Rethinking Food, Rewriting Civil Rights: Food, Power, and Black Life in the Mississippi Civil Rights Movement

How does our understanding of the American civil rights movement shift if food is the starting point? In this talk, Dr. Bobby J. Smith II discusses his forthcoming book, Food Power Politics: The Food Story of the Mississippi Civil Rights Movement, to grapple with this question. Located at the intersection of multiple disciplines, including critical food studies, Black studies, history, sociology, agri-food studies, and southern studies, Food Power Politics recovers a food focus that is often diluted or muted in the historical retelling of the civil rights movement and the larger Black Freedom Struggle. This food focus uncovers a neglected stage of the movement that amplifies the overlooked and unacknowledged collaborative food efforts between Black working-class sharecroppers who joined arms with local and national activists to get food on their tables in the Mississippi Delta region of state of Mississippi. Such efforts reveal how food was a weapon, tool, tactic, and everyday preoccupation in power struggles over food during the movement and can help us theorize the past to inform contemporary social movements for food justice and food sovereignty in Black communities. They also show us how food shapes the relationship between inadequate access to food, structural inequalities, and social movements in Black life and beyond. This relationship creates a conversation between the study of the civil rights movement and research on the contemporary food justice movement, providing a space to rethink our ideas surrounding food while rewriting our understandings of one of the most celebrated social movements in American history—the civil rights movement.