Fannie Lou Hamer Quotes

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.

When you compare what people endured in the South in the 60s to try to get the right to vote for African Americans, and to compare what people were subjected to there to what happened in Philadelphia - which was inappropriate, certainly that . . . to describe it in those terms I think does a great disservice to people who put their lives on the line, who risked all, for my people.

We've begun to put fear into those whites who think they can do anything they want to a black person and get away with it.

Our duty is to fight! Then we can adjust the problems that remain in the life of the colored man.

10 years ago the black man knew what his condition was. And today, because of the world revolution that's taking place all over this earth, the black man would be fighting for what he knows is his by right, but the movement on the part of [Martin Luther] King and the others had done nothing but slow down the militancy that is inherent in the nature of the black man.

The sooner our society admits that the Negro Revolution is no momentary outburst soon to subside into placid passivity, the easier the future will be for us all.

I would not hesitate to say that it is unfortunate that so-called demonstrations are taking place in Birmingham at this time, but I would say in more emphatic terms that it is even more unfortunate that the white power structure of this city left the Negro community with no other alternative.

The forties and fifties were years of high poet-incense; the language-flowers were thickly sweet. Those flowers whined and begged white folks to pick them, to find them lovable. Then the '60s: Independent fire!

A people who have suffered so much for so long at the hands of a racist society must draw the line somewhere.

A riot is the language of the unheard.

Both morally and practically, segregation is to me a basic injustice. Since I believe it to be so, I must attempt to remove it. There are three ways in which one can deal with an injustice. (a) One can accept it without protest. (b) On can seek to avoid it. (c) One can resist the injustice non-violently. To accept it is to perpetuate it.

As long as Negro leader is making the white man think that our people are satisfied to sit in his house and wait for him to correct these conditions, he is - he is misrepresenting the thinking of the black masses, and he's doing the white man a disservice because he's making the white man be more complacent than he would be if he knew the dangerous situation that is building up right inside his own house.

What the white man in America needs to realize is there's a new thinking among black people today which makes them not willing to sit around and wait for five years to get this problem solved, much less a hundred years.

Any negro who occupies a position that was given to him by the white man, if you analyze his function, his function never enables him to really take a firm, uncompromising, militant stand on problems that confront our people.

The truth is that in this country you here you're more likely to be harassed, hurt, or killed if you're a minister speaking about progress for Black people than if you are a sure enough revolutionary.

America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked 'insufficient funds.'

I'm sick and tired of black and white people of good intent giving aspirin to a society that is dying of a cancerous disease.

If a Negro got legs he ought to use them. Sit down too long, somebody will figure out a way to tie them up.

The white man is a devil. If he is not a devil, let him prove it!

I think it is a must for young people and generations yet to come, to understand, to feel, to touch, to almost smell the drama of what happened a few short years ago [the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s]. So maybe, just maybe, we will never ever repeat this unbelievable time in our history. We have to tell it all, and make it plain, and make it clear, so people will never ever forget the distance we have come, and the progress we have yet to make.

Anger is an appropriate reaction to racist attitudes, as is fury when the actions arising from those attitudes do not change.

I don't sign for white people.

The white man is our mortal enemy, and we cannot accept him. I will fight to see that vicious beast go down into the lake of fire prepared for him from the beginning, that he never rise again to give any innocent black man, woman or child the hell that he has delighted in pouring on us for 400 years.

Martin Luther King has made the Negro in America unnatural.