An inspirational figure whose face adorns murals and whose words grace tee shirts, Hamer has not been lost. She co-authored an autobiography; there is a volume of her speeches and a record of her rich voice singing the freedom songs that gave comfort to activists who often did not know that they would live through the night. She has had four prior biographers, and several children’s books tell her story.
Yet synthetic histories of the civil rights movement may have obscured her central role in the Black Freedom Struggle. Historian Keisha N. Blain had never heard of Hamer when she first encountered her in a college history class. “I was blown away by what I read,” Blain writes in the introduction to Until I Am Free: Fannie Lou Hamer’s Enduring Message to America, “and I couldn’t help but wonder why it had taken me so long to encounter this fearless and extraordinary Black woman.”
A partial answer to that question might be that Hamer, while a powerful leader in her own community, was not only working class, but remained working class. Unlike middle-class activists like Martin Luther King Jr., Bayard Rustin, or Stokely Carmichael, she grew up, and remained, a sharecropper until her activism caused her to be expelled from the plantation where she was employed. Numerous activists, like future Congressman John R. Lewis, were also born into sharecropping, but clawed their way into colleges where they became middle class and were radicalized by the movement.
Both of these new books do a powerful job of showing how politically, class, and gender diverse the civil rights movement was. If many organizers, like Lewis, went into politics, the grassroots strategies developed in Mississippi by working-class women like Hamer planted the seed for what would become the Movement for Black Lives. Hamer, Blain argues, is a central figure for understanding that long historical arc from a movement focused solely on civil rights to a contemporary racial justice movement that puts ending anti-Black violence at the center. Blain and Larson are differently persuasive that today’s systemic assaults on Black people by agents of the state, and by white citizens who believe they are defending their communities, need to begin with a realistic understanding of how far white people were willing to go to maintain supremacy, and what a very recent past it still is.