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It Is Only When We Speak What Is Right That We Stand A Chance At Night Of Being Blown To Bits In Our Homes. Can We Call This A Free Country, When I Am Afraid To Go To Sleep In My Own Home In Mississippi?... I Might Not Live Two Hours After I Get Back Home, But I Want To Be A Part Of Setting The Negro Free In Mississippi.

-Fannie Lou Hamer

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It Is Only When

Fannie Lou Hamer

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It Is Only When We Speak What Is Right That We Stand A Chance At Night Of Being Blown To Bits In Our Homes. Can We Call This A Free Country, When I Am Afraid To Go To Sleep In My Own Home In Mississippi?... I Might Not Live Two Hours After I Get Back Home, But I Want To Be A Part Of Setting The Negro Free In Mississippi.

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The 20th Of March In 1964, I Went Before The Secretary Of State To Qualify To Run As An Official Candidate For Congress From The 2nd Congressional District, And It Was Easier For Me To Qualify To Run Than It Was For Me To Pass The Literacy Test To Be A Registered Voter. And We Had Four People To Qualify And Run In The June Primary Election Be We Didn't Have Enough Negroes Registered In Mississippi.

Never To Forget Where We Came From And Always Praise The Bridges That Carried Us Over.

I Was In Jail When Medgar Evers Was Murdered And Nothing, I Mean Nothing Has Been Done About That.

I Used To Question This For Years - What Did Our Kids Actually Fight For? They Would Go In The Service And Go Through All Of That And Come Right Out To Be Drowned In A River In Mississippi. I Found This Hypocrisy Is All Over 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.

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.

I Guess If I'd Had Any Sense, I'd Have Been A Little Scared [to Register To Vote] - But What Was The Point Of Being Scared? The Only Thing They Could Do Was Kill Me, And It Kinda Seemed Like They'd Been Trying To Do That A Little Bit At A Time Since I Could Remember.

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.

This White Man Who Is Saying "it Takes Time." For Three Hundred And More Years They Have Had "time," And Now It Is Time For Them To Listen.

We Didnt Come All This Way For No Two Seats When All Of Us Is Tired.

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 This Is A Great Society, I'd Hate To See A Bad One.

But You See Now Baby, Whether You Have A Ph.d., D.d. Or No D, We're In This Bag Together. And Whether You Are From Morehouse Or Nohouse, We,re Still In This Bag Together.

I Would Like To Talk About Some Of The Things That Happened That Made Me Know That There Was Something Wrong In The South From A Child.

I Went Almost Naked To See That My Mother Was Kept Decent And Treated As A Human Being For The First Time In All Of Her Life.

These People In Mississippi State, They Are Not "down"; All They Need Is A Chance. And I Am Determined To Give My Part Not For What The Movement Can Do For Me, But What I Can Do For The Movement To Bring About A Change In The State Of Mississippi.

I Believe In Christianity Because The Scriptures Said: "the Things That Have Been Done In The Dark Will Be Known On The House Tops."

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 Don't Have To Like Everybody, But You Have To Love Everybody.

To Support Whatever Is Right, And To Bring In Justice Where Weve Had So Much Injustice.

[my Mother] Tried So Hard To Make Life Easy For Us. Those Are The Things That Forced Me To Try To Do Something Different And When This Movement Came To Mississippi I Still Feel It Is One Of The Greatest Things That Ever Happened Because Only A Person Living In The State Of Mississippi Knows What It Is Like To Suffer; Knows What It Is Like To Be Hungry; Knows What It Is Like To Have No Clothing To Wear.

The People At Home Will Work Hard And Actually All Of Them Think It Was Important That We Hade The Decision That We Did Make Not To Compromise; Because We Didn't Have Anything To Compromise For.

We Have To Build Our Own Power. We Have To Win Every Single Political Office We Can, Where We Have A Majority Of Black People... The Question For Black People Is Not, When Is The White Man Going To Give Us Our Rights, Or When Is He Going To Give Us Good Education For Our Children, Or When Is He Going To Give Us Jobs-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.

I See So Many Ways America Uses To Rob Negroes And It Is Sinful And America Can't Keep Holding On, And Doing These Things.

One Of The Things I Remember As A Child: There Was A Man Named Joe Pulliam. He Was A Great Christian Man; But One Time, He Was Living With A White Family And This White Family Robbed Him Of What He Earned. They Didn't Pay Him Anything. This White Man Gave Him $150 To Go To The Hill, (you See, I Lived In The Black Belt Of Mississippi)... To Get Another Negro Family. Joe Pulliam Knew What This White Man Had Been Doing To Him So He Kept The $150 And Didn't Go.

