PDF Wounds of Returning: Race; Memory; and Property on the Postslavery Plantation (New Directions in Southern Studies) by Jessica Adams in History

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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.