Fannie Lou Hamer Quotes

The history of Black Americans in South Carolina is riddled with trials and tribulations.

When I wrote 'The Secret Life of Bees,' I was writing about civil rights.

What we fly today is not an enduring symbol of our heritage, but the fighting flag of those who wanted to preserve a segregated South.

Why can a Communist eat at a lunch counter in Selma, Alabama while a Black American veteran cannot?

One hundred years ago the slave was freed. One hundred years later, the negro remains in bondage to the color of his skin…. The negro today asks for justice. We do not answer him—we do not answer those who lie beneath this soil—when we answer “Patience.”

Southern attempts to deny blacks equal rights were turning the Constitution into a sublime and beautiful scripture—into a horrid charter of wrong.

The story of the Negro in America is the story of America. It is not a pretty story.

Black people have been fighting for basic citizenship rights since the inception of the country.

If you want to understand America, it's slavery.

For nearly a century and a half, this country deluded itself into thinking that its greatest calamity, the Civil War, had nothing to do with one of its greatest sins, enslavement. It deluded itself in this manner despite available evidence to the contrary.

As a child, I lived through and survived the segregated South. I sat at the back of the bus at a time when America wasn't yet as great as it could be. As a grown woman, I saw the first black president reach down a hand and touch the face of a child like I once was, lifting his eyes toward a better future.

I think that Abraham Lincoln probably did more to trick negroes than any other man in history.

I grew up in the southern United States in a city which at that time during the late '40's and early '50's was the most segregated city in the country, and in a sense learning how to oppose the status quo was a question of survival.

The goal of Dr. Martin Luther King is to give Negroes a chance to sit in a segregated restaurant beside the same white man who had brutalized them for 400 years.

The need for raising the awareness of this shameful chapter in U.S. history is more apparent than ever.

It is over one hundred years since the abolition of slavery. The Negro people in the United States have taken plenty and they have reached a stage where they have decided that they are not going to take any more.

I was born after the Civil Rights Movement. I never saw Martin Luther King alive.

As a southerner born after the epic events of the civil rights movement, I've always wondered how on earth people of good will could have conceivably lived with Jim Crow - with the daily degradations, the lynchings in plain sight, and, as the movement gathered force, with the fire hoses and the police dogs and the billy clubs.

The first African-American leader was Dr. Martin Luther King.

Her continuity - you know, if you connect Harriet Tubman, who died in 1913, to Rosa Parks, born in 1913, you get this extraordinary spectrum of the African-American experience.

Being so closely related to the South, barbecue was part of segregation and helped defeat it.

I marched back then - I was in a civil-rights musical, Fly Blackbird, and we met Martin Luther King.

My earliest memories are of the civil rights era. My earliest experiences were rage.

The government has a history of not treating people fairly, from the internment of Japanese Americans in World War II to African-Americans in the Civil Rights era.

People get bent out of shape about the fact that when I was a kid, you could not drink out of certain water fountains. Well, the water was the same.