Women Activists From The United States

"As a child I was taught that to tell the truth was often painful. As an adult I have learned that not to tell the truth is more painful, and that the fear of telling the truth — whatever the truth may be — that fear is the most painful sensation of a moral life."

"Bisexuality means I am free and I am as likely to want to love a woman as I am likely to want to love a man, and what about that? Isn't that what freedom implies?"

"If you are free, you are not predictable and you are not controllable."

"I care because I want you to care about me. I care because I have become aware of my absolute dependency upon you, whoever you are, for the outcome of my social, my democratic experience."

"If any of us hopes to survive, s/he must meet the extremity of the American female condition with immediate and political response. The thoroughly destructive and indefensible subjugation of the majority of Americans cannot continue except at the peril of the entire body politic."

"I am working for the courage to admit the truth that Bertolt Brecht has written; he says, "It takes courage to say that the good were defeated not because they were good, but because they were weak." I cherish the mercy and the grace of women’s work. But I know there is new work that we must undertake as well: that new work will make defeat detestable to us. That new women’s work will mean we will not die trying to stand up: we will live that way: standing up. I came too late to help my mother to her feet. By way of everlasting thanks to all of the women who have helped me to stay alive I am working never to be late again."

"I wanted to be strong. I never wanted to be weak again as long as I lived. I thought about my mother and her suicide and I thought about how my father could not tell whether she was dead or alive. I wanted to get well and what I wanted to do as soon as I was strong, actually, what I wanted to do was I wanted to live my life so that people would know unmistakably that I am alive, so that when I finally die people will know the difference for sure between my living and my death. And I thought about the idea of my mother as a good woman and I rejected that, because I don't see why it's a good thing when you give up, or when you cooperate with those who hate you or when you polish and iron and mend and endlessly mollify for the sake of the people who love the way that you kill yourself day by day silently. And I think all of this is really about women and work. Certainly this is all about me as a woman and my life work. I mean I am not sure my mother’s suicide was something extraordinary. Perhaps most women must deal with a similar inheritance, the legacy of a woman whose death you cannot possibly pinpoint because she died so many, many times and because, even before she became my mother, the life of that woman was taken; I say it was taken away."

"And who will join this standing up and the ones who stood without sweet company will sing and sing back into the mountains and if necessary even under the sea we are the ones we have been waiting for"

"Our earth is round, and, among other things, that means that you and I can hold completely different points of view and both be right. The difference of our positions will show stars in your window I cannot even imagine. Your sky may burn with light, while mine, at the same moment, spreads beautiful to darkness. Still we must choose how we separately corner the circling universe of our experience. Once chosen, our cornering will determine the message of any star and darkness we encounter. These poems speak to philosophy; they reveal the corners where we organize what we know."

"We will never forget Aaron Henry and Fannie Lou Hamer. Their testimony educated a nation and brought the political powers to their knees in repentance, for the convention voted never again to seat a delegation that was racially segregated. But the true test of their message would be whether or not Negroes in Northern cities heard them and would register and vote."

"SNCC workers have found that F.B.I. men in the South often share the segregationist views of the people around them; this is reflected in the lack of enthusiasm which F.B.I. men show in handling civil rights cases. Mrs. Fannie Lou Hamer once told an F.B.I. agent, "If I get to heaven and I see you there, I will tell St. Peter to send me on back to Mississippi!""

"Mrs. Hamer is short and stocky, her skin like weather-beaten copper, her eyes soft and large; she walks with a limp because she had polio as a child, and when she sings she is crying out to the heavens. She told what happened after she went down to register: "The thirty-first of August in '62, the day I went into the courthouse to register, well, after I'd gotten back home, this man that I had worked for as a timekeeper and sharecropper for eighteen years, he said that I would just have to leave....So I told him I wasn't trying to register for him, I was trying to register for myself. . . . I didn't have no other choice because for one time I wanted things to be different...Mrs. Hamer became a field secretary for SNCC after her eviction from the plantation. Just as Moses and the other "outsiders" had become insiders, now the insiders were beginning to become outsiders to the society they had grown up in. As Mrs. Hamer put it: "You know they said outsiders was coming in and beginning to get the people stirred up because they've always been satisfied. Well, as long as I can remember, I've never been satisfied. It was twenty of us, six girls and fourteen boys, and we just barely was making it. You know I could see the whites was going to school at a time when we would be out of school…and most of the time we didn't have anything to wear. I knew it was something wrong. ... I always sensed that we was the one who always do the hard work, you know..." I asked her if she was going to remain with the movement, and she responded with the words to a song: "I told them if they ever miss me from the movement and couldn't find me nowhere, come on over to the graveyard, and I'll be buried there.""

"women played a crucial role in those early dangerous years of organizing in the South, and were looked on with admiration...Women of all ages demonstrated, went to jail. Mrs. Fannie Lou Hamer, a sharecropper in Ruleville, Mississippi, became legendary as organizer and speaker. She sang hymns; she walked picket lines with her familiar limp (as a child she contracted polio). She roused people to excitement at mass meetings: "I'm sick an' tired o' bein' sick an' tired!""

