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