by Keisha N. Blain
Beacon Press
10/4/2022, paperback
SKU: 9780807007259
Explores the Black activist's ideas and political strategies, highlighting their relevance for tackling modern social issues including voter suppression, police violence, and economic inequality.
"We have a long fight and this fight is not mine alone, but you are not free whether you are white or black, until I am free."
-- Fannie Lou Hamer
A blend of social commentary, biography, and intellectual history, Until I Am Free is a manifesto for anyone committed to social justice. The book challenges us to listen to a working-poor and disabled Black woman activist and intellectual of the civil rights movement as we grapple with contemporary concerns around race, inequality, and social justice.
Award-winning historian and New York Times best-selling author Keisha N. Blain situates Fannie Lou Hamer as a key political thinker alongside leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, and Rosa Parks and demonstrates how her ideas remain salient for a new generation of activists committed to dismantling systems of oppression in the United States and across the globe.
Despite her limited material resources and the myriad challenges she endured as a Black woman living in poverty in Mississippi, Hamer committed herself to making a difference in the lives of others. She refused to be sidelined in the movement and refused to be intimidated by those of higher social status and with better jobs and education. In these pages, Hamer's words and ideas take center stage, allowing us all to hear the activist's voice and deeply engage her words, as though we had the privilege to sit right beside her.
More than 40 years since Hamer's death in 1977, her words still speak truth to power, laying bare the faults in American society and offering valuable insights on how we might yet continue the fight to help the nation live up to its core ideals of "equality and justice for all."
Includes a photo insert featuring Hamer at civil rights marches, participating in the Democratic National Convention, testifying before Congress, and more.
Reviews:
"[A] riveting and timely exploration of Hamer's life... Brilliantly constructed to be both forward and backward looking, Blain's book functions simultaneously as a much needed history lesson and an indispensable guide for modern activists." -- New York Times Book Review
"Keisha Blain's magnificent Until I Am Free introduces us to Hamer the political thinker, the strategist and theorist, the internationalist whose expansive vision of freedom embraced the oppressed everywhere. A pathbreaking contribution to our history and a precious guide for today's activists fighting for the world Hamer envisioned." -- Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination
"Keisha Blain brings Fannie Lou Hamer and her fight for liberation to life in the exhilarating Until I Am Free. Alight with curiosity and passion, Blain's view of Hamer is both intimate and political, exquisitely sensitive to the challenges faced by a Black woman sharecropper whose body was too often the site of white supremacist, misogynist violence, and whose revolutionary story has too rarely been framed as such. Until I Am Free corrects that omission and will be an invaluable resource for generations to come." -- Rebecca Traister, author of Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women's Anger
About the Author:
Keisha N. Blain is a historian of the 20th-century United States specializing in African American history, the modern African diaspora, and women's and gender studies. She is the author of the multi-prize-winning book Set the World on Fire and co-editor, with Ibram X. Kendi, of the #1 New York Times bestseller Four Hundred Souls. She is an associate professor of history at the University of Pittsburgh, president of the African American Intellectual History Society, and a columnist for MSNBC.