Fannie Lou Hamer Quotes
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.
Hamer, Fannie Lou. To Praise Our Bridges: An Autobiography. Edited by Julius Lester, KIPCO, 1967.
Religion has been on both sides of the racism issue. In general, slavery the world over and in the American South needed the support of mainstream religions. At the same time, religion has been one of the major forces for abolition. The two mainstream Protestant religions of the South, the Baptists and the Methodists split from their Northern brethren in the 19th century over the slavery issue, and they have never united.
In Helms bizarre view, the University of North Carolina which had desegregated and had Black students and faculty was communist. In the beginning of the Cold War, the Communists of the world frequently attacked the United States for its Racial Segregation and Discrimination before the Civil Rights Bill was passed. It was one of the great shames and weaknesses of America as slavery had been earlier. Southern racists then conflated the civil rights issue and Communism. Since all communists seemed opposed to segregation, then it followed, they erroneously reasoned, that all opponents of segregation were communists. See {622174} for another of Helms vicious smears using this twisted logic.
Fannie Lou Hamer was an American voting and women's rights activist, community organizer, and a leader in the civil rights movement. She was the co-founder and vice-chair of the Freedom Democratic Party, which she represented at the 1964 Democratic National Convention. Hamer also organized Mississippi's Freedom Summer along with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). She was also a co-founder of the National Women's Political Caucus, an organization created to recruit, train, and support women of all races who wish to seek election to government office.
