Mississippi Library Association

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

Asch, Christopher Myers. The Senator and the Sharecropper: The Freedom Struggles of James O. Eastland and Fannie Lou Hamer.
New York: New Press, 2008.
368 pp. $27.95 (hardcover)

It is clear from Asch’s introduction that this book was written to provide a contrast between the life experiences of an affluent, powerful, white Southern male (Senator James O. Eastland) and a poor, barely educated, female, civil rights activist (Fannie Lou Hamer) who was his neighbor in Sunflower County, Mississippi.
As Asch points out, it would be difficult to find a pair of Mississippians more diametrically opposed to one another. Whereas Eastland, as a long time member of the U.S. Senate and a devout white supremacist, resisted all efforts to end segregation, Hamer was equally active in the struggle to bring about true equality for all Americans. Asch traces the lives of these two individuals using flashback techniques and interviews to describe the critical differences between Eastland’s world and that of Hamer. The contrast between these two well-known Mississippi residents is used by Asch to depict a polarized society led by a small handful of elites who used money, power, law, and tradition to ensure the continued oppression of black Americans.
This is an interesting book, which can inform contemporary readers about the challenges that were overcome in the Deep South as a consequence of the work of people like Hamer and despite the opposition of men like Eastland. It is an extremely well researched and documented text. This is also one of its slight drawbacks, because at times it reads more like the doctoral dissertation it once was than a work of historical commentary. Asch is, at times, didactic and uses his text to make an argument against the kind of social system that created Eastland and Hamer. His political convictions shine through this book. The book ends with Hamer’s death in 1977 and Eastland’s in 1986. It covers almost three quarters of a century of Mississippi history during a period when great social change was occurring. Eastland fought desperately against that change and, for a time, succeeded in preventing it from occurring. However, it is Hamer as depicted by Asch who emerges as the true heroic center of this era. This title is recommended for public and academic libraries.

William Bahr
Assistant Director
Pike-Amite-Walthall Library System

Entry Filed under: Book Reviews
Posted on: October 1st, 2008