![]() ![]() ![]() And throughout her life, she sang praises in church, inspirational spirituals in planning meetings, freedom songs at protest rallies, and sorrow songs in jail cells.īiographer and historian Kate Clifford Larson chronicles the struggle of those who stayed behind when millions of Black Americans moved north and west during the Great Migration to find work and escape “racial terrorism.” The youngest of twenty children, Hamer remained to help her aging father and ailing mother as they eked out a living in the “oppressive and brutal” existence of the Mississippi Delta. When she left school at age twelve, she chanted work songs to keep pace as she picked cotton with her sharecropping family. Hamer sang as a child to please her part-time preacher father. ![]() ![]() I knew about Hamer’s remarkable life fighting racism, sexism, and class subordination, but until I read this book I had never realized the force of her passion for singing. The Death and Life of Christian Hardcoreįannie Lou Hamer often sang a spiritual that implores: “While I’m on this tedious journey, I want Jesus to walk with me.” As the title of her biography implies, Hamer’s life was a song inviting those seeking equality to join her in direct action for change. ![]()
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