Sublime

“I had much rather starve in England, a free woman than be a slave for the best man that ever breathed upon the American continent.”

On television I caught glimpses of the heroes of the Black Power movement. Muhammad Ali, Stokley Carmichael and Yuri Kochiyama were all preaching about the condition of black people, and Angela Davis was still regarded as the most dangerous person in the USA.

As Hamer and her associates prepared to leave, they saw that police officers had surrounded the old school bus in which they had traveled to the courthouse. Hamer later described the scene in vivid detail: “By the time the eighteen of us going in two by two had finished taking the literacy test—now there’s people, mind you, there that day with guns

the age of forty-four, Hamer set out to let her light shine when she became a member of SNCC, working alongside many of the activists who had played such a pivotal role in her entrance into the civil rights movement.