Christopher Asch (2008) appears to have transformed a doctoral dissertation comparing the views and experiences of two famous Mississippi figures from the civil rights movement era into a full length nonfiction text. This is Asch's first published book. It is clear from his introduction that the book was written in order to provide a contrast between the lived experiences of an affluent, powerful, white Southern male (Senator James O. Eastland) and a poor, barely educated civil rights female activist (Fannie Lou Hamer) who was his neighbor in Sunflower County, Mississippi.
As Asch (2008) points out, it would be difficult to find a pair of Mississippians more diametrically opposed to one another. Whereas Eastland as a long time member of the U.S. Senate and a devout white supremacist resisted all efforts to end segregation, Hamer was equally active in the struggle to bring about true equality for all Americans. Asch (2008) traces the lives of these two individuals using flashback techniques as well as interviews to describe the critical differences between Eastland's world and that of Hamer. Eastland was a child of privilege who gained great power in America. Hamer was the child of sharecroppers who began picking cotton when she was only six years old. Where Eastland was well fed, Hamer was often hungry. The contrast between these two well known Mississippi residents is used by Asch (2008) to depict a polarized society led by a small handful of elites who used money, power, law, and tradition to ensure the continued oppression of black Americans.
Anyone reading this book will be aware that Asch (2008) is far more sympathetic to Hamer than to Eastland. Asch (2008) documents the activities of Eastland while he was a member of the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee to harass individuals and organizations that he suspected of being aligned with the Communist Party. In revealing that Eastland's father was the lead...