“I was blown away by what I read,” Blain writes in the introduction to Until I Am Free: Fannie Lou Hamer’s Enduring Message to America, “and I couldn’t help but wonder why it had taken me so long to encounter this fearless and extraordinary Black woman.”Ī partial answer to that question might be that Hamer, while a powerful leader in her own community, was not only working class, but remained working class. Blain had never heard of Hamer when she first encountered her in a college history class. Yet synthetic histories of the civil rights movement may have obscured her central role in the Black Freedom Struggle. She has had four prior biographers, and several children’s books tell her story.

She co-authored an autobiography there is a volume of her speeches and a record of her rich voice singing the freedom songs that gave comfort to activists who often did not know that they would live through the night. “The land of the free and the home of the brave, where we have to sleep with our telephones off the hooks because our lives be threatened daily because we want to live as decent human beings, in America?” In that moment, Hamer briefly became the moral face of her movement.Īn inspirational figure whose face adorns murals and whose words grace tee shirts, Hamer has not been lost. She spoke of her own brutal beating in the Winona County jail, an assault so severe that she never walked without pain again. She spoke in detail about the lethal violence that ordinary white citizens, police, and state officials perpetrated to prevent Black voter registration. Hamer’s nationally televised testimony in that sweltering Atlantic City hotel ballroom was electrifying. She had done it before, but this time she was in a nationally televised meeting of the Democratic National Convention’s Credentials Committee, as she and the Mississippi Freedom Democrats sought to displace a state delegation chosen by, and exclusively made up of, whites. On August 22, 1964, the 47-year-old sharecropper and Southern Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) activist bravely spoke her truth. Like many heroes and martyrs of the Black Freedom Struggle, Fannie Lou Hamer seems to be forever imprisoned in a single historical moment. Walk with Me: A Biography of Fannie Lou Hamer By Kate Clifford Larson Until I Am Free: Fannie Lou Hamer’s Enduring Message to America By Keisha N.

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