Fannie Lou Hamer Quotes

By means of the prevailing scheme of settling political contests in white conventions and primaries, the negroes had been practically eliminated as an active factor; they were only occasionally appealed to when there were local splits in the Democratic party …. The questions at issue having been settled in the primary, the election itself is a mere legal formality, to which no more attention is given than is necessary to record the result of the primary.

As Republicans try to trample on our most sacred freedoms, Democrats will do everything we can to end discrimination and protect the one right that preserves all others - the right to vote.

My father joined our party because the Democrats in Jim Crow Alabama of 1952 would not register him to vote. The Republicans did.

Blacks as a group have voted Democratic since the 1930s. The GOP has not courted them in any real way since the 1960s, focusing instead on attracting white constituencies hostile to civil rights and African-Americans in general.

When you compare what people endured in the South in the 60s to try to get the right to vote for African Americans, and to compare what people were subjected to there to what happened in Philadelphia - which was inappropriate, certainly that . . . to describe it in those terms I think does a great disservice to people who put their lives on the line, who risked all, for my people.

The Democratic Party does not want anybody to have a photo ID because that would have a very negative impact on cheating! If you require a photo ID, that pretty much shuts out cheating.

I can see criticizing, complaining, protesting - anything but choosing not to vote. Too many people died for us not to vote.

There is no Constitutional issue here. The command of the Constitution is plain. There is no moral issue. It is wrong - deadly wrong - to deny any of your fellow Americans the right to vote in this country. There is no issue of States' rights or National rights. There is only the struggle for human rights.

The first Republican I knew was my father and he is still the Republican I most admire. He joined our party because the Democrats in Jim Crow Alabama of 1952 would not register him to vote. The Republicans did. My father has never forgotten that day, and neither have I.

For twelve successive Congresses we have appeared before committees of the two Houses making this plea, that the underlying principle of our Government, the right of consent, shall have practical application to the other half of people. Such a little simple thing we have been asking for a quarter of a century. For over forty years, longer than the children of Israel wandered through the wilderness, we have been begging and praying and pleading for this act of justice. We shall some day be heeded.

Nationwide about 1 in 7 black men are temporarily or permanently disenfranchised due to felon disenfranchisement laws.

Up until, really, Roosevelt, African-Americans largely voted ninety per cent Republican. That was the political origins, that's what their political voice was in the Republican party. During that history, that last sixty or seventy years of history, the Republican party effectively walked away from the community. They were afraid to really embrace civil rights even though they embraced civil rights legislation. And so it's not enough to just to put it on paper, you gotta actually show up and be in the community, and understand what that struggle was really about.

[The Democratic Party]it's a party with an incredible century-and-a-half history of institutional racism.

[Rosa Louise] Parks used to say, "Everybody looks at me because I sat down once in Montgomery, but the real hero is a woman named Septima Clark."She created the Citizenship Schools [where civil-rights activists taught basic literacy and political education classes].

Black folks in America are telling one party, 'We don't give a damn about you.' They're telling the other party, 'You've got our vote.' Therefore, you have labeled yourself 'disenfranchised' because one party knows they've got you under their thumb. The other party knows they'll never get you and nobody comes to address your interest.

The disfranchisement of a single legal elector by fraud or intimidation is a crime too grave to be regarded lightly.

It's the Democrat Party that is destroying the integrity of the American electoral system. It's not Vladimir Putin. It's not Dmitry Medvedev. It's the Democrat Party, which has sought to destroy the integrity of the American electoral system, all because they're a bunch of spoilsports who lost the election.

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.

People were threatened, folks was put in jail just because we wanted people to try to register to vote.

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?

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.

A man's rights rest in three boxes: the ballot box, the jury box, and the cartridge box.

I knew that however bad the Republican party was, the Democratic party was much worse. The elements of which the Republican party was composed gave better ground for the ultimate hope of the success of the colored mans cause than those of the Democratic party.