I first heard Sweet Honey in the Rock’s rousing song, Fannie Lou Hamer, on a car radio a summer day in 1994 when Nelson Mandela addressed the United Nations General Assembly. The song and the moment were very powerful, but not as strong as Hamer’s own voice, raised in song or to protest conditions for Black Mississippians in the 1960s and 1970s.
Read MoreIf you don’t know much about Black history, or not as much as you’d like, all you have to do is watch two documentaries in February, Black History Month. Women with distinguished civil rights forebears made these both documentaries, and both films use innovative techniques.
Read MoreAdam Clayton Powell Jr., the tall, dapper congressman who represented Harlem, wanted to be sure the short, stout sharecropper from Mississippi in a borrowed dress understood how important and powerful he was.
“I know who you are,” Fannie Lou Hamer told him.