Sublime

Annie Bell Green Eady, although she gave herself the nickname Mammie and went by it her whole life. She was Nearest’s granddaughter.

Helene Wright was an impressive woman, at least in Medallion she was. Heavy hair in a bun, dark eyes arched in a perpetual query about other people’s manners. A woman who won all social battles with presence and a conviction of the legitimacy of her authority.

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.

In Sunflower County, where Hamer had been sterilized, at least 60 percent of the Black women experienced forced sterilizations following pregnancy.72 Deemed “unfit” to reproduce by white physicians and other state officials, Black women who entered hospitals for routine procedures ran the risk of

Even now, at seventeen—high school graduate, mistress of her fate, and a ten-dollar-a-week file clerk in the very Forty-seventh Street lawyer’s office where Helen was a fifteen-dollar-a-week typist—as she sat on Helen’s bed and watched Helen primp for a party, the memory hurt. There was no consolation in the thought that not now and not then would