You Know The Scripture Says "be Not Deceived For God Is Not Mocked; Whatsoever A Man Sow That Shall He Also Reap." And One Day, I Don't Know How They're Going To Get It, But They're Going To Get Some Of It Back. They Are Scared To Death And Are More Afraid Now Than We Are.

Just Because People Are Fat, It Doesn't Mean They Are Well Fed. The Cheapest Foods Are The Fattening Ones, Not The Most Nourishing.

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.

Now Many Things Are Beginning To Come Out And It Was Truly A Reality To Me When I Went To Africa, To Guinea. The Little Things That Had Been Taught To Me About The African People, That They Were "heathens," "savages," And They Were Just Downright Stupid People. But When I Got To Guinea, We Were Greeted By The Government Of Guinea, Which Is Black People - And We Stayed At A Place That Was The Government Building, Because We Were The Guests Of The Government.

My Parents Tried So Hard To Do What They Could To Keep Us In School, But School Didn't Last But Four Months Out Of The Year And Most Of The Time We Didn't Have Clothes To Wear.

If I Fall, I Will Fall Five-feet Four-inches Forward In The Fight For Freedom.

My Mother Got Down Sick In 53 And She Lived With Me, An Invalid, Until She Passed Away In 1961. And During The Time She Was Staying With Me Sometime I Would Be Worked So Hard I Couldn't Sleep At Night.

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.

That's Why I Believe In Christianity Because The Scriptures Said: "the Things That Have Been Done In The Dark Will Be Known On The House Tops."

You Know What Really Made Me Sick? I Was In Washington, D.c. At Another Time Reading In A Paper Where The U.s. Gives Byron De La Beckwith - The Man Who Is Charged With Murdering Medgar Evers - They Were Giving Him So Much Money For Some Land And I Ask "is This America?" We Can No Longer Ignore The Fact That America Is Not The "land Of The Free And The Home Of The Brave."

I Remember, And I Will Never Forget, One Day - I Was Six Years Old And I Was Playing Beside The Road And This Plantation Owner Drove Up To Me And Stopped And Asked Me "could I Pick Some Cotton." I Told Him I Didn't Know And He Said, "yes, You Can. I Will Give You Things That You Want From The Commissary Store," And He Named A Huge List That He Called Off. I Picked The 30 Pounds Of Cotton That Week, But I Found Out What Actually Happened Was He Was Trapping Me Into Beginning The Work I Was To Keep Doing And I Never Did Get Out Of His Debt Again.

Actually Since The Convention I Have Gotten So Many Letters That I Have Tried To Answer But Every Letter Said They Thought This Decision, Not To Accept The Compromise, Was So Important. There Wasn't One Letter I Have Gotten So Far That Said We Should Have Accepted The Compromise - Not One.

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.

You Can Tell This By The Program The Federal Government Had To Train 2,400 Tractor Drivers. They Would Have Trained Negro And White Together, But This Man, Congressman Jamie Whitten, Voted Against It And Everything That Was Decent. So, We've Got To Have Somebody In Washington Who Is Concerned About The People Of Mississippi.

In Coming To Atlantic City, We Believed Strongly That We Were Right. In Fact, It Was Just Right For Us To Come To Challenge The Seating Of The Regular Democratic Party From Mississippi. But We Didn't Think When We Got There That We Would Meet People, That Actually The Other Leaders Of The Movement Would Differ With What We Felt Was Right.

Hate Won't Only Destroy Us. It Will Destroy These People That's Hating As Well.

[my Father] Did Get Enough Money To Buy Mules. We Didn't Have Tractors, But He Bought Mules, Wagons, Cultivators And Some Farming Equipment. As Soon As He Bought That And Decided To Rent Some Land, Because It Was Always Better If You Rent The Land, But As Soon As He Got The Mules And Wagons And Everything, Somebody Went To Our Trough - A White Man Who Didn't Live Very Far From Us - And He Fed The Mules Paris Green, Put It In Their Food And It Killed The Mules And Our Cows.

You Know I'm Not Hung Up On This Liberating Myself From The "black" Man - I'm Not Going To Try That Thing.

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. It Doesn't Really Mean Anything To Us. The Only Way We Can Make This Thing 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.

I Met One Child There Eleven Years Old, Speaking Three Languages [in Guinea]. He Could Speak English, French And Malinke. Speaking My Language Actually Better Than I Could. And This Hypocrisy - They Tell Us Here In America [ That Black People Can't Be Intelligent].

I Am Sick And Tired Of Being Sick And Tired.

In Fact, One Day I Was Going To Jackson And I Saw A Huge Sign That U.s. Senator John Stennis Was Speaking That Night For The White Citizens Council In Yazoo City And They Also Have A State Charter That They May Set Up For "private Schools." It Is No Secret.

