It also uses interviews with Civil Rights activists conducted by the Kate Clifford Larson’s biography of Fannie Lou Hamer is the most complete ever written, drawing on recently declassified sources on both Hamer and the Civil Rights movement, including unredacted FBI and Department of Justice files. For those whose lives she touched and transformed, for those who heard and followed her voice, she was the embodiment of protest, perseverance, and, most of all, the potential for
But Fannie Lou Hamer would not be held back. Its standard-bearer, President Lyndon Johnson-tried to contain. She used her brutal beating at the hands of Mississippi police, an ordeal from which she never fully recovered, as the basis of a televised speech at the 1964 Democratic Convention, a speech that the mainstream party-including She summoned and used what she had against the citadel-her anger, her courage, her faith in the Bible,Īnd her conviction that hearts could be won over and injustice overcome. (SNCC), which recruited her to help with voter-registration drives, Hamer became a community organizer, women’s rights activist, and co-founder of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. Working with the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee Starting in the early 1960s and until her death in 1977, she was an irresistible force, not merely joining the swelling wave of change brought by the Civil Rights movement but keeping it in motion.
And she was denied the most basic of all rights in America-the right to cast a ballot-in a state in which Blacks constituted nearly half the population.Īnd so Fannie Lou Hamer lifted up her voice. Her consent to an operation that deprived her of children.
She left school at 12 to pick cotton, as those before her had done, in a world where white supremacy was an unassailable citadel. She was born the 20th child in a family that had lived in the Mississippi Delta for generations, first as enslaved people and then as sharecroppers.
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