Walk with Me: A Biography of Fannie Lou Hamer

Written by Kate Clifford Larson

Narrated by Karen Chilton

She was born the 20th child in a family that had lived in the Mississippi Delta for generations, first as enslaved people and then as sharecroppers. She left school at 12 to pick cotton, as those before her had done, in a world in which white supremacy was an unassailable citadel. She was subjected without her consent to an operation that deprived her of children. And she was denied the most basic of all rights in America—the right to cast a ballot—in a state in which Blacks constituted nearly half the population.

And so Fannie Lou Hamer lifted up her voice. Starting in the early 1960s and until her death in 1977, she was an irresistible force, not merely joining the swelling wave of change brought by civil rights but keeping it in motion. Working with the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), which recruited her to help with voter-registration drives, Hamer became a community organizer, women's rights activist, and co-founder of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. She summoned and used what she had against the citadel—her anger, her courage, her faith in the Bible, and her conviction that hearts could be won over and injustice overcome. She used her brutal beating at the hands of Mississippi police, an ordeal from which she never fully recovered, as the basis of a televised speech at the 1964 Democratic Convention, a speech that the mainstream party—including its standard-bearer, President Lyndon Johnson—tried to contain. But Fannie Lou Hamer would not be held back. For those whose lives she touched and transformed, for those who heard and followed her voice, she was the embodiment of protest, perseverance, and, most of all, the potential for revolutionary change.

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. Stirring, immersive, and authoritative, 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 biography of Fannie Lou Hamer, the civil-rights advocate who challenged Mississippi segregationists with her powerful oratory and 'unforgettable' singing, places grassroots organizing by women at the heart of the battle for Black enfranchisement."—The New Yorker

• Language: English
• Publisher: Recorded Books, Inc.
• Release date: Jan 18, 2022
• ISBN: 9781705050118

Kate Clifford Larson

KATE CLIFFORD LARSON is an American historian and biographer. The author of two other critically acclaimed biographies: Bound for the Promised Land: Harriet Tubman, Portrait of an American Hero and The Assassin’s Accomplice: Mary Surratt and the Plot to Kill Abraham Lincoln. She has been a consultant and interpretive specialist for numerous museum and public history initiatives, focusing on the lives and contributions of women in the making of our national identity.  

Reviews for Walk with Me

[rocketjk · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

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.