We Have Been Listening Year After Year To [white People] And What Have We Got? We Are Not Even Allowed To Think For Ourselves. "i Know What Is Best For You," But They Don't Know What Is Best For Us! It Is Time Now To Let Them Know What They Owe Us, And They Owe Us A Great Deal.

I Saw In Chicago, On The Street Where I Was Visiting My Sister-in-law, This "urban Renewal" And It Means One Thing: "negro Removal." But They Want To Tear The Homes Down And Put A Parking Lot There. Where Are Those People Going? Where Will They Go? And As Soon As Negroes Take To The Street Demonstrating, One Hears People Say, "they Shouldn't Have Done It." The World Is Looking At America And It Is Really Beginning To Show Up For What It Is Really Like. "go Tell It On The Mountain." We Can No Longer Ignore This, That America Is Not "the Land Of The Free And The Home Of The Brave."

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?

Some Things I Found Out In The National Convention I Wasn't Too Glad I Did Find Out. But We Will Work Hard, And It Was Important To Actually Really Bring This Out To The Open, The Things I Will Say Some People Knew About And Some People Didn't; This Stuff That Has Been Kept Under The Cover For So Many Years. Actually, The World And America Is Upset And The Only Way To Bring About A Change Is To Upset It More.

My Mother Was A Great Woman. To Look At Her From The Suffering She Had Gone Through To Bring Us Up - 20 Children: 6 Girls And 14 Boys, But Still She Taught Us To Be Decent And To Respect Ourselves, And That Is One Of The Things That Has Kept Me Going, Even After She Passed.

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.

I Think There Will Be Great Leaders Emerging From The State Of Mississippi. The People That Have The Experience To Know And The People Not Interested In Letting Somebody Pat You On The Back And Tell Us "i Think It Is Right." And It Is Very Important For Us Not To Accept A Compromise And After I Got Back To Mississippi, People There Said It Was The Most Important Step That Had Been Taken.

Christianity Is Being Concerned About [others], Not Building A Million-dollar Church While People Are Starving Right Around The Corner. Christ Was A Revolutionary Person, Out There Where It Was Happening. That's What God Is All About, And That's Where I Get My Strength.

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.

Whether You Have A Ph.d., Or No D, We're In This Bag Together. And Whether You're From Morehouse Or Nohouse, We're Still In This Bag Together. Not To Fight To Try To Liberate Ourselves From The Men - This Is Another Trick To Get Us Fighting Among Ourselves - But To Work Together With The Black Man, Then We Will Have A Better Chance To Just Act As Human Beings, And To Be Treated As Human Beings In Our Sick Society.

I Don't Know About The Press, But I Know In The Town Where I Live Everybody Was Aware That I Was In Africa, Because I Remember After I Got Back Some Of The People Told Me That Mayor Dura Of Our Town Said He Just Wished They Would Boil Me In Tar.

We Are Here To Work Side-by-side With This "black" Man In Trying To Bring Liberation To All Our People!

Black People Know What White People Mean When They Say “law And Order”.

Righteousness Exalts A Nation. Hate Just Makes People Miserable.

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?

If I Am Truly Free, Who Can Tell Me How Much Of My Freedom I Can Have Today?

This Problem Is Not Only In Mississippi. During The Time I Was In The Convention In Atlantic City, I Didn't Get Any Threats From Mississippi. The Threatening Letters Were From Philadelphia, Chicago And Other Big Cities.

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.

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!

A Black Woman's Body Was Never Hers Alone.

I Saw How The Government Was Run There [in Africa] And I Saw Where Black People Were Running The Banks. I Saw, For The First Time In My Life, A Black Stewardess Walking Through A Plane And That Was Quite An Inspiration For Me.

It Is Only When We Speak What Is Right That We Stand A Chance At Night Of Being Blown To Bits In Our Homes. Can We Call This A Free Country, When I Am Afraid To Go To Sleep In My Own Home In Mississippi?... I Might Not Live Two Hours After I Get Back Home, But I Want To Be A Part Of Setting The Negro Free In Mississippi.

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.

[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.

It's Time For America To Get Right.

It Is Our Right To Stay Here And We Will Stay And Stand Up For What Belongs To Us As American Citizens, Because They Can't Say That We Haven't Had Patience.

American Citizens

I Do Remember, One Time, A Man Came To Me After The Students Began To Work In Mississippi And He Said The White People Were Getting Tired And They Were Getting Tense And Anything Might Happen. Well, I Asked Him "how Long He Thinks We Had Been Getting Tired"? I Have Been Tired For 46 Years And My Parents Was Tired Before Me And Their Parents Were Tired, And I Have Always Wanted To Do Something That Would Help Some Of The Things I Would See Going On Among Negroes That I Didn't Like And I Don't Like Now.

