Larson skillfully explains the complex political maneuverings that under-cut the MFDP in 1964 but shows how early failure laid a foundation for greater success in 1968, ultimately feeding into a major party realignment that she alternately celebrates and laments. Over and over again, she told her story, sharing excruciating details with the world when she testified on behalf of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) at the Democratic National Convention (DNC) in 1964. The brutal beatings she endured after being arrested for attempting to integrate a segregated bus depot in Winona, Mississippi, left her emotionally scarred and physically maimed but more determined than ever. Threats of violence, acts of actual violence, and injuries resulting from violence shadowed the rest of Hamer’s life.

It was to this experience-her “Mississippi appendectomy”-that Larson traces Hamer’s enraged political awakening, which Hamer enacted first through working with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, in the 1950s, and later with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and the Council of Federated Organizations (p. And like so many Black women in the rural South, Hamer found that she had been sterilized without her consent after seeking gyneco-logical care.

But like so many Black children in the rural South, Hamer came up poor and left elementary school for field work.

Hamer’s mother, Ella Townsend, set an example for her daughter that prioritized faith in God, pride and self-respect, storytelling and education, and protection of her family-by gun if necessary. But even as Larson chronicles Hamer’s improbable trajectory, she emphasizes Hamer’s ordinariness as one of countless women whose grassroots organizing and everyday leadership made the civil rights movement in Mississippi. Kate Clifford Larson’s Walk with Me: A Biography of Fannie Lou Hamer joins this wave of recent biographical attention to the inimitable civil rights leader, songstress, and maker of what fellow activist John Lewis called “good trouble.” The book opens with Hamer’s inauspicious beginnings as the twentieth child of tenant farmers in order to highlight the unlikelihood of her later rise to local and national prominence. More than forty years after it ended, Fannie Lou Hamer’s remarkable life is being rediscovered by scholars and filmmakers.

Walk with Me by Kate Clifford Larson