Fannie Lou Hamer was an American voting and women’s rights activist, community organizer, and leader in the civil rights movement. She was the co-founder and vice-chair of the Freedom Democratic Party, which she represented at the 1964 Democratic National Convention. These Fannie Lou Hamer quotes will motivate you.
Best Fannie Lou Hamer Quotes
- “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.” ~ Fannie Lou Hamer
- “Sometimes it seem 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. I’m not backing off.” ~ Fannie Lou Hamer
- “When I liberate myself, I liberate others. If you don’t speak out ain’t nobody going to speak out for you.” ~ Fannie Lou Hamer
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“Nobody’s free until everybody’s free.” ~ Fannie Lou Hamer
- “Never to forget where we came from and always praise the bridges that carried us over.” ~ Fannie Lou Hamer
- “Christianity is being concerned about [others], not building a million-dollar church while people are starving right around the corner. Christ was a revolutionary person, out there where it was happening. That’s what God is all about, and that’s where I get my strength.” ~ Fannie Lou Hamer
- “Whether you have a Ph.D., or no D, we’re in this bag together. And whether you’re from Morehouse or Nohouse, we’re still in this bag together. Not to fight to try to liberate ourselves from the men – this is another trick to get us fighting among ourselves – but to work together with the black man, then we will have a better chance to just act as human beings, and to be treated as human beings in our sick society.” ~ Fannie Lou Hamer
- “We have to build our own power. We have to win every single political office we can, where we have a majority of black people… The question for black people is not, when is the white man going to give us our rights, or when is he going to give us good education for our children, or when is he going to give us jobs-if the white man gives you anything-just remember when he gets ready he will take it right back. We have to take for ourselves.” ~ Fannie Lou Hamer
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“I am sick and tired of being sick and tired.” ~ Fannie Lou Hamer
- “Black people know what white people mean when they say “law and order”.” ~ Fannie Lou Hamer
- “I feel sorry for anybody that could let hate wrap them up. Ain’t no such thing as I can hate anybody and hope to see God’s face.” ~ Fannie Lou Hamer
- “I have just as much right to stay in America – in fact, the black people have contributed more to America than any other race, because our kids have fought here for what was called “democracy”; our mothers and fathers were sold and bought here for a price. So all I can say when they say “go back to Africa,” I say “when you send the Chinese back to China, the Italians back to Italy, etc., and you get on that Mayflower from whence you came, and give the Indians their land back, who really would be here at home?”” ~ Fannie Lou Hamer
- “With the people, for the people, by the people. I crack up when I hear it; I say, with the handful, for the handful, by the handful, cause that’s what really happens.” ~ Fannie Lou Hamer
- “I guess if I’d had any sense, I’d have been a little scared [to register to vote] – but what was the point of being scared? The only thing they could do was kill me, and it kinda seemed like they’d been trying to do that a little bit at a time since I could remember.” ~ Fannie Lou Hamer
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“If I am truly free, who can tell me how much of my freedom I can have today?” ~ Fannie Lou Hamer
- “Righteousness exalts a nation. Hate just makes people miserable.” ~ Fannie Lou Hamer
- “It’s time for America to get right.” ~ Fannie Lou Hamer
- “The only thing I really feel is necessary is that the black people, not only in Mississippi, will have to actually upset this applecart. What I mean by that is, so many things are under the cover that will have to be swept out and shown to this whole world, not just to America. This thing they say of “the land of the free and the home of the brave” is all on paper. It doesn’t really mean anything to us. The only way we can make this thing a reality in America is to do all we can to destroy this system and bring this out to the light that has been under the cover all these years.” ~ Fannie Lou Hamer
- “America that is divided against itself cannot stand, and we cannot say we have all of this unity they say we have when black people are being discriminated against in every city in America I have visited.” ~ Fannie Lou Hamer
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“Hate won’t only destroy us. It will destroy these people that’s hating as well.” ~ Fannie Lou Hamer
- “You don’t have to like everybody, but you have to love everybody.” ~ Fannie Lou Hamer
- “When I liberate others, I liberate myself.” ~ Fannie Lou Hamer
- “There is one thing you have got to learn about our movement. Three people are better than no people.” ~ Fannie Lou Hamer
- “If this is a Great Society, I’d hate to see a bad one.” ~ Fannie Lou Hamer
- “This white man who is saying “it takes time.” For three hundred and more years they have had “time,” and now it is time for them to listen.” ~ Fannie Lou Hamer
- “just because people are fat, it doesn’t mean they are well fed. The cheapest foods are the fattening ones, not the most nourishing.” ~ Fannie Lou Hamer
