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.
Fannie Lou HamerThis 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.
Fannie Lou Hamer[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.
Fannie Lou HamerWhite 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.
Fannie Lou HamerYou 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."
Fannie Lou HamerWe 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.
Fannie Lou Hamer