By Chana Kai Lee. In this intimate biography, Chana Kai Lee documents Hamer's lifelong crusade to empower the poor through collective action, her rise to national prominence as a civil rights activist, and the personal costs of her ongoing struggle to win a political voice and economic self-sufficiency for blacks in the segregated South.. "Offering a complex understanding of how racism, sexism, violence, and economic injustice intersected to spur the civil rights movement and to shape, and sometimes restrict, the role of women and poor people within it, Lee illuminates the abiding links between political activism and economic transformation.. "The definitive biography of one of the most important civil rights activists of the twentieth century, For Freedom's Sake is also a moving social history of a critical epoch in American history. University of Illinois Press (2000), English, Paperback: 288 pages.