Book Alert / The Senator and the Sharecropper

The Senator and the Sharecropper: The Freedom Struggles of James O. Eastland & Fannie Lou Hamer by Chris Myers Asch, The New Press '08, $27.95, 368 pages, ISBN #1595583327. Index, source notes, no bibliography, grouping of b&w images.

Soon after he began teaching in Sunflower County, MS, Chris Myers Asch and his black students were playing catch on the front lawn of his rented house when "a petite, silver-haired white woman with a syrupy drawl" drew up in her Mercedes. The woman, who was also the town mayor, told Asch, "You know they're not supposed to be here. You're going to catch a lot of flak." His house, Asch soon found out, was on the "white folks part" of town, and by an unwritten rule, blacks were forbidden there unless they worked for a white family."

Within minutes, three men arrived on Asch's lawn, "screaming racial epithets as they charged at my students." The largest among them, who turned out to be the mayor's husband, growled, "I don't care  if they're good kids. I send my kids to Indianola Academy (an all-white private school nearby) to get away from those sons of bitches."

One might think Asch's anecdote was from the 1950s, when some of the most virulent racism in our history took place in Mississippi. In fact, it happened in 1994, long after the freedom marches, school sit-ins, voter registration projects, Supreme Court rulings and Congressional civil rights acts had supposedly paved the way for a race-blind society.

That Sunflower County remains segregated in many ways today is a theme of Asch's new book, in which he uses the lives of two iconic Mississippians -- Fannie Lou Hamer and Sen. James O. Eastland -- to describe how the state came to be as it is and the effect of governmental edicts and globalization upon its lifestyle and troubled economy. Hamer, who sprang from a dirt-poor childhood, became the spiritual leader of the Mississippi freedom struggle, while Eastland as a senator was one of the most resistant to social change.