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Senate Years of Service: 1941-1941; 1943-1978 Party: Democrat; Democrat
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EASTLAND, James Oliver, a Senator from Mississippi; born in Doddsville, Sunflower County,
Miss., November 28, 1904; moved with his parents to Forest, Miss., in 1905;
attended the public schools, the University of Mississippi at Oxford,
Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tenn., and the University of Alabama at
Tuscaloosa; studied law; admitted to the bar in 1927 and commenced practice in
Forest, Miss.; also engaged in agricultural pursuits; member, State house of
representatives 1928-1932; moved to Ruleville, Miss., in 1934; appointed on
June 30, 1941, as a Democrat to the United States Senate to fill the vacancy
caused by the death of Pat Harrison and served from June 30, 1941, to September
28, 1941; was not a candidate for election to the vacancy; elected as a
Democrat to the United States Senate in 1942; reelected in 1948, 1954, 1960,
1966, and again in 1972, and served from January 3, 1943, until his resignation
December 27, 1978; was not a candidate for reelection in 1978; served as
President pro tempore of the Senate during the Ninety-second through the
Ninety-fifth Congresses; chairman, Committee on the Judiciary (Eighty-fourth
through Ninety-fifth Congresses); was a resident of Doddsville, Miss., until
his death on February 19, 1986; interment in Forest Cemetery, Forest, Miss.
BibliographyAmerican National Biography;
Scribner Encyclopedia of American Lives; Schlauch, Wolfgang.
Representative William Colmer and Senator James O. Eastland and the
Reconstruction of Germany, 1945.
Journal of Mississippi History 34 (August 1972): 193-213;
Asch, Christopher Myers.
The Senator and the Sharecropper: The Freedom Struggles of James O.
Eastland and Fannie Lou Hamer. New York: New Press,
2008.
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