Why bother? They're all screwing us over.

[struggle4progress]

103. Fannie Lou Hamer

... Williams Institutional CME Church
Harlem, New York
December 20, 1964

... It was the 31st of August of 1962, that eighteen of us traveled 26 miles to the county courthouse in Indianola, Mississippi, to try to register ... After taking this literacy test, some of you have seen it, we have 21 questions and some is not questions. It began with: "Write the date of this application. What is your full name. By whom are you employed" — so we can be fired by the time we get back home ... After finishing this form, we started on this trip back to Ruleville, Mississippi, and we was stopped by the same city policeman ... When we got back to Indianola the bus driver was charged with driving a bus the wrong color ... This same bus had been used year after year to haul people to the cotton fields to pick cotton and to chop cotton. But, this day, for the first time that this bus had been used for voter registration it had the wrong color ... When we got to Ruleville .. I was met there by my daughter and my husband's cousin that told me this man was raising a lot of Cain because I had went to Indianola. My oldest girl said that she believed I would have to leave there ... He said, "I mean that. You will have to go down and withdraw or you will have to leave" I said, "Mr. Marlow," I said, "I wasn't trying to register for you today. I was trying to register for myself." And this was it. I had to leave that same night ... On the tenth of September in 1962, sixteen bullets were fired into the home of Mr. and Mrs. Robert Tucker, where I'd been living after I was fired from this plantation. That same night, two girls was shot in Ruleville ... And you can always hear this long sob story: "You know it takes time." For three hundred years, we've given them time. And I've been tired so long, now I am sick and tired of being sick and tired, and we want a change ...