Fannie lou hamer was an american civil rights leader who was a driving force behind the voting rights movement in the 1960s. Her powerful speeches and stirring words inspired many to make their voices heard. Here is a collection of some of fannie lou hamer quotes that continue to inspire motivate today us.
Best Fannie Lou Hamer Quotes
🌐 “You don’t have to like everybody, but you have to love everybody.”
“I feel sorry for anybody that could let hate wrap them up.”
🌐 “All of this is on account we want to register to become first-class citizens, and if the Freedom Democratic Party is not seated now, I question America.”
🌐 “The only way we can make this thing of equality 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.”
🌐 “One day, I know the struggle will change.”
🌐 “The type of education that we get in the state of Mississippi will make our minds so narrow it won’t coordinate with our big bodies.”
🌐 “If I am truly free, who can tell me how much of my freedom I can have today?”
🌐 “What I’m trying to point out now is when you take a very close look at this American society, it’s time to question these things.”
🌐 “They [The American Government] can’t do that [Protect minorities], but when a white man is killed in the Congo, they send people there”
🌐 “When I liberate others, I liberate myself.”
🌐 “I might not live two hours after I get back home, but I want to be a part of setting our people free in Mississippi.”
🌐 “Sin is beginning to reproach America today and we want what is rightfully ours.”
🌐 “Because a house divided against itself cannot stand and today America is divided against itself because they don’t want us to have even the ballot here in Mississippi.”
🌐 “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.”
🌐 “And, brother, you can believe this or not: I been sick of this system as long as I can remember. I heard some people speak of depression in the ’30s. In the ’20s, it was ’pression with me! De-pression”
🌐 “Righteousness exalts a nation. Hate just makes people miserable.”
🌐 “And I have walked through the shadows of death because it was on the tenth of September in ’62 when they shot sixteen times in a house and it wasn’t a foot over the bed where my head was.”
Famous Fannie Lou Hamer Quotes
🌐 “Eighteen hundred and seventy, the Fifteenth Amendment was added on to the Constitution of the United States that gave every man a chance to vote for what he think to be the right way”
🌐 “If this is a great society, I’d hate to see a bad one.”
“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.”
🌐 “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.”
🌐 “Nobody ‘s free until everybody ‘s free.”
🌐 “I go to the big city, and with the kind of education they give us in Mississippi, I got problems.”
🌐 “We didn’t come all this way for no two seats when all of us is tired.”
🌐 “Hate won’t only destroy us. It will destroy these people that’s hating as well.”
🌐 “If you don’t speak out ain’t nobody going to speak out for you.”
🌐. “…so many things are under the cover that will have to be swept out and shown to this whole world, not just to America.”
🌐 “To support whatever is right, and to bring in justice where we’ve had so much injustice.”
🌐 “We want a change in this society in America because, you see, we can no longer ignore the facts”
🌐 “I am sick and tired of being sick and tired.”
🌐 “We want ours and we want ours now.”
Important Fannie Lou Hamer Quotes
🌐 “These people in Mississippi State, they are not down; all they need is a chance.”
🌐 “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.”
🌐 “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?”
“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.”
🌐 “For three hundred and more years they have had ‘time’, and now it is time for them to listen.”
🌐 “I know lots of people in Mississippi who have lost their jobs trying to register to vote.”
🌐 “This thing they say of the land of the free and the home of the brave is all on paper.”
🌐 “We are tired of being mistreated.”
🌐 “We have in Sunflower County fourteen hundred children that we were able to get out of the ghettos, out of the country, and most of these children had never seen a commode in their lives.”
🌐 “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.”
🌐 “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.”
🌐 “There is one thing you have got to learn about our movement. Three people are better than no people.”
🌐 “You see if you are professional and if you are a nonprofessional, if you are not giving service to your fellow man, well, you can be as fancy-dressed as you want to be, but just don’t go to church because it’s no good. Because we are our brother’s keeper”
🌐 “Can we call this a free country, when I am afraid to go to sleep in my own home in Mississippi?”
Verdict:
Fannie lou was an inspirational leader and fannie lou hamerquotes continue to be a source of motivation and inspiration for many today.