walk with me a biography of fannie lou hamer

With diligent research featuring new sources, Larson brings her subject into a well-deserved spotlight.Ī social justice pioneer gets her due in this inspiring story of toil and spirit. The group won the right to seat Black delegates at the 1968 convention, and Hamer even ran for office herself. 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. Robert Parrish Moses, the local SNCC field representative, recognized Hamer’s leadership potential and tapped her to galvanize voter registration, against violent White intimidation.

As the NAACP began organizing the civil rights movement and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee opened offices to generate grassroots voting efforts, Hamer responded enthusiastically, finally able to channel her outrage and anger. Married to Perry “Pap” Hamer, a mechanic, and living on a plantation, she underwent a hysterectomy in 1961, without her consent, and could never have children of her own. Larson amply shows Hamer’s indomitable work ethic and strong sense of the injustices Blacks were forced to endure. She was the daughter of an impoverished sharecropper, the last of 20 children born to her beloved mother, who, Hamer later said, “taught us to be decent and respect ourselves.” Forced to help support the family from childhood, she quit school to work in the fields.

Larson, currently a scholar at the Brandeis Women's Studies Research Center, begins with a devastating portrait of her subject’s milieu. A civil rights activist from the Mississippi Delta earns a sympathetic, fully fleshed portrait.įannie Lou Hamer (née Townsend, 1917-1977) 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.

Walk with me a biography of fannie lou hamer