Why read Food Power Politics?

Book cover of Food Power Politics: The Food Story of the Mississippi Civil Rights Movement

Book description

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…

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Why read it?

1 author picked Food Power Politics as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Andrea Freeman

Author

Threatening people with starvation is an effective, if cruel, political tool that seems like a relic of the distant past. But Bobby J. Smith II uncovers the unsavory story of how, in 1963, a Mississippi county’s board of supervisors put up a food blockade during a particularly freezing Delta winter to stop Black people from voting. Resistance spread across the country, inspiring Martin Luther King, Jr. and others to collect food and call for an end to this threat to democracy.

From Andrea's list on food that won’t make you hungry.