Content area
Full Text
For Freedom's Sake: The Life of Fannie Lou Hamer. By Chana Kai Lee. Women in American History. (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, c. 1999. Pp. xviii, 255. $29.95, ISBN 0-252-02151-7.)
Fannie Lou Hamer, like other leading African American women of her time, became an activist who demanded that America's promise of democracy include all its citizens. Chana Kai Lee's book, then, is appropriately entitled For Freedom's Sake, and it chronicles Hamer's role in 1960s activism and resistance to racial oppression and discrimination.
Born Fannie Lou Townsend on October 6, 1917, she began working in the fields at the age of six and spent many years chopping and picking cotton. In the mid- 1940s she became the time and record keeper for W. D. Marlow and soon thereafter married Perry Hamer, a tractor driver on the Marlow plantation. For the next eighteen years, Fannie Lou Hamer worked as sharecropper and timekeeper on the plantation four miles east of Ruleville, Mississippi. All this changed on August 31, 1962, when she suffered economic reprisal after an unsuccessful attempt to become a registered voter in Indianola, the county seat. Marlow appeared...