Fannie Lou Hamer Quotes

Whether you have a Ph. D. or no D. we're in this bag together.

I don't want equal rights with the white man; if I did, I'd be a thief and a murderer.

You can pray until you faint, but unless you get up and try to do something, God is not going to put it in your lap.

If I am truly free, who can tell me how much of my freedom I can have today?

I feel sorry for anybody who would let hate wrap them up. Ain't no such thing as I can hate anybody and hope to see God's face. —Fannie Lou Townsend Hamer

Nobody’s free until everybody’s free.

Every red stripe in that flag represents the black man's blood that has been shed.

I was so hungry to learn. My mother drilled this into me. When you read, she said, you know--and you can help yourself and others.

When they asked for those to raise their hands who'd go down to the courthouse the next day, I raised mine. Had it high up as I could get it. I guess if I'd had any sense I'd've been a little scared, but what was the point of being scared? The only thing they could do to me was kill me and it seemed like they'd been trying to do that a little bit at a time ever since I could remember.

I may not have all the education but I do have common sense, and I know how to treat people.

Sometimes it seems like to tell the truth today is to run the risk of being killed. But if I fall, I’ll fall five-feet four-inches forward in the fight for freedom.

Mrs. Fannie Lou Hamer, a sharecropper in Ruleville, Mississippi, became legendary as organizer and speaker. She sang hymns; she walked picket lines with her familiar limp (as a child she contracted polio). She roused people to excitement at mass meetings: "I'm sick an' tired o' bein' sick an' tired!

Is this America, the land of the free and the home of the brave, where we have to sleep with our telephones off of the hooks because our lives be threatened daily, because we want to live as decent human beings, in America?

We must hear the questions raised by Fannie Lou Hamer forty years ago. Every American everywhere asks herself, himself, these questions Hamer asked: What do I think of my country? What is there, which elevates my shoulders and stirs my blood when I hear the words, the United States of America: Do I praise my country enough? Do I laud my fellow citizens enough? What is there about my country that makes me hang my head and avert my eyes when I hear the words the United States of America, and what am I doing about it? Am I relating my disappointment to my leaders and to my fellow citizens, or am I like someone not involved, sitting high and looking low? As Americans, we should not be afraid to respond.

I will never forget, one day [when I] was six years old and I was playing beside the road and this plantation owner drove up to me and stopped and asked me, `could I pick cotton.' I told him I didn't know and he said, `Yes, you can. I will give you things that you want from the commissary store,' and he named things like crackerjacks and sardines--and it was a huge list that he called off. So I picked the 30 pounds of cotton that week, but I found out what actually happened was he was trapping me into beginning the work I was to keep doing and I never did get out of his debt again. My parents tried so hard to do what they could to keep us in school, but school didn't last four months out of the year and most of the time we didn't have clothes to wear.

When I arrive in Jackson I’m not just thinking of Evers, I’m also thinking of Fannie Lou Hamer and her use of the phrase Mississippi Appendectomy.

The interracial MFDP came to Atlantic City and requested to be seated in place of the regular Mississippi delegation, which everyone knew had been elected through fraud and violence. The MFDP’s electrifying vice chair, Fannie Lou Hamer, riveted the nation in her live televised testimony at the convention. “If the Freedom Democratic Party is not

not just Dr. King but John Lewis and Bob Moses, Fannie Lou Hamer and Diane Nash. In their heroic efforts—going door-to-door to register voters, sitting down at lunch counters, and marching to freedom songs—I saw the possibility of practicing the values my mother had taught me; how you could build power not by putting others down but by lifting them up.

Thomas Paine is America’s single great revolutionary theorist. We have produced a slew of admirable anarchists (Alexander Berkman, Emma Goldman, Dorothy Day, and Noam Chomsky), and radical leaders have arisen out of oppressed groups (Sitting Bull, Frederick Douglass, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Fannie Lou Hamer, Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, Cornel West, and bell hooks). But we do not have a tradition of revolutionists. This makes Paine unique.

I believe that there lives a burning desire in the most sequestered private heart of every American, a desire to belong to a great country. I believe that every citizen wants to stand on the world stage and represent a noble country where the mighty do not always crush the weak and the dream of a democracy is not the sole possession of the strong. We must hear the questions raised by Fannie Lou Hamer forty years ago. Every American everywhere asks herself, himself, these questions Hamer asked: What do I think of my country? What is there, which elevates my shoulders and stirs my blood when I hear the words, the United States of America: Do I praise my country enough? Do I laud my fellow citizens enough? What is there about my country that makes me hang my head and avert my eyes when I hear the words the United States of America, and what am I doing about it? Am I relating my disappointment to my leaders and to my fellow citizens, or am I like someone not involved, sitting high and looking low? As Americans, we should not be afraid to respond.

