This Little Light Of Mine [Paperback]

Fannie Lou Hamer was a poorly educated woman who, like most of her contemporaries growing up in pre-Depression Mississippi and beyond, endured virtual apartheid for a good portion of her life. Voting rights were essentially unknown to African-Americans in the state, which was controlled for decades by opponents of civil rights locally and through the state's federal representatives, most notably James O. Eastland, a senator who consistently stalled civil rights legislation through his control of the Judiciary Committee.

Ms. Hamer was among the first African-Americans to challenge Mississippi's voting registration practices, which were designed to bar blacks from voting. For her troubles, she was arrested, detained in a small-town jail and beaten so severely that she sustained injuries that eventually shortened her life.

Mills paints a vivid picture of Ms. Hamer's indomitable spirit, which was symbolized by her powerful singing voice, frequently employed to boost the courage of her local comrades and of the black and white workers who came to Mississippi during the Freedom Summer of 1964 in an attempt to challenge the white supremacists who ran the state.

Nowhere does her spirit come through more clearly than in Mills' account of the 1964 challenge Hamer and others leveled at the Democratic delegation sent to the presidential convention in Atlantic City. The challengers persuasively claimed that they represented thousands of disenfranchised African-Americans who had been denied their right to participate in the political process. The Democratic presidential candidate, Lyndon Johnson, and his running mate, Hubert Humphrey, Mills recounts, dragged their feet on addressing the challengers' claims, only belatedly offering a weak compromise that Hamer and some others fiercely opposed.

"I question America," Hamer memorably said during hearings on her group's challenge of the white-only delegation. Mills is careful to explore the arguments and motivations of those within Hamer's delegation who argued in favor of accepting the compromise, but it is clear that her heart lies with Hamer's courageous stand.

In the end, the 1964 challenge failed, but in 1968 another challenge succeeded and Hamer was seated, along with others, at that year's presidential convention. The victory, which deserves special mention in American history, was tempered and largely forgotten due to the street violence for which the 1968 convention is now largely remembered.

Mills also does a fine job of relating Ms. Hamer's attention to the plight of the poor and her attempts to build political power for the impoverished. One gets a strong sense of the sacrifice that Hamer made to live a life committed to political struggle.

It is only when Mills attempts to summarize the major events of the civil rights movement that the book's strength flags. I found the first couple of chapters negligible because I'm familiar with the big events of the movement and frankly they've been done better elsewhere.

When she turns her attention to Ms. Hamer, however, Mills delivers a story worth telling in strong prose that reveals her admiration for her subject without sacrificing her critical judgment.