nonfiction - biography of Civil Rights icon (daughter of a preacher from a share-cropping family in Mississippi) and history of the movement, and some of the long history of injustices and violence leading up to and throughout the movement.

well written and thorough, as well as inspiring, a portrait of a great lady and details about other important events and figureheads of the time. I haven't read the previous biographies written about Hamer, or her autobiography, so I can't say how this compares, but it was really good. ( )

Kate Clifford Larson has delivered a stirring and extremely readable biography of an extremely important and inspirational--though I expect not well enough known at this point--figure in the American Civil Rights Movement. Fannie Lou Hamer was the children of tenant farmers, and became one herself, in Jim Crow Mississippi. With very little education but with a burning drive to learn and an iron-willed dignity that would not allow her to sit still for the horrific realities of 1950s and 60s Mississippi, Hamer gradually became involved in the grass roots efforts of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) to help rural Blacks attain voting rights in the face of furious, violent and often deadly resistance by segregationist whites. The book begins with the story of Hamer's childhood and family life, of necessity intertwined with an in-depth description of the depravities and horror of Jim Crow oppression, which was brutal and ubiquitous. When, as an adult, Hamer went into town to attempt to register to vote, she came home to find that her white landlord was promising to evict Hamer, along with her husband and children, unless she promised to go back to town the next day to rescind her registration. Hamer replied, "I registered to vote for me, not for you," and her landlord followed up on his threat. Later, in a Winona, Mississippi, jail cell, Hamer and four of her companions received vicious beatings, and Hamer was raped, for the crime of trying to integrate a bus stop diner. The beating left Hamer's health compromised for the rest of her life. But Hamer, due to her articulate, passionate speeches, her inspirational singing and her drive and inclusiveness, nevertheless became a powerful figure in the movement, to the extent that she was the keynote speaker before the Democratic National Committee when the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, a Black party organized to fight the seating of the fiercely segregationist Mississippi Democratic contingent at the 1964 Democratic Presidential Convention in Atlantic City in 1964.

In addition to being a wholly compelling biography of a fascinating figure, Larson's book also provides an important "from the inside" history of SNCC that compliments and in many ways expands upon the more global history of that organization, In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s by Clayborne Carson, which I read a year or two back. The biography also provides an effective description of the full deadly fury of Jim Crow. So in some ways the book is hard to get through, especially over the first 50 pages or so, as many of its details are horrific and depressing. Once Hamer moves into adulthood and begins her freedom-building activities, the book becomes a page-turner. This is one of the best, most fascinating, if sometimes depressing, biographies I've read over the past 10 years. ( )