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“If the white man gives you anything – just remember when he gets ready he will take it right back. We have to take for ourselves.” ~ Fannie Lou Hamer
- “One day I know the struggle will change. There’s got to be a change-not only for Mississippi, not only for the people in the United States, but people all over the world.” ~ Fannie Lou Hamer
- “White Americans today don’t know what in the world to do because when they put us behind them, that’s where they made their mistake… they put us behind them, and we watched every move they made.” ~ Fannie Lou Hamer
- “It is our right to stay here and we will stay and stand up for what belongs to us as American citizens, because they can’t say that we haven’t had patience.” ~ Fannie Lou Hamer
- “But you see now baby, whether you have a ph.d., d.d. or no d, we’re in this bag together. And whether you are from Morehouse or Nohouse, we,re still in this bag together.” ~ Fannie Lou Hamer
- “To support whatever is right, and to bring in justice where weve had so much injustice.” ~ Fannie Lou Hamer
- “Actually, the world and America is upset and the only way to bring about a change is to upset it more.” ~ Fannie Lou Hamer
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“We didnt come all this way for no two seats when all of us is tired.” ~ Fannie Lou Hamer
- “I saw in Chicago, on the street where I was visiting my sister-in-law, this “Urban Renewal” and it means one thing: “Negro removal.” But they want to tear the homes down and put a parking lot there. Where are those people going? Where will they go? And as soon as Negroes take to the street demonstrating, one hears people say, “they shouldn’t have done it.” The world is looking at America and it is really beginning to show up for what it is really like. “Go Tell It on the Mountain.” We can no longer ignore this, that America is not “the land of the free and the home of the brave.”” ~ Fannie Lou Hamer
- “if I fall, I will fall five-feet four-inches forward in the fight for freedom.” ~ Fannie Lou Hamer
- “I remember, and I will never forget, one day – 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 some 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 a huge list that he called off. 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.” ~ Fannie Lou Hamer
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“A black woman’s body was never hers alone.” ~ Fannie Lou Hamer
- “Some things I found out in the National Convention I wasn’t too glad I did find out. But we will work hard, and it was important to actually really bring this out to the open, the things I will say some people knew about and some people didn’t; this stuff that has been kept under the cover for so many years. Actually, the world and America is upset and the only way to bring about a change is to upset it more.” ~ Fannie Lou Hamer]
- “People have got to get together and work together. I’m tired of the kind of oppression that white people have inflicted on us and are still trying to inflict.” ~ Fannie Lou Hamer
- “[On her Freedom Farm Cooperative:] If you give a hungry man food, he will eat it. [But] if you give him land, he will grow his own food.” ~ Fannie Lou Hamer
- “It is only when we speak what is right that we stand a chance at night of being blown to bits in our homes. Can we call this a free country, when I am afraid to go to sleep in my own home in Mississippi?… I might not live two hours after I get back home, but I want to be a part of setting the Negro free in Mississippi.” ~ Fannie Lou Hamer
- “[My father] did get enough money to buy mules. We didn’t have tractors, but he bought mules, wagons, cultivators and some farming equipment. As soon as he bought that and decided to rent some land, because it was always better if you rent the land, but as soon as he got the mules and wagons and everything, somebody went to our trough – a white man who didn’t live very far from us – and he fed the mules Paris Green, put it in their food and it killed the mules and our cows.” ~ Fannie Lou Hamer
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“I am determined to get every Negro in the state of Mississippi registered.” ~ Fannie Lou Hamer
- “We have been listening year after year to [white people] and what have we got? We are not even allowed to think for ourselves. “I know what is best for you,” but they don’t know what is best for us! It is time now to let them know what they owe us, and they owe us a great deal.” ~ Fannie Lou Hamer
- “We didn’t come all the way up here to compromise for no more than we’d gotten here. We didn’t come all this way for no two seats, ’cause all of us is tired.” ~ Fannie Lou Hamer
- “I do remember, one time, a man came to me after the students began to work in Mississippi and he said the white people were getting tired and they were getting tense and anything might happen. Well, I asked him “how long he thinks we had been getting tired”? I have been tired for 46 years and my parents was tired before me and their parents were tired, and I have always wanted to do something that would help some of the things I would see going on among Negroes that I didn’t like and I don’t like now.” ~ Fannie Lou Hamer
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“You know the Scripture says “be not deceived for God is not mocked; whatsoever a man sow that shall he also reap.” And one day, I don’t know how they’re going to get it, but they’re going to get some of it back. They are scared to death and are more afraid now than we are.” ~ Fannie Lou Hamer
