What is "racism"? Belief in natural superiority

He risked his life filming a Mississippi senator's plantation in 1964

(David Hoffman, Feb. 17, 2021) Who was Fannie Lou Hamer? I have kept this kinescope in my archive since it was recorded by a colleague in 1964.

He had the guts to go onto the Dixiecrat Senator James Eastland's plantation in Mississippi to see what the sharecroppers who had "free" rent forever were living like and how they felt.

BHM is in February but is always important.

Eastland was an avowed segregationist, a Dixiecrat Democrat, a powerful senator. Mississippi, his state, was a one-party state dominated by white Democrats who used poll taxes and literacy tests to exclude Black Americans from voting.

Eastland grew up rich on the plantation his family had owned since before the Civil War. He was famous for voting against voting rights, food stamps, and G.I. benefits for Black soldiers returning from World War II.

This film clip contains a bit of footage of Fannie Lou Hammer, who came from the plantation and grew to fight Sen. Eastland and his colleagues by helping to set up the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party before the 1964 Democratic Party convention.