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| Author | Carole Boston Weatherford |
|---|---|
| Illustrator | Ekua Holmes |
| Publisher | Candlewick Press |
Publication date | August 4, 2015 |
| ISBN | 978-0-76-366531-9 |
Voice of Freedom: Fannie Lou Hamer, The Spirit of the Civil Rights Movement is a 2015 non-fiction and poetic children's book by written by Carole Boston Weatherford and illustrated by Ekua Holmes.
The book discusses the life of American civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer (1917–1977). Hamer was born to sharecropper parents in Mississippi, the youngest of 20 children. Although her mother taught her to read, Hamer began working in the cotton fields at age six and dropped out of school at age 12. She later married a sharecropper, and when she learned she could vote, she registered immediately. However, she soon learned about the unfair circumstances surrounding voting in the United States during the Jim Crow era, which led her to advocate for voting rights for African Americans along many others, including the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. In addition to her activism, Hamer had a full life in which she cared for her aging mother, married, and had children, although she was also forcibly sterilized and otherwise brutalized.
Voice of Freedom was well-received by critics and landed on many "best of" lists. It won the 2016 John Steptoe New Talent Illustrator Award was named an honor book for the 2016 Boston Globe–Horn Book Award, Caldecott Medal, and Sibert Medal.