2021, 322 pages, hardback, e-book.
Kate Clifford Larson explores the life of Mississippi sharecropper and civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer in this outstanding book that takes readers on the journey of a woman who was born into the grinding poverty and racism of the Mississippi Delta, and who rose to become the voice of the unheard and the conscience of a nation.
The 20th child of Mississippi sharecroppers, she had to quit school to work in the fields after sixth grade. When she tried to register to vote she was fired from her plantation job and kicked out of the house where she lived. Despite being arrested, brutally beaten, harassed by lawmen and the KKK, she persisted. 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 summoned and used what she had against the citadel―her anger, her courage, her faith in the Bible, and her conviction that hearts could be won over and injustice overcome. 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 itsstandard-bearer, President Lyndon Johnson―tried to contain. But Fannie Lou Hamer would not be held back. 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 revolutionary change.
She was not well educated or a polished orator like many of her fellow activists, but her ability to empathize with the poorest Black men and women, long denied the ability to vote in the South, resonated profoundly throughout the region and rendered her one of the most effective speakers of all.
Hamer's big moment came as she told her life story on national TV as part of the effort to challenge Mississippi's all-White delegation to participate in the Democratic National Convention in 1964. Her testimony, given while wearing a borrowed dress, eloquently described the oppressive system that kept Mississippi Blacks powerless, and poverty stricken. The group won the right to seat Black delegates at the 1968 convention, and Hamer even ran for office herself.
This very moving book raises important questions about leadership of social movements—should it be top-down, led by ‘elites’, should it be grassroots bottom-up led by ‘the people’ or a combination. A significant question we have yet to answer.
