The Twisting Course of Freedom in the Mississippi Delta

Fanny Lou Hamer and Senator James Eastland appear to be the perfect historical foils for each other. The granddaughter of slaves, Hamer was born in 1917 into poverty on a cotton plantation in Sunflower County, Mississippi. She became, however, one of the most remarkable women of the black freedom struggle, toiling for the political rights and economic uplift for her fellow black citizens throughout the 1960s and 1970s. Eastland, on the other hand, inherited his father's large and profitable cotton plantation, also in Sunflower County. In 1943, at the age of thirty-nine, he was elected to the U.S. Senate, where for thirty-five years he fostered a reputation as a forceful anti-Communist and staunch segregationist.

Chris Asch weaves together the stories of these two formidable figures in this compelling narrative, tracing their histories across the social landscape of the twentieth century. Yet Asch is not interested in simply providing paired biographies; rather he sees Hamer and Eastland's stories as deeply rooted in the history of an actual landscape, in the scorching sun and flat, sprawling fields of the Mississippi Delta. Sunflower County lies in the heart of the Delta, a place that James Cobb has called "the most southern place on earth" because of the ways in which it embodied the 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 the "epicenter of the 20^th century struggle for and against black freedom" in this country, a struggle that the biographies of Hamer and Eastland "crystallize" (p. 4).

Asch has his own roots in Sunflower County, where he moved in the 1990s to teach elementary school and where, inspired by the freedom schools of the Civil Rights era, he co-founded the Sunflower County Freedom Project, an education nonprofit organization that provides mentorship and leadership training for local students. He begins and ends his book with a paean to the physical beauty and cultural splendor of this place, but also a lament for the poverty and racial segregation that still envelope it. Ultimately, Ashe uses the stories of Hamer and Eastland to understand the Sunflower County of the present, to comprehend the economic stagnation that African American residents still face today and to make sense of the unspoken rules that continue to govern racial interactions in the twenty-first century. How could Sunflower County have been "ground central" for the black freedom struggle and yet remain so mired in economic despair and entrenched racism today? That question runs beneath Asch's absorbing narrative.

Hamer has been the subject of a number of biographies, many of them hagiographic.² Asch is careful not to heroicize her, however—a difficult task since Hamer was known for her charisma and fortitude. At the time the black freedom struggle entered the Delta in 1961, Hamer was working as a timekeeper on a plantation. The trajectory of her life changed when, in the summer of 1962, she attended a meeting of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and soon after attempted to register to vote. For that, she was fired from her position and evicted from her home, a chain of events that allowed her to dedicate her life to the movement. She became central to the efforts of Freedom Summer and helped found the Mississippi Democratic Freedom Party, which challenged the legality of the state's all-white Democratic Party.

Hamer has stood as an iconic figure in histories of the movement because in many ways she epitomized its goals as a grassroots struggle, in which change should happen from the bottom up, rooted in community-based action, involving local actors, and attentive to the particulars of local circumstances. Much of the historiography on the movement in...