Rhythmic Style

Augusta Fells Savage by Erin K. Robinson

Fannie Lou Hamer by  Erin K. Robinson

 (1914-1977) Civil Rights Leader

Fannie Lou Hamer, a Mississippi sharecropper, changed this nation's perspective on democracy. She worked for political, social, and economic equality for herself and all black Americans. She fought to integrate the national Democratic Party and became one of the first Black delegates to a presidential convention.

She was also the youngest among 20 children and started field-work when she was only six years old.

She had a walking disability because of polio and had an eye blood clot after she was severely beaten by the police in a Mississippi jail when she was arrested, along with five other people, for trying to register to vote.

Most of her life she worked as a sharecropper or cotton picking where she also met her husband.

She was fired as a sharecropper when she tried to register to vote and spearhead voting drives as a co-founder of the Mississippi Freedom Society. 

She underwent surgery to remove a uterine tumour and woke up to find she had been given a hysterectomy without her consent.

Billie Holiday - The Fragile Bloom That Sang of Shadows by Mika Orr

While Billie Holiday's official cause of death was pulmonary edema and heart failure caused by cirrhosis of the liver, many historians and biographers argue she was effectively "driven to death" or "murdered" by the state through relentless harassment by federal agents.