Fannie Lou Hamer was born the 20th child in a family that had lived in the Mississippi Delta for generations, first as enslaved people and then as sharecroppers. She left school at 12 to pick cotton, as those before her had done, in a world in which white supremacy was an unassailable citadel. She was subjected without her consent to an operation that deprived her of children. And she was denied the most basic of all rights in America—the right to cast a ballot—in a state in which Blacks constituted nearly half the population.
And so, Fannie Lou Hamer lifted up her voice. Starting in the early 1960s and until her death in 1977, she was an irresistible force, not merely joining the swelling wave of change brought by civil rights but keeping it in motion.
In this program, featuring Larson’s Walk with Me: A Biography of Fannie Lou Hamer, she delves deep into the issues with which Fannie Lou Hamer wrestled—discrimination, poverty and disenfranchisement. She will share how Fannie's mission and life's work lives on in voting rights and registration campaigns, anti- racism and Black Lives Matter marches, the #MeToo movement, anti-poverty activism and justice reform.
Kate Clifford Larson is an American historian and Harriet Tubman scholar. Her 2003 biography of Harriet Tubman, Bound for the Promised Land was one of the first non-juvenile Tubman biographies published in six decades. Larson is the consultant for the Harriet Tubman Special Resource Study of the National Park Service and serves on the advisory board of the Historic Context on the Underground Railroad in Delaware, Underground Railroad Coalition of Delaware.
Larson is also the author of Rosemary: The Hidden Kennedy Daughter, about Rosemary Kennedy, the disabled sister of President John F. Kennedy. [Houghton, Mifflin, Harcourt October 2015.]
This is a virtual event. Zoom link will be sent the day before.
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Author & Historian Kate Larson Clifford.