TY - JOUR
T1 - Walk with Me: A Biography of Fannie Lou Hamer by Kate Clifford Larson, New York: Oxford University Press, 2021
AU - Rubio, Philip
PY - 2022
Y1 - 2022
N2 - Larson, currently a visiting Women’s Center Research Scholar at Brandeis University, has written an excellent biography of Fannie Lou Hamer’s life as a grassroots civil rights leader and an activist in 1960s Mississippi. Focusing her research on nineteenth- and twentieth-century women and African Americans, Larson’s previous books include Bound for the Promised Land (CH, Oct'04, 42-1139a), about abolitionist Harriet Tubman; The Assassin’s Accomplice (2008), about would-be Abraham Lincoln assassin Mary Surratt; and Rosemary (2015), about Rosemary Kennedy, the disabled daughter of the famous Kennedy family. Walk with Me is a critically acclaimed social and political history, which the publisher, Oxford University Press, calls “the most complete ever written [on Hamer], drawing on recently declassified sources on both Hamer and the [C]ivil [R]ights [M]ovement.” Coincidentally, in 2021 Brown University historian Keisha N. Blain also published the Hamer biography Until I Am Free. Speaking to an audience at North Carolina A&T State University in April 2022, Blain argued that there could never be too many biographies of Fannie Lou Hamer (hers is an intellectual history). Kay Mills said the same thing in her 2007 edition of This Little Light of Mine. First published in 1993, Mills’s biography was followed by Chana Kai Lee’s similar exploration of Hamer’s activist life in For Freedom’s Sake (CH, Feb'00, 37-3511). Since then, eleven more books have been published on the life and work of this pivotal yet still-under-recognized Black, working-class, civil and human rights leader.
AB - Larson, currently a visiting Women’s Center Research Scholar at Brandeis University, has written an excellent biography of Fannie Lou Hamer’s life as a grassroots civil rights leader and an activist in 1960s Mississippi. Focusing her research on nineteenth- and twentieth-century women and African Americans, Larson’s previous books include Bound for the Promised Land (CH, Oct'04, 42-1139a), about abolitionist Harriet Tubman; The Assassin’s Accomplice (2008), about would-be Abraham Lincoln assassin Mary Surratt; and Rosemary (2015), about Rosemary Kennedy, the disabled daughter of the famous Kennedy family. Walk with Me is a critically acclaimed social and political history, which the publisher, Oxford University Press, calls “the most complete ever written [on Hamer], drawing on recently declassified sources on both Hamer and the [C]ivil [R]ights [M]ovement.” Coincidentally, in 2021 Brown University historian Keisha N. Blain also published the Hamer biography Until I Am Free. Speaking to an audience at North Carolina A&T State University in April 2022, Blain argued that there could never be too many biographies of Fannie Lou Hamer (hers is an intellectual history). Kay Mills said the same thing in her 2007 edition of This Little Light of Mine. First published in 1993, Mills’s biography was followed by Chana Kai Lee’s similar exploration of Hamer’s activist life in For Freedom’s Sake (CH, Feb'00, 37-3511). Since then, eleven more books have been published on the life and work of this pivotal yet still-under-recognized Black, working-class, civil and human rights leader.
M3 - Review article
VL - 60
JO - Choice
JF - Choice
IS - 4
ER -