Quotes from 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.

I'm sick and tired of being sick and tired.

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

It was the 31st of August in 1962 that eighteen of us traveled twenty-six miles to the county courthouse in Indianola to try to register to become first-class citizens. We was met in Indianola by policemen, Highway Patrolmen, and they only allowed two of us in to take the literacy test at the time.

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.

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.

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.

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!

You know I'm not hung up on this liberating myself from the "black" man - I'm not going to try that thing.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

If I am truly free, who can tell me how much of my freedom I can have today?

if I fall, I will fall five-feet four-inches forward in the fight for freedom.