And as soon as Negroes take to the street demonstrating, one hears people say, "they shouldn't have done it." Because each style has its own formatting nuances that evolve over time and not all information is available for every reference entry or article, Encyclopedia.com cannot guarantee each citation it generates. We worked all the time, just worked and then we would be hungry and my mother was clearing up a new ground trying to help feed us for $1.25 a day. We had 63,000 people registered on the Freedom Registration form. We have never been represented in Washington.
Our foreparents were mostly brought from West Africa, the same place that we visited in Africa. I met one child there eleven years old, speaking three languages. One of those men was driving a truck from the State Penitentiary.
She still would be ragged and 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. That knocked us right back down. It is our right to stay here and we will stay and stand up for what belongs to us as American citizens, because they can't say that we haven't had patience.o'dell: Was there a lot of interest in your trip among the African people that you met?hamer: Yes. I went almost naked to see that my mother was kept decent and treated as a human being for the first time in all of her life. Those are the things that forced me to try to do something different and when this Movement came to Mississippi I still feel it is one of the greatest things that ever happened because only a person living in the State of Mississippi knows what it is like to suffer; knows what it is like to be hungry; knows what it is like to have no clothing to wear. Then, copy and paste the text into your bibliography or works cited list. I saw in Chicago, on the street where I was visiting my sister-in-law, this "Urban Renewal" and it means one thing: "Negro removal." And these people in Mississippi State, they are not "down"; all they need is a chance. We are not even allowed to think for ourselves. I have been tired for 46 years and my parents was tired before me and their parents were tired, and I have always wanted to do something that would help some of the things I would see going on among Negroes that I didn't like and I don't like now.o'dell: Getting back just for a minute to Atlantic City. So I picked the 30 pounds of cotton that week, but I found out what actually happened was he was trapping me into beginning the work I was to keep doing and I never did get out of his debt again.
It was quite an experience.o'dell: There will be other elections and other conventions and the people in Mississippi should be a little stronger.o'dell: Well, it's good to know that the people you have to work with every day are with you.o'dell: That's encouraging because it makes the work that much easier. Civil rights pioneer, lecturer