The Senator and the Sharecropper: The Freedom Struggles of James O. Eastland and Fannie Lou Hamer

Reconstruction haunts its people, conjuring up collective memories of federal power and black progress in communities of both races and helping explain the deeprooted racism of the county's oppressive white minority and the apparent passivity of its black citizens. A few minor caveats: the resistance group Eastland helped form in 1955, (the Federation for Constitutional Government) never established a viable Washington lobby or published anything more than newsletters; defeat of the 1966 civil rights bill can be credited to Everett Dirksen and the long hot summer much more than to Eastland (and the housing bill became law in 1968 despite them all); and it seems to this reviewer that times have changed if Joseph Kennedy's son, no matter how powerful, can be called a "Massachusetts Brahmin" (p. 1 83).