A plantation-owning senator and an impoverished farmer face off in
the Mississippi Delta.There is little doubt that the author is
deeply invested in Sunflower County, Miss., where he worked for
years as an educator and activist, but Asch may have stuffed too
much information about his adopted home into a single book. It not
only chronicles the life and work of Sunflower's most renowned
residents, longtime Senator James Eastland and civil-rights
activist Fannie Lou Hamer, but also the intricate details of the
Delta cotton industry and the origins of pioneer Dixie settlements.
The spotlight shines brightest on Eastland, scion of Sunflower's
most prestigious plantation family, who was elected to the Senate
in 1942 on the strength of his pro-cotton platform. When the Jim
Crow status quo was threatened, he found his voice as one of the
country's most devout white supremacists. Eastland eventually
landed the chairmanship of the Senate Judiciary Committee,
affording him significant power until his retirement in 1978, and
capably dispatched several key civil-rights bills. But back home in
Sunflower, he found a formidable opponent in Hamer, the youngest
child in a brood of 20 born to sharecropping farmers. After a
failed attempt at voter registration led to her arrest,
unemployment and indigence, Hamer joined the civil-rights movement.
She took on everyone from Democratic Party demagogues to Big
Cotton. However, remarks the author in closing, Sunflower County
today remains "resiliently separate and unequal." The book
sometimes suffers from Asch's overuse of his meticulous research:
Countless, often tangential quotations crowd lengthy passages of
pedantic exposition, slowing the narrative flow. Hamer doesn't make
much of an appearance until well into the book's second half - a
shame, as she's far more compelling than the exhaustive catalogue
of Eastland's policy work the author provides instead. However,
Asch has crafted an objective, engaging and authoritative portrait
of two polarizing figures.Eminently readable despite its narrow
academic lens. (Kirkus Reviews)
The story of two larger-than-life personalities from one humble
corner of the Missippi Delta: the senator, James O. Eastland, a
fabulously wealthy cotton planter and the sharecropper, Fannie Lou
Hamer, who grew up desperately poor a few miles from Eastland's
plantation. Asch charts the epic struggle for black equality in the
20th century by telling the story of the two deeply intertwined
life histories of the staunch segregationist senator and his
sharecropper nemesis.
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