senatorsharecropper1.jpg[Please welcome author Chris Myers Asch in our comments today. -- DN]

In most regards, the story that Chris Myers Asch details in the riveting and remarkable The Senator and the Sharecropper: The Freedom Struggles of James O. Eastland and Fannie Lou Hamer is a tale of the South. Populated largely with African Americans fighting for their civil rights and racist whites fighting to keep them under their collective thumbs, from the outside it has all the trappings of a classic civil-rights-era story set in Dixie.

But in Asch’s capable hands, it becomes much more. Even though it is focused on a particular patch of land — Sunflower County, Mississippi — there is a universal American quality to the cultural landscape he describes, one in which economics and race collide and collude to create an institutionalized divide that leaves a cloud over us all. Sunflower County is a distinctly Southern place — cotton fields and swamps and small towns — but its social landscape is awfully familiar to all Americans, one in which racism is rarely given public expression but it still maintains its awful, silent grip on the community. And as Asch explains, this is not a healthy thing.

The book, as its title suggests, is focused on the lives of two people: James O. Eastland, the U.S. Senator from Mississippi who was raised in Sunflower County and who was one of the most ardent and effective advocates of white supremacy, Jim Crow, and segregation in the nation for much of the first half of the last century and well into its second half too; and Fannie Lou Hamer, the celebrated civil-rights activist who fought for black voting rights and was perhaps most famous for uttering the immortal line that she was "sick and tired of being sick and tired" — which also is the epitaph on her tombstone.

Through the lens of these two people’s lives, Asch gives flesh and blood to a story most of us know only from its bare bones: the struggle of Southern blacks, through decades of oppression, to gain the most fundamental civil rights, and to overcome the noxious effects of Jim Crow, segregation, and the terroristic thread of lynching that hung over the heads of every one of them. Hamer, not surprisingly, comes off as the heroine she genuinely is, but Asch is careful to portray her as the complicated person, warts and all, every historical figure is.

Eastland is a tougher row to hoe; Asch attempts to humanize the senator and does a reasonably good job of it, but in the end it’s impossible to overlook his essential monstrousness. The scion of a well-to-do Sunflower family — his father, as Asch recounts, led a lynch mob that killed four innocent black people as though they were insects en route to the horrific public torture/immolation/lynching of the two blacks responsible for the murder of his brother (for whom the senator-to-be was named) — Eastland was a vicious and unapologetic racist, capable of spewing the kind of bigoted hatred that is now the stuff of Southern cliche. Yet he was more effective than most other ardent segregationists in that he learned how to move up in the halls of power until he became one of America’s most powerful men. His longstanding animus to black civil rights played a significant role in how he shaped the nation’s court system as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee beginning in 1956 and continuing all the way through 1977. His legacy, in many regards, remains with us today.

For that matter, so do the essential undercurrents of how the civil-rights struggle played out. Because, as Asch explains, Sunflower County is outwardly as unsegregated as anywhere else in America — but it doesn’t take long to discover that the racial divide there is as deep as it ever has been. Some of this he lays at the feet of the continuing efforts of the white majority to (in classic Southern lexicon) "keep the niggers down", but some of it can also be fairly laid at the failures of everyone else to keep fighting the way Fannie Lou Hamer fought. The civil-rights legislation of the 1960s was a good start, but little has been done to effectively follow up on it — particularly to dismantle the institutional and economic pressures that were always part of the foundations of white supremacy in the first place.

As Asch writes:

The struggles in Sunflower County had been intense, sustained, and often violent, and they had transformed the area in ways that I could not grasp when I first arrived. And yet the culture of segregation, among both blacks and whites, and the economic advantages that white supremacy had bestowed upon Sunflower County whites remained firmly entrenched even in the late twentieth century.

In that respect, Sunflower County is very much like the rest of America in terms of its racial landscape — perhaps in a more intensely crystallized form, but present nonetheless. We need only look at the residential segregation, job discrimination, and continuing impoverishment of minorities that persists in every quarter of the country to recognize it. If you take the time to read The Senator and the Sharecropper – and it is a compelling, fast-moving read — you’ll recognize it too.