The Senator and the Sharecropper

In this fascinating study of race politics and economics in Mississippi Chris Myers Asch tells the story of two extraordinary personalities — Fannie Lou Hamer and James O. Eastland — who represented deeply opposed sides of the civil rights movement. Both were from Sunflower County: Eastland was a wealthy white planter and one of the most powerful segregationists in the U.S. Senate while Hamer a sharecropper who grew up desperately poor just a few miles from the Eastland plantation rose to become the spiritual leader of the Mississippi freedom struggle. Asch uses Hamer’s and Eastland’s entwined histories set against the backdrop of Sunflower County’s rise and fall as a center of cotton agriculture to explore the county’s changing social landscape during the mid-twentieth century and its persistence today as a land separate and unequal. Asch who spent nearly a decade in Mississippi as an educator offers a fresh look at the South’s troubled ties to the cotton industry the long struggle for civil rights and unrelenting social and economic injustice through the eyes of two of the era’s most important and intriguing figures.