Monroe Dispatch - No Struggle, No Progress

In the summer of 2002, I picked up the book, This Little Life of Mine, a biography of Mrs. Fannie Lou Hamer (1917-1977).

At the time, I was entering my sophomore year at Wossman High School, and I had reached a point in life where I longed for more education on things that I thought were important. As I searched my parents' library, I eventually found Hamer’s book.

Author Kay Mills shared many horrific and sad stories of Hamer’s life. Hamer rose from picking cotton for a sharecropped farm to become a leader in the fight for Blacks' voting rights. From being tormented by Whites as a chi...