"I idolize Fannie Lou Hamer and Ella Baker. And they are supreme examples of what being freedom fighters, principled, fearless — or at least courageous. There’s a difference between being fearless and being courageous. Courageous is actually better, because everyone should have some fear about what might actually harm them. And, of course, Fannie Lou Hamer paid a huge price for wanting to do something as seemingly ordinary as vote. But in the Jim Crow South of that era, Black people, virtually none of them were allowed to vote. She paid a permanent price because of the beating that she received. And I just found out yesterday, if you can believe it, after all these years, that she actually was blinded in one eye. She is known for having worked with SNCC, doing voter organizing and other kinds of antiracist organizing during that Jim Crow era, and then, of course, speaking out so powerfully at the 1964 Democratic convention about what went on in Mississippi, and asking the very, very, very relevant question: “Is this America?”...I actually had the great, great pleasure and honor of meeting Fannie Lou Hamer when I was a teenager in Cleveland in 1965 and was very involved in the civil rights movement as a young person."

"legendary organizer Fannie Lou Hamer"

"when I think about this, in order to become president of the United States, you have to be nominated by one of the two political parties, so the crucial thing for me was, in reflecting back, was the 1964 challenge of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party to the National Democratic Convention, because that was where the stage was set that allowed this to happen, because without opening up the national political structure in the country, this wasn’t going to happen. And, you know, we could have gotten the right to vote without the opening up of the national political party structure. And the party structure wasn’t opened up by getting the right to vote; the party structure was opened up by directly challenging in Mississippi the right of Mississippi to send an all-white delegation to the 1964 National Democratic Convention. And it was Fannie Lou Hamer and all the people in that delegation that really forced the national Democratic Party to open up, you know?...all I heard and all I saw was Fannie Lou Hamer giving her testimony. I had no idea that while she was giving her testimony, that the President, Lyndon Johnson, was so afraid of this woman, who had been raised and lived her life as a sharecropper and had been working on the Marlow plantation in Sunflower County, outside of Ruleville. He was so afraid of her that he went — you know, at that time, we just had the three networks: ABC, NBC and CBS. And he went to — notified all three networks that he had a special announcement, because he was terrified that her testimony was so powerful and she was so authentic that people would flood the convention, the credentials committee, with telegrams demanding that her party be seated. And so, he went and interrupted her testimony."

"if you think about the civil rights movement, what we were able to do was get Jim Crow out of three very distinct arenas in the country: First, there was public accommodations; second, there was voting rights and access to the political structures of the country; and third, and not well known, access to the national party structure itself — that is, to the Democratic Party. And that was Fannie Lou Hamer and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party at the 1964 convention of the Democratic Party. And remember, Kennedy had been assassinated. Johnson had been moved into the presidency, but he hadn’t been nominated yet, right? And so, we won those struggles, but what we didn’t win was getting Jim Crow out of education, right? And that was actually the subtext of the right to vote...And Fannie Lou Hamer, when she testified — and, you know, Martin Luther King testified, but President Johnson wasn’t afraid of him. He was afraid of this sharecropper from Louisville, Mississippi. And when she went on to testify, the president said, “We have an announcement to make.” And he took over the TV, right?"

"a lot of the women in northern New Mexico were like the women I had met in rural Mississippi. They were Fanny Lou Hamers — only they spoke Spanish — in northern New Mexico. Same kind of older, tough ladies who had seen it all, and the same kind of strength, you know? So there was just nothing you could do except respect — a whole lot — those women."

"The voices of the grassroots, of people like Fannie Lou Hamer, must always be heard if we are to understand the past and move effectively toward the future."

"Over and over again the defense of the family is seen as the primary concern of black women; their understanding of the defense of the family always includes the elevation of the black man. "We are here to work side by side with the black man in trying to bring liberation to all people," is the way Fannie Lou Hamer, the 20th-century Mississippi grassroots leader, summarized a long tradition."

"In the final analysis, it must be said that this Nobel Prize was won by a movement of great people, whose discipline, wise restraint, and majestic courage has led them down a nonviolent course in seeking to establish a reign of justice and a rule of love across this nation of ours: Herbert Lee, Fannie Lou Hamer, Medgar Evers, Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner, and the thousands of children in Birmingham, Albany, St. Augustine, and Savannah who had accepted physical blows and jail and had discovered that the power of the soul is greater than the might of violence. These unknown thousands had given this movement the international acclaim, which we received from the Norwegian Parliament."

"In 1961, civil rights icon Fannie Lou Hamer, a disabled Black woman, was forcibly sterilized without her knowledge; the procedure was so common at the time that it had its own nickname, the "Mississippi appendectomy." Buck v. Bell has never been overturned."

"They were remarkable women and deserve to be remembered that way."

