Until I Am Free: Fannie Lou Hamer’s Enduring Message to America

Blain (history, Univ. of Pittsburgh; Set the World on Fire; Four Hundred Souls) blends biography with intellectual history to discuss Fannie Lou Hamer (1917–77), her instrumental civil rights activism, and her influence which resounds in the 21st century. Hamer was a grassroots organizer who came from a sharecropping background in Mississippi. Her main civil rights concerns were voter suppression and police brutality—the same battles being fought by contemporary Black Lives Matter activists. Blain uses extensive primary sources (including excerpts from Hamer’s speeches, and accounts of her experiences of sexual assault and medical trauma) to illustrate how Hamer “turned her pain into political action.” Blain effectively conveys the racism and sexism Hamer faced in her fight for equality and liberation and shows how it impacted her relationships to both the civil rights movement and the women’s liberation movement; she also establishes the modernity and contemporary relevance of Hamer’s proto-intersectional politics (Kimberlé Crenshaw would coin “intersectionality” in 1989).