When I Liberate Others, I Liberate Myself.

There Is One Thing You Have Got To Learn About Our Movement. Three People Are Better Than No People.

Actually, The World And America Is Upset And The Only Way To Bring About A Change Is To Upset It More.

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.

When I Liberate Myself, I Liberate Others. If You Don't Speak Out Ain't Nobody Going To Speak Out For You.

After We Testified Before The Credentials Committee In Atlantic City, Their Mississippi Representative Testified Also. He Said I Got 600 Votes But When They Made The Count In Mississippi, I Was Told I Had 388 Votes. So Actually It Is No Telling How Many Votes I Actually Got.

... 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.

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"; Our Mothers And Fathers Were Sold And Bought Here For A Price. So All I Can Say When They Say "go Back To Africa," I Say "when You Send The Chinese Back To China, The Italians Back To Italy, Etc., And You Get On That Mayflower From Whence You Came, And Give The Indians Their Land Back, Who Really Would Be Here At Home?"

I Was Treated Much Better In Africa Than I Was Treated In America. And You See, Often I Get Letters Like This: "go Back To Africa."

We Worked All The Time, Just Worked And Then We Would Be Hungry And My Mother Was Clearing Up A New Ground Trying To Help Feed Us For $1.25 A Day. She Was Using An Axe, Just Like A Man, And Something Flew Up And Hit Her In Her Eye. It Eventually Caused Her To Lose Both Of Her Eyes And I Began To Get Sicker And Sicker Of The System There. I Used To See My Mother Wear Clothes That Would Have So Many Patches On Them, They Had Been Done Over And Over And Over Again. She Would Do That But She Would Try To Keep Us Decent.

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.

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.

Nobody's Free Until Everybody's Free.

I Got Pictures Of Us And They Would Draw Big Red Rings Around Us And Tell What They Thought Of Us. I Got A Letter Said, "i Have Been Shot Three Times Throught The Heart. I Hope I See Your Second Act." But This White Man Who Wants To Stay White, And To Think For The Negro, He Is Not Only Destroying The Negro, He Is Destroying Himself, Because A House Divided Against Itself Cannot Stand And That Same Thing Applies To America.

I Am Determined To Get Every Negro In The State Of Mississippi Registered.

My Parents Would Make Huge Crops Of Sometimes 55 To 60 Bales Of Cotton. Being From A Big Family Where There Were 20 Children, It Wasn't Too Hard To Pick That Much Cotton. But My Father, Year After Year, Didn't Get Too Much Money And I Remember He Just Kept Going.

When I Got On That Plane, It Was Loaded With White People Going To Africa For The Peace Corps. I Got There And Met A Lot Of Them, And Actually They Had More Peace There In Guinea Than I Have Here. I Talked To Some Of Them. I Told Them Before They Would Be Able To Clean Up Somebody Else's House You Would Have To Clean Up Yours; Before They Can Tell Somebody Else How To Run Their Country, Why Don't They Do Something Here.

Not Only Have We Paid The Price With Our Names In Ink, But We Have Also Paid In Blood. And They Can't Say That Black People Can't Be Intelligent, Because Going Back To Africa, In Guinea, There Are Almost 4 Million People There And What He, President [sekou] Toure, Is Doing To Educate The People: As Long As The French People Had It They Weren't Doing A Thing That Is Being Done Now.

The President Of Guinea, Sekou Toure, Came To See Us On The 13th. Now You Know, I Don't Know How You Can Compare This By Me Being Able To See A President Of A Country When I Have Just Been There Two Days; And Here I Have Been In America, Born In America, And I Am 46 Years Pleading With The President For The Last Two To Three Years To Just Give Us A Chance-and This President In Guinea Recognized Us Enough To Talk To Us.

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.

The Only Thing We Took Out Was The Constitution Of The State Of Mississippi And The Interpretation Of The Constitution. We Had 63,000 People Registered On The Freedom Registration Form. And We Tried From Every Level To Go Into The Regular Democratic Party Medium. We Tried From The Precinct Level. The 16th Of June When They Were Holding Precinct Meetings All Across The State, I Was There And There Was Eight Of Us There To Attend The Meeting, And They Had The Door Locked At 10 O'clock In The Morning. This Is What's Happening In The State Of Mississippi.

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.

The Mississippi Is Not The Only River. There's The Tallahatchie And The Big Black. People Have Been Put In The River Year After Year, These Things Been Happening.

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