Until I Am Free

Summary: A brief biography of one of the civil rights era's most important voting rights figures. 

I have known about Fannie Lou Hamer for a while. She was a figure in many histories of the civil rights era and a character in several biographies I have read, but this is the first book I have read primarily about her. I decided to pick it up after listening to an interview with the author on the Pass the Mic podcast and because I needed to use some credits on Audible. It is a brief biography, and the context is very helpful. But I also wanted a bit more. In print, it is just under 140 pages of text. Given that brief length, I wish there were an appendix with the text of several of her speeches. On the other hand, the book is well documented, with more than 30 pages of endnotes and a ten-page index. That high level of documentation is great, but it reads as a very accessible biography.

After the first, each of the chapters opens with a short passage detailing violence against black women. That framing of the book by connecting Hamer with the current civil rights struggle gives context for why we need to pay attention to Fannie Lou Hamer and other relatively unknown figures today.

Traditionally I have used Julia Child as an example of someone that did not start what they are known for until later in life. Julia Child did not take her first cooking class until she was 36. She didn't start writing her first cookbook until her early 40s and didn't start her TV show until she was 50. By comparison, when she was six, Fannie Lou Hamer started working cotton fields when she was trapped into a work contract as a sharecropper. She was sterilized without her consent during surgery to remove a tumor as a young woman. Because of this, she was unable to have biological children but did adopt two daughters and raised two additional girls. It was not until her mid-40s that Fannie Lou Hamer started working in civil rights.

At a church meeting organized by SNCC, she learned that she had a right to vote for the first time. On Aug 31, 1962, Fannie Lou Hamer and 17 others attempted to register to vote, and they were all arrested. She and her husband were immediately fired. Over the next couple of weeks, she regularly moved and went into hiding. She was shot at 15 times in an attempt to intimidate her. She and her husband left the county for three months for their safety. In December 1962, she again attempted to register to vote but was denied because of failing a literacy test. She returned in Jan 1963 and passed the literacy test but was denied the ability to vote that fall because she could not produce receipts for the two poll taxes. She eventually was able to vote, but the violence and repercussions against her left her unable to find work. Finally, she was hired by SNCC in 1963.

In June of 1963, returning from an SNCC meeting, she was arrested and beaten so severely that she was left permanently disabled. She spent three months recovering out of state before returning to her work in Mississippi. Despite being widely known, running for Congress and other political offices multiple times, and working for SNCC, she and her family were destitute. One of her daughters died after being weakened by severe malnutrition in 1968. Another daughter was hit by a car in retaliation for her mother's work on voting rights, she was refused admittance to a hospital and died. Fannie Lou Hamer herself died of breast cancer in 1977 when she was only 59.

Fannie Lou Hamer's work to force the national Democratic party to change southern segregated primaries and her work creating an alternative political party in Mississippi changed politics across the country. She may not be the best-known civil rights figure, but the work she did was done in only a nine-year time period.