For Freedom's Sake: The Life of Fannie Lou Hamer / Edition 1

by Chana Lee

Overview

The youngest of twenty children of sharecroppers in rural Mississippi, Fannie Lou Hamer witnessed throughout her childhood the white cruelty, political exclusion, and relentless economic exploitation that defined African American existence in the Delta. 

In this intimate biography, Chana Kai Lee documents Hamer's lifelong crusade to empower the poor through collective action, her rise to national prominence as a civil rights activist, and the personal costs of her ongoing struggle to win a political voice and economic self-sufficiency for blacks in the segregated South. Lee looks at Hamer's early work as a field secretary for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in Mississippi, her dramatic appearance at the 1964 Democratic National Convention, and her ongoing work as a militant grassroots leader in her own community.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780252069369
Publisher:	University of Illinois Press
Publication date:	05/25/2000
Series:	Women, Gender, and Sexuality in American History
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	288
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Chana Kai Lee is an associate professor of history and women's studies at the University of Georgia.

Editorial Reviews

Winner of the Willie Lee Rose Prize, Southern Association of Women Historians, 1998.  Winner of the Letitia Woods Brown Prize.

"Emerging from the lowliest rungs of Mississippi's segregated world, Fannie Lou Hamer became an icon of black protest during the 1960s. . . . This book will win recognition for ably showing Hamer as a warrior at once valiant and vulnerable."—Robert Weisbrot, American Historical Review

"Far more prominent in the historical record than in the history books, black women in the post-World War II freedom movements are the subject of exciting recent scholarship. Lee's portrait of Fanny Lou Hamer stands among the best of those works. . . . This is the best book on a crucially important subject."—Timothy B. Tyson, Journal of American History

"Lee's biography is less committed to exploring Hamer's personal life than to charting her growth as an activist and examining the profound impact of gender, sexuality, violence and poverty on the early civil rights movement. . . . Vividly brings to light a crucial aspect of the civil rights movement that until now has not been given its due."—Publishers Weekly

"Chana Kai Lee's accessible, elegant, and comprehensively researched biography of Fannie Lou Hamer reminds us that even cataclysmic changes in social relations start with the experiences, aspirations, and imagination of ordinary people. An unknown plantation field hand and timekeeper until her forties, Mrs. Hamer emerged as the quintessential rank and file activist and grassroots leader of the Mississippi Freedom Movement. Lee shows how the civil rights movement was not just a battle to end segregation, but rather functioned as a broad based battle against poverty, illiteracy, economic exploitation, and all forms of dehumanization and oppression. More than any other individual, Fannie Lou Hamer embodied the extraordinary changes provoked in U.S. society by the civil rights movement of the 1960s. In Chana Kai Lee, she has found a biographer worthy of her story."—George Lipsitz, author of A Rainbow at Midnight: Labor and Culture in the 1940s

"Chana Kai Lee has written a remarkable biography of a remarkable woman. Of all the local people who guided and sustained the civil rights movement in reshaping the South and America during the second half of the twentieth century, Fannie Lou Hamer stands at the top. . . . Lee has given us a brilliantly textured portrait of the public and private life of a wife, mother, civil rights organizer, and mentor to young people struggling for freedom. For Freedom's Sake provides a truthful and sensitive portrait of a poor, southern black woman who transformed herself and countless others, while at the same time experiencing intense personal disappointment and pain. Not merely a story of one woman's triumph and tragedy, Lee's revealing book presents a moving and perceptive study of the human condition."—Steven F. Lawson, author of Running for Freedom: Civil Rights and Black Politics in America since 1941

"An extremely valuable addition to the historiography of the civil rights movement."—John Dittmer, author of Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi

"Enlightening, moving, and inspirational."—Beverly Guy-Sheftall, author of Daughters of Sorrow: Attitudes toward Black Women, 1880-1920

From the Publisher

At the 1964 Democratic National Convention, Fannie Lou Hamer garnered the national spotlight when she and other members of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party attempted to unseat the entirely white official Mississippi delegation. Though the coup failed, and Hamer herself earned the wrath of Lyndon Johnson, she helped draw attention to the ways in which black Southerners were denied political power. At the time, Hamer had only been involved in the civil rights movement for two years; at the age of 47 she reemerged as a natural and vibrant leader who would go on to run (unsuccessfully) for the Mississippi State Senate. Lee's biography is less committed to exploring Hamer's personal life than to charting her growth as an activist and examining the profound impact of gender, sexuality, violence and poverty on the early civil rights movement. By focusing on these issues in Hamer's own life--the repeated rapes her grandmother endured, resulting in 20 illegitimate children, Hamer's own involuntary sterilization and the sexual abuse she suffered at the hands of the police--the book highlights the vantage point of African-American women in the fight for basic human rights in the South. Lee handles this difficult material sensitively, placing it in context of the economic and social complexities of Southern life. Never sentimentalizing her subject, Lee honestly discusses the movement's bitter internal struggles, Hamer's severe bouts with depression and her strong disagreements with white feminists. This biography vividly brings to light a crucial aspect of the civil rights movement that until now has not been given its due. (Sept.) Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly