Fannie Lou Hamer

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? ”

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 know lots of people in Mississippi who have lost their jobs trying to register to vote. ”

People have got to get together and work together. I'm tired of the kind of oppression that white people have inflicted on us and are still trying to inflict. ”