Guide to Source Material for Anti-Racist Activists and Thinkers

Fannie Lou Hamer burst unto the national scene when she gave one of the important speeches at a political convention. Representing the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, she brilliantly protested the democratic party's plans to seat an all-white Mississippi delegation at the 1964 convention. This major biography of Ms. Hamer, one of the bravest leaders of the civil rights movement, places this event in the context of her full and extraordinary life. For the first forty-four years, Hamer lived on sharecropping plantations, all the while learning life lessons from her family, the Black Baptist religious tradition, and from the oppressive white supremacist mores surrounding her. Once Hamer's life path intersected with the mid-century Civil Rights Movement, she spent fifteen years (1962-1977) traveling from the South to the North--and even to the West Coast of Africa--advocating civil rights, economic justice, and interracial cooperation.

Kate Clifford Larson's biography of Fannie Lou Hamer is the most complete ever written, drawing on recently declassified sources on both Hamer and the civil rights movement, including unredacted FBI and Department of Justice files. It also makes full use of interviews with Civil Rights activists conducted by the Smithsonian and the Library of Congress, and Democratic National Committee archives, in addition to extensive conversations with Hamer's family and with those with whom she worked most closely. Walk with Me does justice to Fannie Lou Hamer's life, capturing in full the spirit, and the voice, that led the fight for freedom and equality in America at its critical moment.

This collection of twenty-one speeches and testimonies of Fannie Lou Hamer, coupled with brief critical descriptions, includes many of her most famous speeches given at rallies or in front of courtrooms and committees during her time organizing the Civil Rights movement in Mississippi. It includes her testimony in front of the Credentials Committee of the 1964 Democratic National Convention in addition to the last full-length oral history interview Hamer granted, a recent oral history interview that the editor conducted with Hamer's daughter, as well as a bibliography of additional primary and secondary sources.