The Senator and the Sharecropper
The Senator and the Sharecropper

Author: Chris Myers Asch

Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press

Published: 2011-02-01

Total Pages: 393

ISBN-13: 0807878057

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

In this fascinating study of race, politics, and economics in Mississippi, Chris Myers Asch tells the story of two extraordinary personalities--Fannie Lou Hamer and James O. Eastland--who represented deeply opposed sides of the civil rights movement. Both were from Sunflower County: Eastland was a wealthy white planter and one of the most powerful segregationists in the U.S. Senate, while Hamer, a sharecropper who grew up desperately poor just a few miles from the Eastland plantation, rose to become the spiritual leader of the Mississippi freedom struggle. Asch uses Hamer's and Eastland's entwined histories, set against the backdrop of Sunflower County's rise and fall as a center of cotton agriculture, to explore the county's changing social landscape during the mid-twentieth century and its persistence today as a land separate and unequal. Asch, who spent nearly a decade in Mississippi as an educator, offers a fresh look at the South's troubled ties to the cotton industry, the long struggle for civil rights, and unrelenting social and economic injustice through the eyes of two of the era's most important and intriguing figures.

Senator Allen Ellender of Louisiana
Senator Allen Ellender of Louisiana

Author: Thomas A. Becnel

Publisher: LSU Press

Published: 1996-01-01

Total Pages: 344

ISBN-13: 9780807119785

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Allen J. Ellender, born in 1890 on a sugar plantation in Terrebonne Parish, Louisiana, rose to become one of the most dominant men in the U.S. Senate. This biography, based on prolonged examination of the voluminous Ellender Papers and extensive research in other primary and secondary sources, including interviews with people who knew Ellender during various stages of his lengthy career, makes an important contribution to our understanding of Louisiana and national politics during much of this century. Ellender began life in a farm family and never lost his close ties to rural Louisiana. Still, he sought a career as a lawyer and served as city attorney and district attorney before being elected to the Louisiana state legislature in 1924. Originally an opponent of Huey Long, Ellender converted to Longism after Huey was elected governor in 1928. But because he refused to condone questionable oil-leasing practices on state lands, he was bypassed as Long’s state political heir in the thirties. He was elected instead to the U.S. Senate, where he served until his death in 1972. In Senator Allen Ellender of Louisiana, Thomas A. Becnel methodically traces the extended career of this contradictory politician—a man who, though essentially a conservative, was surprisingly liberal on many issues. He supported progressive legislation in areas such as education, public housing, censorship, and the separation of church and state. He was also one of the first senators to criticize his colleague Joseph McCarthy. Yet throughout his career he remained a staunch advocate of racial segregation. During Ellender’s long tenure in the Senate, in which he served under Presidents Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon, through the Great Depression, World War II, the Cold War, McCarthyism, the Korean conflict, the civil rights movement, and the Vietnam War, he was intimately involved in decisions and debates that have shaped the recent history of the country. Becnel astutely places Ellender in the context of the history of his time and the social, economic, and political milieu of his state. The result is a careful, balanced portrait of one of the most influential legislators of this century.