Synopses & Reviews
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.
Synopsis
This elegant work intertwines the life histories of a staunch segregationist and his sharecropper nemesis as they come to confront each other on the national political stage at the height of the civil rights struggle. Illustrated.
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.The Senator and the Sharecropper is the story of two larger-than-life personalities from one humble corner of the Mississippi Delta: the senator, James O. Eastland, a fabulously wealthy cotton planter and one of the most powerful figures in the U.S. Senate, and the sharecropper, Fannie Lou Hamer, who grew up desperately poor a few miles from Eastland's plantation. During Eastland's long tenure as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, he ruthlessly and effectively bottled up civil rights legislation on Capitol Hill. From Hamer's lowly origins, she emerged as a spiritual leader of the civil rights movement that eventually toppled Eastlanda woman who "shook the foundations of the nation," in the words of Andrew Young.
The Senator and the Sharecropper tells how these two pivotal figures came to confront one another on the national political stage at the height of the civil rights struggle. Their intertwined historiesset against a backdrop of Sunflower County's rise and fall as a center of cotton agricultureoffer a powerful window onto the unraveling of Jim Crow during the upheavals of the 1960s and, in our own time, the persistence of profound inequality in the post-civil rights era.
About the Author
Chris Myers Asch taught elementary school in Sunflower, Mississippi, with Teach For America and later co-founded an academic enrichment program for teenagers, the Sunflower County Freedom Project. He is now working to build the U.S. Public Service Academy. A graduate of Duke University, he holds a PhD in American history from the University of North Carolina.