Fannie Lou Hamer Quotes

In my home county—Lowndes County, Alabama--in 1964 Blacks were 80 percent of the population. Not one Black was registered to vote—Not one!!!

So here we are, just two months away from the election, with more and more examples that modern day Jim Crowe laws are alive and well in the state of Florida.

We've got a larger than usual police force. Its twice as big as any city of our size. They [Blacks attempting to vote] won't have a chance.

I was born in Decatur, was raised there, but I never in my life was permitted to vote there.

In Selma, Alabama, in 1965, only 2.1 percent of blacks of voting age were registered to vote. The only place you could attempt to register was to go down to the courthouse. You had to pass a so-called literacy test. And they would tell people over and over again that they didn't or couldn't pass the literacy test.

Negroes could not vote in those days. When I went to Massachusetts and ran for office, it was the first time in my life that I ever voted.

I was forced away from the plantation because I wouldn't go back and withdraw, you know, my literacy test after I had tried to take it. I wouldn't go back.

Black men and women were not allowed to register to vote. My own mother, my own father, my grandfather and my uncles and aunts could not register to vote because each time they attempted to register to vote, they were told they could not pass the literacy test.

Voting in our country has never been easy, and unfortunately, it has never been guaranteed for everyone. But through the work of brave civil rights leaders, some of whom died for the cause, by the early 2000s we were at a point where most, but still not all, people who wanted to vote could do so.

The closer a Negro got to the ballot box, the more he looked like a rapist.

The voting business in the South will regulate itself.

Votes for women didn’t come until the 1920’s. Votes for Blacks didn’t effectively come until the 1960’s.

The great majority of negroes in the South who do not vote, do not care to vote and would not know for what to vote if they could.

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.

I grew up hearing my parents' stories about how they had to fight for their right to vote in the Jim Crow South.

I think there should be a literacy test and a poll tax for people to vote.

You grow up with a heightened sense of the Civil Rights Movement, but I think it wasn't until I became of age that I really had a great appreciation for the struggle that took place.

I vividly remember the summer of 1964 with its voter registration drives, boiling racial tensions, and the erupting awareness of the cruelty of racism. I was never the same after that summer.

Well, I've been politically involved for a really long time. Growing up in the segregated South, it was a very painful experience for me to live through the open racism of the time.

Since the birth of our Nation, no other right has been more important than having the ability to vote. Unfortunately, as history has shown, the denial of this right to minorities is a scar on our system of democracy.

Countless black citizens in the South couldn't vote. They were second-class citizens from cradle to grave. The discrimination was terrible, brutal.

Many have fought for and even lost their lives to end segregation, to win the right to vote. It disappoints me to now have to cajole people to register and to vote.

Americans of our own time - minority and majority Americans alike - need the continued guidance that the Voting Rights Act provides. We have come a long way, but more needs to be done.

The civil rights movement wasn't easy for anybody.

It was the biggest suppression of voting rights in our country's history since Jim Crow. And the thread of race runs from the beginning to the end of my book.