Fannie Lou Hamer Quotes

A riot is the language of the unheard. And what is it that America has failed to hear? It has failed to hear that the plight of the Negro poor has worsened over the last few years. It has failed to hear that the promises of freedom and justice have not been met. And it has failed to hear that large segments of white society are more concerned about tranquility and the status quo than about justice, equality and humanity. And so in a real sense our nation’s summers of riots are caused by our nation’s winters of delay. And as long as America postpones justice, we stand in the position of having these recurrences of violence and riots over and over again. Social justice and progress are the absolute guarantors of riot prevention.

All I demand for the black man is, that the white people shall take their heels off his neck, and let him have a chance to rise by his own efforts.

We've begun to put fear into those whites who think they can do anything they want to a black person and get away with it.

But black people fall for that same argument, and they go around talking about law breakers. We did not make the laws in this country. We are neither morally nor legally confined to those laws. Those laws that keep them up, keep us down.

I am for violence if non-violence means we continue postponing a solution to the American black man's problem just to avoid violence.

Social equity is based on justice; politics change on the opinion of the time. The black man's skin will be a mark of social inferiority so long as white men are conceited, ignorant, unjust, and prejudiced. You cannot legislate these qualities out of the white - you must steal them out by teaching, illustration, and example.

Until racial justice and freedom is a reality in this land, our union will remain profoundly imperfect.... The Negro is going to get justice or this society will be ripped apart.

The Negro fought in the war, and … he’s not gonna keep taking the shit we’re dishing out. We’re in a race with time. If we don’t act, we’re gonna have blood in the streets.

We will have demonstrations until the injustices that have caused them are eliminated.

For years now I have heard the word “Wait”. It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This “Wait” has almost always meant “Never”.

All who abhor the immortality of discrimination and social injustice toward their fellow men must share the impatience of the nation’s Negro Americans and stand shoulder to shoulder with them in full active and affirmative support of their struggle to make a present reality out of the 100 year old Emancipation Proclamation.

The whole issue of race and discrimination is a moral issue.

The only part of my mother's experience that still gets to me is the way she and people like her were looked down upon for asking America to be America, for asking for full and equal participation in our democracy.

Black lives matter' doesn't mean that all lives do not matter, rather it is a cry for equal treatment in the greater circle of justice for all Americans.

We actually know that all lives do matter. And we believe it is so much so that we had to create Black Lives Matter.

The Ahmaud Arbery video was the final straw for me in being silent. That shook me to the core like nothing has in the past. Something flipped inside of me to be more vocal and stand up for racial equality and make sure we get a hold on that and change the face of this world and get it to a better place.

The struggle of African Americans is everybody's struggle.

The sunlight that has brought life and healing to you has brought stripes and death to me. This Fourth of July is yours, not mine.

In a sense we've come to our nation's capital to cash a check. When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men - yes, black men as well as white men - would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness... America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked 'insufficient funds.'

My father was a slave and my people died to build this country and I am going to stay here and have a part of it just like you.

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.

Where I come from, if you see your family and friends' civil rights being taken away, you speak up and do everything you can to keep that from happening!

My belief system is that you laugh at racism, and that's how it goes away.

The greatest problem is not with flat-out white racists, but rather with the far larger number of Americans who believe intellectually in racial equality but are quietly oblivious to injustice around them.

No, we are not anti-white. But we don't have time for the white man. The white man is on top already, the white man is the boss already... He has first-class citizenship already. So you are wasting your time talking to the white man. We are working on our own people.