In Until I Am Free, a wonderful and timely new book on the life of civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer, author Keisha N. Blain deftly portrays Hamer as a thoughtful and prescient political activist whose message for today’s racial justice movements is as powerful as it was more than a half-century ago.
In the book’s introduction, Blain recounts her own first exposure to Hamer when she was a senior in college: “I was blown away by what I read and couldn’t help wondering why it had taken me so long to encounter this fearless and extraordinary Black woman. The more I learned about Hamer’s life and her political vision, however, it became clear to me why she hadn’t received the same level of attention and acclaim as so many others: She didn’t reflect the public’s memory of the civil rights movement.”
"Until I Am Free: Fannie Lou Hamer's Enduring Message to America" By Keisha N. Blain. Beacon Press, 171 pages Publication date: October 5, 2021
After a biographical chapter on Hamer’s early life, Blain launches into a series of chapters that each include a story from recent years. For instance, chapter two begins with the story of Sandra Bland, a twenty-eight-year-old Black woman who died in police custody in Texas after a routine traffic stop. This leads into a description of Hamer’s own beating by Mississippi police in 1963, a story that Hamer related to a live television audience during the 1964 Democratic National Convention.
“In Hamer’s view, public testimony was one powerful response to challenge this system,” Blain explains. “By telling her story, repeatedly, Hamer hoped to empower others and to send the message that silence when confronting everyday degradation and violence was simply not an option.”
Hamer first got involved in the civil rights movement in 1962, at age forty-four, when she heard James Forman speak on voting rights. She joined the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in August of that year and began organizing for the right of her neighbors to vote in her home state of Mississippi. She was evicted from her house by W.D. Marlow, the white plantation owner for whom she worked, when he learned that she had registered to vote. Hamer moved on and never turned back.
Hamer is perhaps best remembered for the phrase “I am sick and tired of being sick and tired,” first used in a speech she gave December 20, 1964, at Malcolm X’s church in New York City; it is also inscribed on her tombstone in Ruleville, Mississippi. Her work as an activist included her push to get the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party seated as delegates at the 1964 Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, New Jersey; an international trip with members of SNCC to Guinea in 1964; and her creation of a farming community in Mississippi.
She was also a pioneer of the growing women’s rights movement. “Although Hamer never self-identified as a feminist, she was deeply committed to the empowerment of women in society, especially in the realm of electoral politics and grassroots organizing, and she did not condone patriarchy or male chauvinism,” Blain writes. “Her life provided a model for how women could effectively lead in society and resist patriarchy in all its manifestations.”
To have true freedom, Hamer understood, Black Americans needed economic freedom as well. So in 1969, she used donated funds to create the Freedom Farm Cooperative. It was a rural economic development project and also a political organizing project. The farm grew and lasted until 1976, but eventually succumbed to economic issues. Hamer died in 1977, at the age of fifty-nine.
For Hamer, says Blain, the “work of democracy remains unfinished, and the roadblocks are many, but Hamer’s vision of America and her enduring message to all Americans offer a way forward.”