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

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, ros...