The Twisting Course of Freedom in the Mississippi Delta

Abstract

Fanny Lou Hamer and Senator James Eastland appear to be perfect historical foils for each other. The granddaughter of slaves, Hamer was born in 1917 into poverty on a cotton plantation in Sunflower County, Mississippl. She became, however, one of most remarkable women of black struggle, toiling for political rights and economic uplift for her fellow black citizens throughout 1960s and 1970s. Eastland, on other hand, inherited his father's large and profitable cotton plantation, also in Sunflower County. In 1943, at age of thirty-nine, he was elected to U.S. Senate, where for thirty-five years he fostered a reputation as a forceful anti-Communist and staunch segregationist. Chris Asch weaves together stories of these two formidable figures in this compelling narrative, tracing their histories across social landscape of twentieth century. Yet Asch is not interested in simply providing paired biographies; rather he sees Hamer and Eastland' s stories as deeply rooted in history of an actual landscape, in scorching sun and flat, sprawling fields of Mississippi Delta. Sunflower County lies in heart of Delta, a place that James Cobb has called the most southern place on earth because of ways in which it embodied extremes of Southern life: overwhelming poverty and almost archaic plantation affluence; brutal racial oppression and breathtaking cultural richness.1 Eastland and Hamer personify these extremes and can help make sense of them. More particularly, Asch sees Sunflower County at epicenter of 20th century struggle for and against black freedom in this country, a struggle that biographies of Hamer and Eastland crystallize (p. 4). Asch has his own roots in Sunflower County, where he moved in 1990s to teach elementary school and where, inspired by schools of Civil Rights era, he co-founded Sunflower County Freedom Project, an education nonprofit organization that provides mentorship and leadership training