Books, films and plays about Fannie Lou Hamer

Where can I read her own words?

Start with The Speeches of Fannie Lou Hamer: To Tell It Like It Is, edited by Maegan Parker Brooks and Davis W. Houck and published by the University Press of Mississippi in 2011. It collects speeches and testimony from the 1960s and 1970s, including the 1964 Credentials Committee testimony, with notes on when and where she spoke. Brooks also wrote A Voice That Could Stir an Army: Fannie Lou Hamer and the Rhetoric of the Black Freedom Movement (2014), a study of how Hamer spoke. Hamer's short autobiography, To Praise Our Bridges (1967), is hard to find but held by some libraries.

Which biographies should I read?

The two standard full biographies are Kay Mills, This Little Light of Mine: The Life of Fannie Lou Hamer (1993), and Chana Kai Lee, For Freedom's Sake: The Life of Fannie Lou Hamer (1999). Mills, a journalist, interviewed many people who knew Hamer. Lee, a historian, looks closely at Hamer's health, family and the costs of her activism. Keisha N. Blain's Until I Am Free: Fannie Lou Hamer's Enduring Message to America (2021) reads Hamer as a political thinker. For the Freedom Farm, see Monica M. White, Freedom Farmers (2018).

What are good books for children?

June Jordan's Fannie Lou Hamer (1972), written while Hamer was alive, and Carole Boston Weatherford's Voice of Freedom: Fannie Lou Hamer, Spirit of the Civil Rights Movement (2015), illustrated by Ekua Holmes, are both widely used in schools. Weatherford's book, told in verse, received a Caldecott Honor for its illustrations.

What films and plays are there?

The documentary Fannie Lou Hamer's America (2022), directed by Joy Davenport, is built entirely from archival recordings of Hamer speaking and singing. The Mississippi Free Press reports that it grew from Davenport's research at Florida State University and an idea by Hamer's great-niece Monica Land, and that it opened the tenth season of PBS's America ReFramed in February 2022. Wikipedia lists a stage play, Fannie, by Cheryl L. West, produced in 2022.

What music honors her?

Gil Scott-Heron and Brian Jackson's 1977 song "95 South (All of the Places We've Been)" was written in her honor, and freedom songs she led are on Smithsonian Folkways recordings. See freedom songs.

Why is this page called angelou.html?

This address was used by an earlier site on this domain. We kept it so links still work. Our page on the poet Maya Angelou's own civil rights work is at maya_angelou.html.