- “These people in Mississippi State, they are not “down”; all they need is a chance. And I am determined to give my part not for what the Movement can do for me, but what I can do for the Movement to bring about a change in the State of Mississippi.” ~ Fannie Lou Hamer
- “It would bring tears in your eyes to make you think of all those years, the type of brain-washing that this man will use in America to keep us separated from our own people.” ~ Fannie Lou Hamer
- “I always said if I lived to get grown and had a chance, I was going to try to get something for my mother and I was going to do something for the black man of the South if it would cost my life; I was determined to see that things were changed.” ~ Fannie Lou Hamer
- “All of this is on account we want to register [sic], to become first-class citizens, and if the Freedom Democratic Party is not seated now, I question America. Is this America, the land of the free and the home of the brave where we have to sleep with our telephones off the hooks because our lives be threatened daily because we want to live as decent human beings – in America?” ~ Fannie Lou Hamer Quotes
- “[My mother] tried so hard to make life easy for us. Those are the things that forced me to try to do something different and when this Movement came to Mississippi I still feel it is one of the greatest things that ever happened because only a person living in the State of Mississippi knows what it is like to suffer; knows what it is like to be hungry; knows what it is like to have no clothing to wear.” ~ Fannie Lou Hamer
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“A white man killed the mules and our cows that knocked us right back down. And things got so tough then I began to wish I was white.” ~ Fannie Lou Hamer
- “My mother was a great woman. To look at her from the suffering she had gone through to bring us up – 20 children: 6 girls and 14 boys, but still she taught us to be decent and to respect ourselves, and that is one of the things that has kept me going, even after she passed.” ~ Fannie Lou Hamer
- “We serve God by serving our fellow man; kids are suffering from malnutrition. People are going to the fields hungry. If you are a Christian, we are tired of being mistreated.” ~ Fannie Lou Hamer
- “I used to question this for years – what did our kids actually fight for? They would go in the service and go through all of that and come right out to be drowned in a river in Mississippi. I found this hypocrisy is all over America.” ~ Fannie Lou Hamer
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“Actually, some of the things I experienced as a child still linger on; what the white man has done to the black people in the south!” ~ Fannie Lou Hamer
- “The President of Guinea, Sekou Toure, came to see us on the 13th. Now you know, I don’t know how you can compare this by me being able to see a President of a country when I have just been there two days; and here I have been in America, born in America, and I am 46 years pleading with the President for the last two to three years to just give us a chance-and this President in Guinea recognized us enough to talk to us.” ~ Fannie Lou Hamer
- “Now many things are beginning to come out and it was truly a reality to me when I went to Africa, to Guinea. The little things that had been taught to me about the African people, that they were “heathens,” “savages,” and they were just downright stupid people. But when I got to Guinea, we were greeted by the Government of Guinea, which is Black People – and we stayed at a place that was the government building, because we were the guests of the Government.” ~ Fannie Lou Hamer
- “The only thing I really feel is necessary is that the black people, not only in Mississippi, will have to actually upset this applecart. What I mean by that is, so many things are under the cover that will have to be swept out and shown to this whole world, not just to America. This thing they say of “the land of the free and the home of the brave” is all on paper.” ~ Fannie Lou Hamer
- “One of the things I remember as a child: There was a man named Joe Pulliam. He was a great Christian man; but one time, he was living with a white family and this white family robbed him of what he earned. They didn’t pay him anything. This white man gave him $150 to go to the hill, (you see, I lived in the Black Belt of Mississippi)… to get another Negro family. Joe Pulliam knew what this white man had been doing to him so he kept the $150 and didn’t go.” ~ Fannie Lou Hamer
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“We are here to work side-by-side with this “black” man in trying to bring liberation to all our people!” ~ Fannie Lou Hamer
- ]”Actually since the Convention I have gotten so many letters that I have tried to answer but every letter said they thought this decision, not to accept the compromise, was so important. There wasn’t one letter I have gotten so far that said we should have accepted the compromise – not one.” ~ Fannie Lou Hamer
- “My parents would make huge crops of sometimes 55 to 60 bales of cotton. Being from a big family where there were 20 children, it wasn’t too hard to pick that much cotton. But my father, year after year, didn’t get too much money and I remember he just kept going.” ~ Fannie Lou Hamer
