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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 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 its standard-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.
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. It also makes full use of interviews with Civil Rights activists conducted by the Smithsonian and the Library of Congress, and Democratic National Committee archives, in addition to 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.
“Would you happen to have a Ben Hur 1860? The third edition, the one with the erratum on page 116.” Don’t follow me on Facebook because I’m not there.
WALK WITH ME: A Biography of Fannie Lou Hamer; Kate Clifford Larson (2021) THE PRICE OF THE TICKET: Collected Nonfiction 1948–1985; James Baldwin (1985) THE LOVE SONGS OF W.E.B. DU BOIS; Honoree Fanonne Jeffers (2021) 3/4 https://t.co/lP6rQebeM9
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Today from @bostonathenaeum: Kate Larson discusses WALK WITH ME: A BIOGRAPHY OF FANNIE LOU HAMER https://t.co/LUhYLcVUi6
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Reviewed today in @nytimes, "Walk with Me" by @KCliffLarson "is a gripping and skillfully researched political biography that embeds Hamer’s personal history within a compelling account of the post-World War II civil rights movement." Read the full review: https://nyti.ms/3FuZIKH