After we had taken this test and started back to Ruleville, we was held up by the City Police and the State Highway Patrolmen and carried back to Indianola, where the bus driver was charged that day with driving a bus the wrong color.
The White Southerners used every tactic to stop the Black people, even using unheard of rules to make them pay fines. The path to freedom was peppered with roadblocks, but Fannie Lou would was not deterred.
And I addressed him and told him and said, “I didn’t try to register for you. I tried to register for myself.” I had to leave that same night.
Fannie Lou’s testimony served to empower the Black people. Her speech told them the need to continue the fight no matter what, segregation, Jim crow laws will persist, and freedom will not be handed to them; thus, they have to fight and demand their place in society.
All of this is 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 of the hooks because our lives be threatened daily because we want to live as decent human beings, in America?
Despite her plight, Fannie Lou pushed forward. The more they were trying to stifled her voice, the more determination she had to fight for her rights. Fannie Lou made her voiced heard in the face of adversity, she did not retreat after losing her work and home. Fannie Lou questioned the very core of America and denounced the hypocrisy of the freedom they spoke of, when in reality all they had was oppression. Her horrendous experience at the hands of her tormentors served as an eye opener on the daily struggles faced by African American, and how they have been continually denied their civil rights.
It is impossible for the United States to preserve itself as a republic or as a democracy when 600 families own more of this Nation’s wealth—in fact, twice as much—as all the balance of the people put together. Ninety-six percent of our people live below the poverty line, while 4 percent own 87 percent of the wealth. America can have enough for all to live in comfort and still permit millionaires to own more than they can ever spend and to have more than they can ever use; but America cannot allow the multimillionaires and the billionaires, a mere handful of them, to own everything unless we are willing to inflict starvation upon 125,000,000 people.
The vast gap between the rich and the masses gave rise to the economic problem within the country. The fact that a small percentage control 87% of the wealth, Long believes that the government is partly responsible for the ever-present poverty that the majority of the population is battling as their is not a law in place for the limit of wealth one can possess.
Those are the things we propose to do. “Every Man a King.” Every man to eat when there is something to eat; all to wear something when there is something to wear. That makes us all a sovereign.
Long says that every man will be a true king when there is no more hunger, homelessness, poverty, basically when we take care of each other, when there is no more selfishness and this will make the world a better place.
We have to limit fortunes. Our present plan is that we will allow no one man to own more that $50,000,000. We think that with that limit we will be able to carry out the balance of the program. It may be necessary that we limit it to less than $50,000,000. It may be necessary, in working out of the plans that no man’s fortune would be more than $10,000,000 or $15,000,000. But be that as it may, it will still be more than any one man, or any one man and his children and their children, will be able to spend in their lifetimes; and it is not necessary or reasonable to have wealth piled up beyond that point where we cannot prevent poverty among the masses.
Long proposes to limit fortunes, he alluded to people hoarding, people having too much in stark contract with the rest living in poverty. Long said this not reasonable and it is a complete waste. Long's idea is to spread the wealth around. The rich has a tendency to amass more riches, while the poor gets deeper into poverty
Is that, my friends, giving them a fair shake of the dice or anything like the inalienable right of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, or anything resembling the fact that all people are created equal; when we have today in America thousands and hundreds of thousands and millions of children on the verge of starvation in a land that is overflowing with too much to eat and too much to wear?
Here Long in his explanation of what the fundamental values are, explains that we can not say we abide by what the Declaration of the Independence called the people's rights for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness or that all men are created equal when millions of people are starving or lacking basic needs while a selected few have more than they will ever need in their lifetime; in this land of plenty, food or other basic needs are not scarce it is just an unequal distribution of wealth.
We have a marvelous love for this Government of ours; in fact, it is almost a religion, and it is well that it should be, because we have a splendid form of government and we have a splendid set of laws. We have everything here that we need, except that we have neglected the fundamentals upon which the American Government was principally predicated.
Here Long praised the existing government and acknowledge that people do believe in the government and its laws, but he pointed that the values upon which the American government was founded, namely the principles of the Declaration of the Independence, were forgotten.
As a result of this tender of the palm-beach, what has been the return? In these years there have occurred: The disfranchisement of the Negro The legal creation of a distinct status of civil inferiority for the Negro. The steady withdrawal of aid from institutions for the higher training of the Negro.
Du Bois believed that Washington's stance in encouraging Black people to be submissive and independent, has caused more harm than good, as they find themselves with no voice or ways to get away from new onslaught of inequalities and discrimination.
Cast it down among the eight millions of Negroes whose habits you know, whose fidelity and love you have tested in days when to have proved treacherous meant the ruin of your firesides. Cast down your bucket among these people who have, without strikes and labour wars, tilled your fields, cleared your forests, builded [sic] your railroads and cities, and brought forth treasures from the bowels of the earth, and helped make possible this magnificent representation of the progress of the South. Casting down your bucket among my people, helping and encouraging them as you are doing on these grounds, and to education of head, hand, and heart, you will find that they will buy your surplus land, make blossom the waste places in your fields, and run your factories. While doing this, you can be sure in the future, as in the past, that you and your families will be surrounded by the most patient, faithful, law-abiding, and unresentful people that the world has seen.
Washington encouraged the White population to work instead with the Black people whom they know and had been working for them faithfully, instead of placing their faith into the mass of immigrants.
Our greatest danger is that in the great leap from slavery to freedom we may overlook the fact that the masses of us are to live by the productions of our hands, and fail to keep in mind that we shall prosper in proportion as we learn to dignify and glorify common labour and put brains and skill into the common occupations of life; shall prosper in proportion as we learn to draw the line between the superficial and the substantial, the ornamental gewgaws [sic] of life and the useful. No race can prosper till it learns that there is as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem. It is at the bottom of life we must begin, and not at the top. Nor should we permit our grievances to overshadow our opportunities.
Washington encouraged Black people to use ordinary occupation like farming and other manual labors as they are more important in attaining gradual prosperity as opposed to other fields of work that he attributed to being superficial and insignificant, which brought on some criticism that Washington wanted the Black people to remain in a state of subservience
And in this connection it is well to bear in mind that whatever other sins the South may be called to bear, when it comes to business, pure and simple, it is in the South that the Negro is given a man’s chance in the commercial world, and in nothing is this Exposition more eloquent than in emphasizing this chance.
Although Washington acknowledged what he called "the sins of the South", alluding to slavery, he believed that no other place will give the Black people a better chance at economic success.
A second time the signal, “Water, water; send us water!” ran up from the distressed vessel, and was answered, “Cast down your bucket where you are.” And a third and fourth signal for water was answered, “Cast down your bucket where you are.” The captain of the distressed vessel, at last heading the injunction, cast down his bucket, and it came up full of fresh, sparkling water from the mouth of the Amazon River.
Booker T. Washington believed that Black people should support themselves instead of looking up and waiting for others, and he also wanted them to realize that they have plenty of resources at their disposal where they were to use instead of looking elsewhere.