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Until I Am Free: Fannie Lou Hamer's Enduring Message to America
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About This Book
Explores the Black activist's ideas and political strategies highlighting their relevance for tackling modern social issues including voter suppression, police violence, and economic inequality. A blend of social commentary, biography, and intellectual history, Until I Am Free is a manifesto for anyone committed to social justice. The book challenges us to listen to a working-poor and disabled Black woman activist and intellectual from the past as we grapple with contemporary concerns around race, inequality, and social justice. Hamer's ideas and fearless activism reveal how we all, regardless of race, gender, sexuality, ability, economic status, or educational background, have the power to transform society. Born in Webster County, Mississippi, Fannie Lou Hamer (1917-1977), the youngest of twenty children, was the granddaughter of enslaved people and worked as a sharecropper before dedicating herself to activism. Hamer fought for her community by working for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), assisting with Black voter registration, and serving as vice chair of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. Hamer's 1964 televised speech before the DNC's credentials committee was delivered before millions, and addressed two central issues that remain relevant today: voter suppression and state-sanctioned violence. Hamer described the scare tactics and violence she and other African Americans experienced and their lack of access to the vote. Throughout her life, Hamer fought for Black voting rights, social justice, women's empowerment, human rights and economic rights.
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Reviews
"Until I Am Free is a must-have for readers interested in American history and civil rights activism."
"Until I Am Free: Fannie Lou Hamer's Enduring Message to America is a deft, eloquent, and deeply engaging narrative of one of the fiercest and most formidable Black female activists of the 20th century ..."
"A highly readable, poignant study of the life and influence of a civil rights legend."
"In Until I Am Free, Blain asks us to revisit the activist's achievements through the lens of the current civil rights movement."
"Blain uses extensive primary sources (including excerpts from Hamer's speeches, and accounts of her experiences of sexual assault and medical trauma) to illustrate how Hamer 'turned her pain into political action.' Blain effectively conveys the racism and sexism Hamer faced in her fight for equality and liberation and shows how it impacted her relationships to both the civil rights movement and the women's liberation movement; she also establishes the modernity and contemporary relevance of Hamer's proto-intersectional politics ..."
"Yet one gets the sense that these terms don't entirely capture Hamer's core concerns ..."
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