Walk with Me: A Biography of Fannie Lou Hamer

Name: Walk with Me: A Biography of Fannie Lou Hamer
Price: 21.50 USD
Availability: InStock
Author: Kate Clifford Larson
ISBN: 9780190096847

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. She left school at 12 to pick cotton, as those before her had done, in a world in which white supremacy was an unassailable citadel. She was subjected without her consent to sterilization. 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. And so Fannie Lou Hamer lifted up her voice.

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 civil rights but keeping it in motion. Working with the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (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. 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 its standard-bearer, President Lyndon Johnson ― tried to contain. But Fannie Lou Hamer would not be held back.

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, interviews with Civil Rights activists conducted by the Smithsonian and the Library of Congress, and extensive conversations with Hamer's family and with those with whom she worked most closely. Stirring, immersive, and authoritative, Walk with Me does justice to Fannie Lou Hamer's life, capturing in full the spirit, and the voice, that led the fight for freedom and equality in America at its critical moment.