Most of all I was inspired by the young leaders of the civil rights movement—not just Dr. King but John Lewis and Bob Moses, Fannie Lou Hamer and Diane Nash. In their heroic efforts—going door-to-door to register voters, sitting down at lunch counters, and marching to freedom songs—I saw the possibility of practicing the values my mother had taught me; how you could build power not by putting others down but by lifting them up. This was true democracy at work—democracy not as a gift from on high, or a division of spoils between interest groups, but rather democracy that was earned, the work of everybody.

Some of the black and brown women on the NWPC Policy Council became the strongest and most valuable supporters I had—Fannie Lou Hamer, Lupe Anguiano, Gwen Cherry and Carol Taylor, among others. They did not have the one problem with my candidacy that many white women did: the whites knew I couldn't be elected, and so their support, even when it was given, seemed a little tentative, because they felt they were fighting for a lost cause. But women like Fannie Lou, Lupe and the rest, having been long active in the civil rights movement and other minority causes, were used to taking up seemingly impossible challenges. Their whole experience had taught them that they might not win the ultimate objective, but they would increase the chance that success would come, someday.

Few of them knew who she was…. But here was clearly someone with force enough for all of them, who knew the meaning of ‘Oh Freedom’ and ‘We Shall Not Be Moved’ in her flesh and spirit as they never would. They lost their shyness and began to sing the choruses with abandon, though their voices all together dimmed beside hers.”95 Although a well-known cast of speakers had been organized for the week, and the daily schedule offered a full slate of lectures and workshops, it was Fannie Lou Hamer whose indomitable presence was everywhere felt by those in attendance and who brought the purpose to focus.

I’m also thinking of Fannie Lou Hamer and her use of the phrase Mississippi Appendectomy. I didn’t even learn about that phrase until I got to medical school and was under the mentorship of a Black female. As soon as I heard it, I felt a sharp pain in my body. Hamer had been sterilized without her permission in 1961, and the procedure was so common, women had labeled it.

When I arrive in Jackson I’m not just thinking of Evers, I’m also thinking of Fannie Lou Hamer and her use of the phrase Mississippi Appendectomy. I didn’t even learn about that phrase until I got to medical school and was under the mentorship of a Black female. As soon as I heard it, I felt a sharp pain in my body. Hamer had been sterilized without her permission in 1961, and the procedure was so common, women had labeled it. I wish

Justice is justice. And the denial of justice for any one group of people erodes justice for all people. Attacks on the rights of transgender people to access health care are tied to assaults on abortion rights, as both are grounded in a fight for sexual autonomy, a tug-of-war with the government over control of our own bodies. The fight for immigrant rights is an LGBTQ+ fight, too, because it is a collective demand for human-centered politics that treat people with a basic level of decency. And the work of dismantling systemic racism is ours as well. The queer community includes people of color. And when the state is empowered to defend white supremacy, violently and brutally, all of our lives are on the line. To paraphrase Fannie Lou Hamer, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and Maya Angelou: so long as a single person has not been liberated, none of us has truly been liberated.

The warm friendliness that accompanied interracial interactions in town now seemed to be simply a cordial veneer covering latent animosity.

Gloria Dickerson Fannie Lou Hamer Unita Blackwell Ella Baker Who are you reading about ?

Fannie Lou Hamer—some of you may have studied the history of the US civil rights movement, the US freedom movement, you may have run across the name of Fannie Lou Hamer—she was a sharecropper and a domestic worker. She was a timekeeper on a cotton plantation in the 1960s. And she emerged as a leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and as a leader of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. She said, “All my life, I have been sick and tired. Now I am sick and tired of being sick and tired.

Fannie Lou Hamer spoke openly about their guns: “I keep a shotgun in every corner of my bedroom and the first cracker even look like he wants to throw some dynamite on my porch won’t write his mama again.

Nobody’s Free Until Everybody’s Free (Fannie Lou Hamer)

If Rosa Parks and Fannie Lou Hamer and others had been heard fifty years ago—if women had been half the speakers in 1963—we might have heard that the civil rights movement was partly a protest against the ritualistic rape and terrorizing of black women by white men.4 We might have known that Rosa Parks had been assigned by the NAACP to investigate the gang rape of a black woman by white men—who had left her for dead near a Montgomery bus stop—before that famous boycott.

Lewis and Bob Moses, Fannie Lou Hamer and Diane Nash.

Nobody's Free Until Everybody's Free.

Y’all is nice. You must be Christian people