The Senator and the Sharecropper: The Freedom Struggles of James O. Eastland and Fannie Lou Hamer - Hardcover

Asch, Chris Myers

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1595583327 ISBN 13: 9781595583321

Publisher: New Press, The, 2008

Synopsis

The epic struggle for black equality in the twentieth century, told through the deeply intertwined life histories of the staunch segregationist and his sharecropper nemesis.

Sunflower County, Mississippi, is a land of seeming contradictions. It boasts some of the world's richest soil, yet has produced widespread poverty that lingers to this day. It stood at the epicenter of the civil rights movement, yet still suffers from racial inequality. It has been on the forefront of globalization, yet continues to stagnate economically.

The Senator and the Sharecropper explores these paradoxes, telling the story of two larger-than-life personalities who epitomized the county's extremes: the senator, James O. Eastland, a wealthy white cotton planter who was one of the most powerful segregationists in the U.S. Senate, and the sharecropper, Fannie Lou Hamer, who grew up desperately poor just a few miles from the Eastland plantation and rose to become the spiritual leader of the Mississippi freedom struggle. Their intertwined histories-set against a backdrop of Sunflower County's rise and fall as a center of cotton agriculture-show how this isolated county weathered revolutionary changes in seemingly distant realms, from the global economy to the Cold War to national politics.

Although Sunflower County would be transformed during the tumultuous decades of the mid-twentieth century, it remained at century's end resiliently separate and unequal. Asch, who spent nearly a decade here as an educator, combines a scholar's attention to fact with an insider's love of the area to tell a maddening but compelling, discouraging yet inspirational story of change and continuity in a land few Americans understand.

About this title

Book Description:

"This elegant book yields fresh insight into the tumultuous decades of the 1950s and 1960s and sobering reflection on why segregation, poverty, and racial inequality continue to define life for many in Mississippi and beyond."--Patricia Sullivan, Emory University

From the Inside Flap:

Asch 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 Fannie Lou Hamer and James O. Eastland, two of the era's most important and intriguing figures.

About this edition

• Publisher: New Press, The
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 1595583327
• ISBN 13: 9781595583321
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 368