This book unearths a food story buried deep within the soil of
American civil rights history. Drawing on archival research,
interviews, and oral histories, Bobby J. Smith II re-examines the
Mississippi civil rights movement as a period when activists expanded
the meaning of civil rights to address food as integral to
sociopolitical and economic conditions. For decades, white economic
and political actors used food as a weapon against Black
sharecropping communities in the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta, but members
of these communities collaborated with activists to transform food
into a tool of resistance. Today, Black youth are building a food
justice movement in the Delta to continue this story, grappling with
inequalities that continue to shape their lives.
Drawing on multiple disciplines including critical food studies,
Black studies, history, sociology, and southern studies, Smith makes
critical connections between civil rights activism and present-day
food justice activism in Black communities, revealing how power
struggles over food empower them to envision Black food futures in
which communities have the full autonomy and capacity to imagine,
design, create, and sustain a self-sufficient local food system.
