Book rec: The Senator and the Sharecropper
The Freedom Struggles of James O. Eastland and Fannie Lou Hamer
From the Shelf: Separate and Unequal
Book: The Senator and the Sharecropper
James O. Eastland was a powerful segregationist senator and plantation owner from Mississippi. Fannie Lou Hamer was a sharecropper from the same county in the heart of the Delta. They both shaped the civil rights movement in their absolutist—and conflicting—view of the rights of Black citizens.
This book is a dual biography, telling the personal history of each of them and through their lives, gives two lens to the Civil Rights Movement. And I think both of those lens are underrepresented in how we typically study, read, or consume the history of that era.
Lens 1: The Devout Segregationist Planter
Eastland was the senator from Mississippi that successfully blocked civil rights legislation for decades. But he’s also a planter: he owns and runs a farming plantation. I don’t think we delve enough into the motivations and situation of people who were opposed to civil rights and never changed their mind. We like the transformations and redemptions—like George Wallace—but some people don’t change.
Lens 2: The Determined Sharecropper Activist
Hamer was a sharecropper, meaning that she is very poor and that over this era in American history, her economic way of life will be virtually eradicated. I don’t think we highlight poor people enough in the Civil Rights era, either.
They clash over civil rights and economic power. Eastland and Hamer live through a transformative time in Mississippi, and the books delves into how cotton is cultivated, how plantation owners enriched themselves using New Deal farm relief, how civil rights workers were branded as communists, the economic plight of sharecroppers as cotton became mechanized, school integration, voting methods, political conventions, and more.
So much of the pushback against the Civil Rights Movement had economic motivations. Plantation owners needed black citizens to be poor. They fought as hard as they could to keep them that way. And they branded them as communists as a way to fight labor organizing and labor rights. Eastland called the first Head Start program in Mississippi a communist front. And it's not like he's some a nobody shouting into the wind, he's chair of the most powerful committee in the Senate when he says this.
Full disclosure:
The content of this book is better than its writing. It’s a little dry. Not academicky unreadabl but a little dry. But in a real bonus, it’s not long. And it “world builds” well.
Postscript: A note for economists about this book
As I was reading the book, I started to line up some years—when does the book take place versus how old are the people who were born at that time. A lot of what we know about wages, wage growth, unemployment, returns to skill and schooling, and other Big Things in labor economics comes from the generation that came of age during this period. Not that we stopped studying the labor market, but they’re the first generation that we have really great longitudinal data on, so they de facto set the basis for our understanding by coming first. But we don’t get a postscript in those papers about segregation or economic fights. Just a thought.
My mom has a copy of A Voice That Could Stir and Army. Fannie Lou Hamer lived an incredibly difficult life. This book sounds fascinating, I'll have to pick it up
I read your article: 'Here's Why American's Aren't Loving The Economy'. To what degree is the US Personal Savings Rate, which has declined from 15% in the 70's to 3.8% in Oct (and seemingly continuing to deteriorate) this year, a factor in what would be considered a healthy economy for the average American?