Daily Inspiration Quote by Fannie Lou Hamer

Trust is a luxury Hamer refuses to sell to her audience. The line lands like a warning passed hand-to-hand, forged in the Mississippi Delta where "gifts" from white power brokers came with strings, surveillance, and a timer. Hamer, a sharecropper turned voting-rights insurgent, is not describing individual prejudice so much as the design of a racial order: access granted at the pleasure of the gatekeeper is not access at all. It is a lease.

Her phrasing is deliberately plain and transactional - "gives", "gets ready", "take it right back" - because the point is structural, not sentimental. White supremacy, in her telling, isn't just violence; it's contingency. Rights become favors, jobs become leverage, aid becomes obedience training. In the Jim Crow South, that was literal: economic retaliation, eviction, credit cutoffs, beatings, and jail could follow the smallest act of Black political agency. Even "moderate" reforms could be revoked the moment they threatened power.

"We have to take for ourselves" is the sentence's pivot from diagnosis to strategy. It's not a call for theft; it's a demand for ownership - of political voice, institutions, land, and the terms of survival. Hamer is arguing for collective self-determination: organizing, registering, building parallel structures, forcing the state to recognize what it would never freely hand over. The subtext is bracing: liberation can't depend on benevolence. It has to be extracted, defended, and made irreversible.