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  • Voice of Freedom: Fannie Lou Hamer: Spirit of the Civil Rights Movement by Carole Boston Weatherford
  • Elizabeth Bush
Weatherford, Carole Boston Voice of Freedom: Fannie Lou Hamer: Spirit of the Civil Rights Movement; illus. by Ekua Holmes. Candlewick, 2015 45p
ISBN 978-0-7636-6531-9 $17.99 R Gr. 4-7

Twenty-two poems in first-person voice trace the life of civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer, from her childhood in a Mississippi sharecropping family (“doggone, dirt-poor doing-without”), through her initial involvement in voting rights (volunteering to register), and on to dangerous anti-segregation efforts with SNCC (arrested and beaten after approaching a whites-only lunch counter) and her runs for political office. Cited quotations are interlaced throughout the ragged right edge text, adding authenticity to the created voice. Holmes’ mixed-media collages are varied and effective: cotton sacks running like tears and sweat down rows in a sharecrop farm; delicate lace curtains backlit in a bullet-pocked wall as a shadowy [End Page 172] pickup truck filled with white vigilantes crosses by; Hamer’s black and white image filling a television screen in a broadcast of the 1964 Democratic Convention. Consider this not only as an accessible biography but also as a piece for solo or duet performance. An author’s note, timeline, source notes, and bibliography are included.

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