Keisha N. Blain

"Until I Am Free explores the political ideas and philosophies of civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer"--

Fannie Lou Hamer's Enduring Message to America

Until I Am Free

J. L. Askew

As I read this book there were many aspects of Fannie Lou Hamer’s life that seemed familiar. My mother, a year younger than Hamer, was also born in Mississippi and the daughter of a sharecropper, going no further than tenth grade. Social class was real; before taking a bride, my father was asked by his father, “why would you marry a sharecropper’s daughter?” One of my earliest memories is of me beside my mother in a field with a large tow sack dragging the ground, picking cotton. But all similarities end there.
Fannie Lou Hamer was born a Black woman in the deep South in the early twentieth century, bearing all the afflictions of her status. Her life would have been one of ordinariness and anonymity, of just getting by except for what happened August 27, 1962. That day at William Chapel Missionary Baptist Church, Ruleville, Mississippi, a meeting was held to inform the community they had the right to vote. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), pushing for social change, had sponsored the event. Invited by a friend but at first reluctant to go, Hamer was curious. “I didn’t know anything about voting; I didn’t know anything about registering to vote.”
I had never heard of Hamer until reading this book by Dr. Keisha Blain that tells of the Black woman’s short fifteen years as a civil rights crusader. She was forty-four years old when she apparently had an epiphany, joining SNNC and embarking on a “divine mission” to secure voting rights for the excluded. Within a year she was Field Secretary of the organization.
Blain describes what it was like for Hamer in the Jim Crow South, of widespread Black intimidation like the racist murder of fourteen-year-old Emmett Till in 1955. But Hamer was determined to change things in her state. “I’m goin’ to stay in Mississippi and if they shoot me down, I’ll be buried here.”
As a civil rights leader, Hamer identified two issues she was fighting to change. The first was voter suppression (the reason she joined the movement) and the second was state-sanctioned violence.
In 1963 Hamer and a group of activists on a bus returning from South Carolina stopped in Winona Mississippi at a cafe to eat where they were turned away. Police were called and she and her friends were beaten. Later she was abused in jail by five officers, one who “pulled her dress up”, as another tried “to feel under my clothes.” The beatings left her with permanent injuries, but she was undeterred.
The book’s first chapter covers Hamer’s upbringing in poverty and discrimination, experiences that produced fertile ground for a middle-age awakening when she discovered her life’s mission. Each chapter thereafter showcases a present-day incident involving Black rights, linking the event to similar struggles by the civil rights worker half a century ago, demonstrating Hamer’s importance as a pioneer in the work for equality. Her salient characteristics echo throughout the narrative through the author’s skillful use of summary and restatement.
The book is an important addition to the genre, revealing a previously little-known figure in the struggle for equality, Fannie Lou Hamer, who deserves her place in history alongside Martin Luther King Jr. and other icons of the civil rights era.

Until I Am Free Fannie Lou Hamer's Enduring Message to America

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