Keisha N. Blain - Until I Am Free: Fannie Lou Hamers Enduring Message to America

Dr. Keisha Blains beautiful prose and infectious passion for uncovering our historical roots tell Hamers amazing life story. If America truly respected its own roots, it would see a Fannie Lou Hamer defending the US Constitution to include We the People. Dr. Blain unveils Hamers leadership in this historical documentation, once again demonstrating that when Black women sit down and demand a seat on the bus or simply get let into the room, we spend the next generation demanding a seat at the table. Until I Am Free allows the reader to see a long part of the political and cultural lines from Fannie Lou Hamer to Vice President Kamala Harris.

DON NA BRAZILE , former chair of the Democratic National Committee

What if our nation had taken Fannie Lou Hamer seriously? This is the motivating question of Keisha Blains insightful new book, Until I Am Free: Fannie Lou Hamers Enduring Message to America. Blain leaves us yearning to live in an America guided by Hamers unyielding commitment to justice, her full embrace of community, her creative spirit of collective problem-solving, and her unreserved love for Black people. This is a book for everyone who doesnt know the legacy of Fannie Lou Hamer and for everyone who thinks they do, because Blain recovers and uncovers a Hamer who is an activist, an organizer, and a thinker far more exceptional and fully human than most will expect to encounter.

MELISSA HARRIS-PERRY, author, media host, and the Maya Angelou Presidential Chair of Politics at Wake Forest University

We all know Fannie Lou Hamer, the courageous civil rights icon who survived white violence and stood up to Lyndon B. Johnson and the Democratic Party. Keisha Blains magnificent Until I Am Free introduces us to Hamer the political thinker, the strategist and theorist, the internationalist whose expansive vision of freedom embraced the oppressed everywhere. A pathbreaking contribution to our history and a precious guide for todays activists fighting for the world Hamer envisioned.

ROBIN D. G. KELLEY, author of FreedomDreams: The Black Radical Imagination

With elegant, passionate, and powerful prose, award-winning historian Keisha Blain weaves together the political and intellectual legacy of Mississippi sharecropper and visionary political leader Fannie Lou Hamer with the contemporary struggle for racial justice and human freedom. With boldness and radical honesty, Hamer confronted in her own time many of the issues that Black activists are confronting today: state violence, sexism and white supremacy, political disenfranchisement, and economic exploitation. Grounded in the material conditions of her lived experience, Hamer crafted a worldview and a politics of radical inclusivity that guided her actions and inspired others. This book expands the boundaries of the Black radical political and intellectual tradition and re-centers a voice that is too prescient to be ignored.

BARBARA RANSBY, author of Making All Black Lives Matter: Reimagining Freedom in the Twenty-First Century

In Until I Am Free, Dr. Keisha N. Blain has written a rich, detailed, and moving portrait of a woman who was one of the most important civil rights activists in American history. In this meticulous biography of Fannie Lou Hamer, Dr. Blain puts her life and work in conversation with the world around us. In doing so, she gives the reader a profound sense of how Hamers too-often-ignored contributions helped shape and lay the groundwork for so much of the work that activists continue to do today. This incredibly important book provides new ways of understanding a woman who saw this country for what it was and demanded that it be better.

CLINT SMITH, author of How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America

Keisha Blain brings Fannie Lou Hamer and her fight for liberation to life in the exhilarating Until I Am Free. Alight with curiosity and passion, Blains view of Hamer is both intimate and political, exquisitely sensitive to the challenges faced by a Black woman sharecropper whose body was too often the site of white supremacist, misogynist violence, and whose revolutionary story has too rarely been framed as such. Until I Am Free corrects that omission and will be an invaluable resource for generations to come.

REBECCA TRAISTER, author of Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Womens Anger

B EACON P RESS
Boston, Massachusetts
www.beacon.org

Beacon Press books are published under the auspices
of the Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations.

2021 by Keisha N. Blain

All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America

24 23 22 21 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Jacket image: Photo by Ken Thompson, The General Board of
Global Ministries of the United Methodist Church, Inc. Used with
permission of Global Ministries.

Text design and composition by Kim Arney

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names Blain, Keisha N., author.
Title: Until I am free : Fannie Lou Hamers enduring message
to America / Keisha N. Blain.
Other titles: Fannie Lou Hamers enduring message to America
Description: Boston : Beacon Press, [2021] | Includes bibliographical
references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2021019372 (print) | LCCN 2021019373 (ebook) |
ISBN 9780807061503 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780807061527 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Hamer, Fannie Lou. | Hamer, Fannie LouInfluence. |
African American women civil rights
workersBiography. | Civil rights workersUnited StatesBiography. | African AmericansCivil
rightsHistory. | Civil rights movementsUnited StatesHistory. |
African AmericansCivil rightsMississippi.
Classification: LCC E185.97.H35 B53 2021 (print) | LCC E185.97.H35
(ebook) | DDC 323.092 [B]dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021019372
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021019373

To Jay and Little Jay, with love

We have a long fight and this FIGHT is not mine alone. But you are not free whether you are white or black, until I am free. Because no man is an island to himself. And until Im free in Mississippi, you are not free in Washington; you are not free in New York.

FANNIE LOU HAMER

I still remember the very first time I heard about Fannie Lou Hamer. It was in spring 2008, when I was a senior at Binghamton University, and I was taking a course on the American civil rights movement. The professor had assigned readings on Hamer, including interviews and a speech Hamer delivered in the 1960s. I was blown away by what I read and couldnt help wondering why it had taken me so long to encounter this fearless and extraordinary Black woman. The more I learned about Hamers life and her political vision, however, it became clear to me why she hadnt received the same level of attention and acclaim as so many others: she didnt reflect the publics memory of the civil rights movement. Mainstream historical narratives on Black social movements, then and now, privilege the ideas and political activities of men. Most Americans connect the civil rights movement and Black Power era with Black men such as Martin Luther King Jr., John Lewis, and Malcolm X, to mention a few. And when Black women leaders enter the conversation, the focus tends to be on the same prominent figures, such as Rosa Parks, Coretta Scott King, and Angela Davis. Needless to say, these trailblazing leaders have all fundamentally shaped American society; their work and lives should be deeply studied. However, the historical record is far richer and more interesting than many realize, including a diverse array of activists and leaders from different classes and all walks of life.