"People such as Fannie Lou Hamer and Martin Luther King Jr. frequently quoted the Declaration in their efforts to eradicate racism."

"In many ways, she paved the way for Barack Obama."

"(What's the difference between a spokesman and a witness?) A spokesman assumes that he is speaking for others. I never assumed that I never assumed that I could. Fannie Lou Hamer, for example, could speak very eloquently for herself. What I tried to do, or to interpret and make clear was that what the Republic was doing to that woman, it was also doing to itself. No society can smash the social contract and be exempt from the consequences, and the consequences are chaos for everybody in the society."

"Fannie Lou Hamer's address at the Atlantic City Convention stunned the country. The reforms that were later introduced into the Democratic Party structure derived from the urgent need for change which she communicated. Not a few of the Black political leaders in the South today, e.g., Charles Evers, Julian Bond, and Ernest N. Morial (the Black mayor of New Orleans), owe their political fortunes to the foundations of reform that Fannie Lou Hamer laid in 1964. In 1965 the MFDP under Hamer's leadership organized the Mississippi Freedom Labor Union and began recruiting Black sharecroppers in the state in a drive to end their terrible poverty. A strike in May 1965 marked the first such action in the Mississippi farm lands since an abortive uprising by 'croppers in the 1930s...Fannie Lou Hamer died in March 1977, at the age of sixty. In a tribute to her, Eleanor Holmes Norton wrote: "This profoundly black woman was of a world broader than her own race and sex. She reached out to the miserably poor whites in her native Sunflower County, organizing a cooperative farm to raise animals and vegetables. Hunger, it turned out, was the vital bond between the white and black poor.""

""All of this on account we want to register, 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? Thank you." It is important that we know that those words came from the lips of an African American woman. It is imperative that we know those words come from the heart of an American...We must hear the questions raised by Fannie Lou Hamer forty years ago…Fannie Lou Hamer knew that she was one woman and only one woman. However, she knew she was an American, and as an American she had a light to shine on the darkness of racism. It was a little light, but she aimed it directly at the gloom of ignorance."

"Fanny Lou Hamer of Mississippi, a woman of great dignity and natural eloquence"

"When they asked for those to raise their hands who'd go down to the courthouse the next day, I raised mine. Had it up high as I could get it. I guess if I'd had any sense, I'd have been a little scared — but what was the point of being scared? The only thing they could do was kill me, and it kinda seemed like they'd been trying to do that a little bit at a time since I could remember."

"You can pray until you faint, but if you don’t get up and try to do something, God is not going to put it in your lap."

"I always said if I lived to get grown and had a chance, I was going to try to get something for my mother and I was going to do something for the black man of the South if it would cost my life; I was determined to see that things were changed."

"It's time for America to get right."

"I am sick and tired of being sick and tired."

"With the people, for the people, by the people. I crack up when I hear it; I say, with the handful, for the handful, by the handful, 'cause that's what really happens."

"It is only when we speak what is right that we stand a chance at night of being blown to bits in our homes. Can we call this a free country, when I am afraid to go to sleep in my own home in Mississippi?... I might not live two hours after I get back home, but I want to be a part of setting the Negro free in Mississippi."

"If I give you romantic advice, don't take it. Look what's happening to me. I have the best taste in friends and the worst taste in husbands. I'm never getting married again. That's just stupid. There's no reason on Earth to do that."

"They used to have clauses and contracts where you can't get bad publicity or you'd get fired. But now bad publicity is good publicity. I just keep working and don't think about it much."

"You don’t know how to handle anything today, because you have to go to jail to get some press or fall down drunk."

"My mother once told me never be a second-rate version of somebody else when you can be a first-rate version of yourself."

"It really scared me to do what Mom did because I never did anything that she did. I promised her that I would never sing her songs, and I kept my promise. "You sing them better than anybody. I don't want to be a second-rate example of you. I want to be a first-rate example of myself.""

"Some people think reality must be constantly depressing, but I think reality is something you rise above."

"I'm carrying on a tradition. But I'd rather be a first-rate version of myself than a second-rate version of somebody else. I'm proud of my parents, and the only way that I can prove it to them is to take what they gave me and work my head off."

"I don't sing them because I couldn't sing them as well as she did. I'd rather be a first-rate version of myself than a second-rate version of anybody."

"I couldn't sing Mama's special songs. I couldn't do them as well. I would rather present a first-rate version of myself than a second-rate version of Mama."

"Liza Minelli said she can't sing well enough those "special songs" of her late mother, Judy Garland, so she doesn't sing them at all. The award-winning entertainer said she'd "rather present a first-rate version of myself than a second-rate version of Mama.""

"Getting older makes you more alive."

"I don't think any woman wants to be known for being beautiful or busty. I think you want to be known for who you are."

"Exchange the words ‘have to’ with ‘get to.’ Exchange the word ‘can’t’ with ‘unwilling.’"

"The greatest gift to give to the people you love the most is your recovery."