Movement Fannie Lou Hamer Quotes

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.