Fannie Lou Hamer

“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?”

“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.”

“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.”

“Why should I leave Ruleville, and why should I leave Mississippi? I go to the big city, and with the kind of education they give us in Mississippi, I got problems. I'd wind up in a soup line there.”

“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.”

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

“I was forced away from the plantation because I wouldn't go back and withdraw, you know, my literacy test after I had tried to take it. I wouldn't go back.”

“We hadn't heard anything about registering to vote because when you see this flat land in here, when the people would get out of the fields, if they had a radio, they'd be too tired to play it. So we didn't know what was going on in the rest of the state, even, much less in other places.”

“What I really feel is necessary is that the black people in this country wil have to upset this apple cart. We can no longer ignore the fact that America is not the... land of the free and the home of the brave.”

“There is one thing you have got to learn about our movement. Three people are better than no people.”

“If I fall, I'll fall five feet four inches forward in the fight for freedom. I'm not backing off.”

“I had to leave, and my husband was forced to stay on this plantation until after the harvest season was over. And then the man that we had worked for, he'd taken the car, and the most of the few things we had had been stolen.”

“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.”

“I'd been in jail, and I'd been beat. I had been to a voter registration workshop, you know, to - they were just training and teaching us how to register, to pass the literacy test.”

“I'm showing the people that a Negro can run for office.”

“On the 10th of September 1962, sixteen bullets was fired into the home of Mr. and Mrs. Robert Tucker for me.”

“Nobody's free until everybody's free.”

“They talked about how it was our rights as human beings to register and vote. I never knew we could vote before. Nobody ever told us.”

“I am sick and tired of being sick and tired.”

“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.”