Cliffsnotes Narrative Life Dou Book

Fascinating portrait of two larger-than-life people and their combative struggles to preserve (Eastland) or revolutionize (Hamer) Sunflower County, Mississippi, and, in the process, the segregated South. Asch could have easily portrayed Eastland as a one-dimensional bogeyman. Instead, while pulling no punches about Eastland's bigoted, white supremacist vision and his brilliant use of political power to attempt to perpetuate a political, social, and cultural system with rich whites such as himself at the top and poor blacks at the bottom, Asch deftly shows the historical, geographical, cultural, and familial origins of Eastland's warped worldview. One begins to see why and how whites such as Eastland could have been oblivious for so long to the injustice and ultimate futility of the South's system of racial oppression.

Similarly, Asch could have simply declared Hamer a saint on a noble mission. But, in addition he shows us how Hamer's naiveté left her blind to the nearly inevitable failure of her dreams of a socialist economic revolution in the Mississippi Delta.

In a strange way, both Hamer and Eastland were captives to the land of the Mississippi Delta and to the global cotton economy and the technological and market changes that revolutionized that economy. While the civil rights victories of the 1960s changed the political landscape of Mississippi Delta, the mechanization of cotton farming eliminated the need for the African-American laborers who had been essential to large-scale cotton production in the Deep South. Many African-Americans left the Delta, and most poor, undereducated African-Americans who remained became dependent on federal government welfare for survival. Both the exodus and the dependence on welfare were developments that both Hamer and Eastland lamented.

Asch also deserves credit for highlighting the deep divide between the cotton-growing, plantation-dominated Mississippi Delta and the majority of the rest of the state, often referred to as the Mississippi Hills. Historically, the two regions have been very different geographically, economically, politically, religiously, and culturally, and therefore have often clashed in interesting and sometimes unpredictable ways.

In summary, this is essential reading for anyone interested in the civil rights movement, Mississippi, or, even if you are just interested in two complex, interesting human beings.