Nobody's Free Until Everybody's Free ... Future of the South Conference at Ole Miss this weekend

Chris Myers Asch, U. S. Public Service Academy will speak on Friday, February 19, 2010 in Johnson Commons Ballroom.  He wrote The Senator and the Sharecropper: The Freedom Struggles of James O. Eastland and Fannie Lou Hamer.

The Senator and the Sharecropper is the story of two larger-than-life personalities from one humble corner of the Mississippi Delta: the Senator, James O. Eastland, a fabulously wealthy cotton planter and one of the most powerful figures in the U.S. Senate, and the sharecropper, Fannie Lou Hamer, who grew up desperately poor a few miles from Eastland’s plantation. During Eastland’s long tenure as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, he ruthlessly and effectively bottled up civil rights legislation on Capitol Hill. From Hamer’s lowly origins, she emerged as a spiritual leader of the Civil Rights Movement that eventually toppled Eastland—a woman who “shook the foundations of the nation,” in the words of Andrew Young.

The Senator and the Sharecropper tells how these two pivotal figures came to confront one another on the national political stage at the height of the civil rights struggle. Their intertwined histories—set against a backdrop of Sunflower County’s rise and fall as a center of cotton agriculture—offer a powerful window onto the unraveling of Jim Crow during the upheavals of the 1960s and, in our own time, the persistence of profound inequality in the post–civil rights era.

Formerly an elementary school teacher in Sunflower, Mississippi, with Teach for America, Chris Myers Asch is now the co-founder of the U.S. Public Service Academy. He holds a PhD in American history from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Asch lives in Cincinnati.

The Porter L. Fortune, Jr. History Symposium/Future of the South Conference
The Civil Rights Movement in Mississippi


Sponsored by the History Department and the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi Scholarly talks and discussion will take place Thursday and Friday, February 18-19, 2010, and an unstructured discussion of the relationship between the history of the Civil Rights Movement and the future of Mississippi will take place on Saturday, February 20.


Particpants in the symposium will include:
Chris Myers Asch, U. S. Public Service Academy
Curtis Austin, Southern Mississippi University
Rita Bender & Bill Bender, University of Mississippi
Emilye Crosby, SUNY Geneseo
David Cunningham, Brandeis University
John Dittmer, DePauw University
Jelani Favors, Morgan State University
Diana Freelon Foster, Mississippi Truth Project
Francoise Hamlin, Brown University
Wesley Hogan, Virginia State University
Byron D'Andra Orey, Jackson State University
Joseph Reiff, Emory and Henry College
Chauncey Spears, Mississippi Dept. of Education
Charles Tucker, Mississippi Truth Project
Akinyele Umoja, Georgia State University
Geoff Ward, U of California, Irvine
Michael Williams, Mississippi State University
Nan Woodruff, Penn State University

PROGRAM


Thursday, February 18, 2010. All events in Johnson Commons Ballroom.
9:30-11:00am Presentations
Emilye Crosby (SUNY Geneseo)
Michael Williams (Mississippi State)
1:00-2:30pm Presentations
Francoise Hamlin (Brown)
Jelani Favors (Morgan State)
3:00-4:30pm Presentations
Akinyele Umoja (Georgia State)
Wesley Hogan (Virginia State)


Friday, February 19, 2010. All events in Johnson Commons Ballroom
9:30-11:00am Presentations
David Cunningham (Brandeis)
Joseph Reiff (Emory and Henry)
1:00-2:30pm Presentations
D'Andra Orey (Jackson State)
Chris Myers Asch (US Public Service Academy)
3:00-4:00pm Comments by John Dittmer (DePauw)

Saturday, February 20, 2010. All events in Tupelo Room, Barnard Observatory

9:00-10:30am
Discussion of Civil Rights Movement and Education: chauncey Spears (Mississippi Department of Education), Curtis Austin (Southern Mississippi), Rita Bender and Bill Bender (University of Mississippi)


10:45-noon
Discussion of Civil Rights Movement and Youth: Moderated by Nan Woodruff (Penn State), a discussion with members of the Mississippi Truth Project, including Geoff Ward (California, Irvine), Charles Tucker, Diana Freelon Foster

All events are free and open to the public. No registration is necessary.For more information on the symposium, contact
Ted Ownby at umsymp@olemiss.edu


Also, at the B. B. King Museum in Indianola -
Book Signing with Chris Myers Asch


Saturday, February 20, 2010 4:30 PM


The B.B. King Museum and Delta Interpretive Center will host a book discussion and signing by former Sunflower County resident, Chris Myers Asch. Asch will be at the Museum Saturday, February 20 at 4:30pm to discuss his book The Senator and the Sharecropper: The Freedom Struggles of James O. Eastland and Fannie Lou Hamer.

A native of Washington, D.C., Chris Myers Asch studied history at Duke University and the University of North Carolina. He first came to Sunflower County as a Teach For America corps member in 1994. He spent three years teaching at East Sunflower Elementary School in Sunflower before co-founding the Sunflower County Freedom Project, an academic enrichment and leadership development program for middle and high school students. He ran the Freedom Project for seven years before leaving Mississippi to work on the U.S. Public Service Academy.

His first book, The Senator and the Sharecropper: The Freedom Struggles of James O. Eastland and Fannie Lou Hamer was published in 2008 and earned the Liberty Legacy Foundation Prize from the Organization of American Historians and the McLemore Prize from the Mississippi Historical Society. Asch currently works as the Coordinator for the Center for Urban Education at the University of the District of Columbia. He is married to former Gentry High School teacher Erica Seager, and the couple has two daughters.

For more information, please contact:
Erin Mulligan, Volunteer Coordinator
400 Second St.
Indianola, MS 38751
662.887.9539 Ext 228

emulligan@bbkingmuseum.org