Chana Kai Lee is an associate professor of history and women's studies at the University of Georgia.
Winner of the Willie Lee Rose Prize, Southern Association of Women
Historians, 1998. Winner of the Letitia Woods Brown
Prize.
"Emerging from the lowliest rungs of Mississippi's segregated
world, Fannie Lou Hamer became an icon of black protest during the
1960s. . . . This book will win recognition for ably showing Hamer
as a warrior at once valiant and vulnerable."--Robert
Weisbrot, American Historical Review
"Far more prominent in the historical record than in the history
books, black women in the post-World War II freedom movements are
the subject of exciting recent scholarship. Lee's portrait of Fanny
Lou Hamer stands among the best of those works. . . . This is the
best book on a crucially important subject."--Timothy B.
Tyson, Journal of American History
"Lee's biography is less committed to exploring Hamer's personal
life than to charting her growth as an activist and examining the
profound impact of gender, sexuality, violence and poverty on the
early civil rights movement. . . . Vividly brings to light a
crucial aspect of the civil rights movement that until now has not
been given its due."--Publishers Weekly
"Chana Kai Lee's accessible, elegant, and comprehensively
researched biography of Fannie Lou Hamer reminds us that even
cataclysmic changes in social relations start with the experiences,
aspirations, and imagination of ordinary people. An unknown
plantation field hand and timekeeper until her forties, Mrs. Hamer
emerged as the quintessential rank and file activist and grassroots
leader of the Mississippi Freedom Movement. Lee shows how the civil
rights movement was not just a battle to end segregation, but
rather functioned as a broad based battle against poverty,
illiteracy, economic exploitation, and all forms of dehumanization
and oppression. More than any other individual, Fannie Lou Hamer
embodied the extraordinary changes provoked in U.S. society by the
civil rights movement of the 1960s. In Chana Kai Lee, she has found
a biographer worthy of her story."--George Lipsitz, author
of A Rainbow at Midnight: Labor and Culture in the 1940s
"Chana Kai Lee has written a remarkable biography of a remarkable
woman. Of all the local people who guided and sustained the civil
rights movement in reshaping the South and America during the
second half of the twentieth century, Fannie Lou Hamer stands at
the top. . . . Lee has given us a brilliantly textured portrait of
the public and private life of a wife, mother, civil rights
organizer, and mentor to young people struggling for freedom. For
Freedom's Sake provides a truthful and sensitive portrait of a
poor, southern black woman who transformed herself and countless
others, while at the same time experiencing intense personal
disappointment and pain. Not merely a story of one woman's triumph
and tragedy, Lee's revealing book presents a moving and perceptive
study of the human condition."--Steven F. Lawson, author
of Running for Freedom: Civil Rights and Black Politics in
America since 1941
"An extremely valuable addition to the historiography of the civil
rights movement."—John Dittmer, author of Local People: The
Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi
"Enlightening, moving, and inspirational."--Beverly Guy-Sheftall,
author of Daughters of Sorrow: Attitudes toward Black Women,
1880-1920
Winner of the Willie Lee Rose Prize, Southern Association of Women
Historians, 1998. Winner of the Letitia Woods Brown Prize.
"Emerging from the lowliest rungs of Mississippi's segregated
world, Fannie Lou Hamer became an icon of black protest during the
1960s. . . . This book will win recognition for ably showing Hamer
as a warrior at once valiant and vulnerable."--Robert Weisbrot,
American Historical Review
"Far more prominent in the historical record than in the history
books, black women in the post-World War II freedom movements are
the subject of exciting recent scholarship. Lee's portrait of Fanny
Lou Hamer stands among the best of those works. . . . This is the
best book on a crucially important subject."--Timothy B. Tyson,
Journal of American History
"Lee's biography is less committed to exploring Hamer's personal
life than to charting her growth as an activist and examining the
profound impact of gender, sexuality, violence and poverty on the
early civil rights movement. . . . Vividly brings to light a
crucial aspect of the civil rights movement that until now has not
been given its due."--Publishers Weekly
"Chana Kai Lee's accessible, elegant, and comprehensively
researched biography of Fannie Lou Hamer reminds us that even
cataclysmic changes in social relations start with the experiences,
aspirations, and imagination of ordinary people. An unknown
plantation field hand and timekeeper until her forties, Mrs. Hamer
emerged as the quintessential rank and file activist and grassroots
leader of the Mississippi Freedom Movement. Lee shows how the civil
rights movement was not just a battle to end segregation, but
rather functioned as a broad based battle against poverty,
illiteracy, economic exploitation, and all forms of dehumanization
and oppression. More than any other individual, Fannie Lou Hamer
embodied the extraordinary changes provoked in U.S. society by the
civil rights movement of the 1960s. In Chana Kai Lee, she has found
a biographer worthy of her story."--George Lipsitz, author of A
Rainbow at Midnight: Labor and Culture in the 1940s
"Chana Kai Lee has written a remarkable biography of a remarkable
woman. Of all the local people who guided and sustained the civil
rights movement in reshaping the South and America during the
second half of the twentieth century, Fannie Lou Hamer stands at
the top. . . . Lee has given us a brilliantly textured portrait of
the public and private life of a wife, mother, civil rights
organizer, and mentor to young people struggling for freedom. For
Freedom's Sake provides a truthful and sensitive portrait of a
poor, southern black woman who transformed herself and countless
others, while at the same time experiencing intense personal
disappointment and pain. Not merely a story of one woman's triumph
and tragedy, Lee's revealing book presents a moving and perceptive
study of the human condition."--Steven F. Lawson, author of
Running for Freedom: Civil Rights and Black Politics in America
since 1941
"An extremely valuable addition to the historiography of the civil
rights movement."-John Dittmer, author of Local People: The
Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi
"Enlightening, moving, and inspirational."--Beverly Guy-Sheftall,
author of Daughters of Sorrow: Attitudes toward Black Women,
1880-1920
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