The Senator and the Sharecropper

In his non-fiction book The Senator and the Sharecropper: The Freedom Struggles of James O. Eastland and Fannie Lou Hamer (2008), American author and historian Chris Myers Asch tells the stories of two twentieth-century figures raised within a few miles of one another in a backwoods Mississippi county, who went on to face each another in the fight for equal rights for African Americans. The first, James O. Eastland, a U.S. Senator and a symbol of Southern segregation, led a broad movement to deny black Americans equal rights. Meanwhile, Fannie Lou Hamer, a civil rights activist fighting on behalf of women and black Americans, co-founded or helped to organize a number of important movements in the 1960s and 70s, including the Freedom Summer initiative of 1964. At her memorial service, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Andrew Young said that Hamer "shook the foundations of the nation."

Born in Doddsville, Mississippi in 1904, James O. Eastland grew up on a cotton farm owned by his father, Woods Caperton Eastland, a lawyer and an active participant in Democratic Party politics. While slavery had long been abolished and many of the farm practices had been mechanized, the farm still employed a number of poor African Americans, mostly as sharecroppers. After attending the local segregated schools in Scott County, Mississippi, Eastland attended the University of Mississippi, Vanderbilt University, and the University of Alabama before learning the law from his father. After passing the bar and completing a stint as a Democratic member of the Mississippi House of Representatives, Eastland took over operations of his father's plantation in Sunflower County.

When Fannie Lou Hamer was just two years old, her family relocated to Sunflower County just a few miles away from the Eastland family farm. Hamer was the youngest of twenty children born to a family of desperately poor sharecroppers. Her parents and older siblings all worked on a cotton plantation belonging to W.D. Marlow, and when Hamer turned six, she too began picking cotton. During winter off-seasons, children of sharecroppers were permitted to attend a one-room school until the planting season began in the spring. Despite the fact that Hamer excelled as a student, she was forced to drop out at the age of twelve to help care for her parents who had already reached old age. She continued to work on the plantation into adulthood, picking 300 pounds of cotton a day until, at the age of twenty-seven, the plantation owner discovered she could read. At that point, she was assigned more administrative duties that were easier on her body, particularly her leg, which had been disfigured by polio during her youth.



Around that time, the governor of Mississippi appointed Eastland to the U.S. Senate as a Democrat following the death of a current Senator. After enjoying a relatively productive relationship with President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Eastland came into conflict with President Harry S. Truman who took a special interest in promoting the civil rights of African-Americans. As early as World War II, Eastland made it known that he believed black Americans were inferior to whites. After vocalizing his opposition to black soldiers serving in World War II, he went so far as to say that the white soldiers who went abroad to fight the Axis Powers "were fighting to maintain white supremacy." After Truman's address to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Eastland decried Truman on the floor of Congress, accusing the President of seeking to destroy the culture of the South "under the guise of another civil-rights bill."

Throughout the 1950s, Hamer attended civil rights conferences. However, her direct involvement in the broader movement began in 1962 when she accompanied other activists to register to vote. After being turned away for failing a registration test designed to keep African-Americans from voting, Hamer suffered swift retribution for her attempt to fulfill her civic duty. Fired from her job at the plantation, Hamer was later shot at by white supremacists and forced out of her county by the Ku Klux Klan. The following year, Hamer attended a conference held by the Southern Poverty Law Center where she was arrested and beaten with a baton by inmates who were instructed by the police to do so. Due to the beating, Hamer suffered permanent kidney damage.

Determined not to back down to white supremacists, Hamer co-founded the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party as an alternative to the oppressive all-white "Dixiecrats" that dominated politics in much of the Deep South. At the 1964 Democratic National Convention, Hamer delivered an impassioned address that was televised across most major networks. In it, she said:
"All of this is on account we want to register, to become first-class citizens, and if the Freedom Democratic Party is not seated now, I question America. Is this America, the land of the free and the home of the brave, where we have to sleep with our telephones off the hooks because our lives are threatened daily because we want to live as decent human beings in America?"



While Hamer was giving passionate speeches on behalf of equal rights, Eastland was doing everything in his power to stymie efforts like hers. In addition to his vocal opposition to the Brown v Board of Education ruling on desegregating schools and his fierce antipathy toward the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Eastland remained committed to excluding black Americans from voting. Later, he tried unsuccessfully to block the appointment of Thurgood Marshall, a black man, to the Supreme Court.

Through these two individuals' stories, The Senator and the Sharecropper tells a vivid and frequently infuriating tale of how people like Hamer dragged the Deep South kicking and screaming into a more equitable era, despite the long-held prejudices of people like Eastland.