Dorothy W. Colom, senior judge for the 14th Chancery Court District of Mississippi, will headline the Feb. 9 Friends of the Columbus-Lowndes Public Library Table Talk series and review Chris Myer Asch”s award-winning “Senator and the Sharecropper: The Freedom Struggles of James O. Eastland and Fannie Lou Hamer.”
Recipient of the Mississippi Library Association”s best non-fiction book in 2010, “The Senator and the Sharecropper” examines the intersecting lives of two opposing figures in the civil rights struggles of the 1950s and 1960s. Judge Colom, who has served as an instructor at Mississippi University for Women and Mississippi State University, will discuss the critical differences between Eastland”s world view and that of Hamer.
While Eastland and Hamer lived only miles apart in the Mississippi Delta, they were worlds apart in education, influence and life experience.
From Hamer”s lowly origins as a desperately-poor sharecropper, she emerged as a spiritual leader of the civil rights movement that eventually toppled Eastland. She was, in the words of former Ambassador and Congressman Andrew Young, a woman who “shook the foundations of the nation.”
Doors open at 11:30 a.m. for those wishing to bring their lunch and socialize before the program begins at noon. The Friends will serve iced tea.
Table Talk will be presented each Wednesday in February. For more information on the series, contact the Friends at [email protected]
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