Voice of Freedom: Fannie Lou Hamer, Spirit of the Civil Rights Movement

This nonfiction book tells Fannie Lou Hamer’s life in poems, using a first-person voice. It traces her path from working in Mississippi cotton fields as a child in a sharecropping family to becoming a civil rights activist and politician. The poems address her efforts to secure voting rights and political representation for African Americans in Mississippi and across the United States. Direct quotations from Hamer appear within the poems, and the book also includes an author’s note, a timeline, and source notes.