Fannie Lou Hamer
Fannie Lou Hamer
Fannie Lou Hamerwas an American voting rights activist, civil rights leader, and philanthropist. She was instrumental in organizing Mississippi's Freedom Summer for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and later became the vice-chair of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, which she represented at the 1964 Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, New Jersey...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionActivist
Date of Birth6 October 1917
CountryUnited States of America
I am determined to get every Negro in the state of Mississippi registered.
No. What would I look like fighting for equality with the white man? I don't want to go down that low. I want the true democracy that'll raise me and that white man up raise America up.
... some of my people could have been left [in Africa] and are living there. And I can't understand them and they don't know me and I don't know them because all we had was taken away from us. And I became kind of angry; I felt the anger of why this had to happen to us. We were so stripped and robbed of our background, we wind up with nothing.
The methods used to take human lives, such as abortion, the pill, the ring, etc., amounts to genocide. I believe that legal abortion is legal murder...
We are here to work side-by-side with this "black" man in trying to bring liberation to all our people!
if I fall, I will fall five-feet four-inches forward in the fight for freedom.
Our foreparents were mostly brought from West Africa. We were brought to America and our foreparents were sold; white people bo ught them; white people changed their names my maiden name is supposed to be Townsend, but really, what is my maiden name? What is my name?
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?
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.
You know I'm not hung up on this liberating myself from the "black" man - I'm not going to try that thing.
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.
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.
[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.
A black woman's body was never hers alone.