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

“The only thing they could do to me was to kill me,” she later said in an interview, “and it seemed like they’d been trying to do that a little bit at a time ever since I could remember.

dual rhetorical purpose.

The light Hamer began to shine when she walked out of the mass meeting on August 27, 1962, illuminated the way for millions of people, from all walks of life, in the decades to follow.

Above all, she taught me the importance of using my voice as a Black woman in America to call out injustice wherever I see it. Her story and the lessons she taught through her words and example provide a model for how I approach the ongoing fight for human rights.

We hadn’t heard anything about registering to vote, because when you see this flat land in here, when the people would get out of the fields if they had a radio, they’d be too tired to play it. So we didn’t know what was going on in the rest of the state, even, much less in other places.”73

“We want ours and we want ours now. I question sometime, actually, has any

Hamer’s political vision, the most effective leaders emerged from the same local space in which they sought to organize. Though she valued the contributions

Born in Mississippi on October 6,

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