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
an operation that deprived her of children. 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 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.
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