During the Obama administration, agricultural activists trekked south to map food deserts, where access to fresh vegetables and meats is restricted and fast-food chains deliver high-calorie payloads and low-nutrient payoffs. Policy makers funded community gardens and redrew school-lunch nutrition standards.
On Monday, Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue announced that schools receiving federal funds for lunches may opt out of federal whole-grain requirements and delay low-sodium mandates. When Secretary Perdue, a former Georgia governor, delivered this news from a Virginia school cafeteria, he applied a states’ rights argument, honed in the South, to American food-system policy.
“A perfect example” of why there should be local control, Mr. Perdue claimed, lies “in the South, where the schools want to serve grits. But the whole-grain variety has little black flakes in it, and the kids won’t eat it. The school is compliant with the whole-grain requirements, but no one is eating the grits. That doesn’t make any sense.”
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The South is more than a locus for food-system problems and a battleground for policy arguments. Throughout its history, the region has incubated bold American solutions to hunger and food access. Radical Southerners, especially black women, who long provided the expertise and labor on farms and in kitchens, have challenged American agricultural practices and driven our changing relationship to food.
Fannie Lou Hamer, a woman of great emotional and intellectual ferocity, made her name as a voting rights activist. In June 1963 in a jail in Winona, Miss., a highway patrol officer ordered two of her fellow prisoners to beat her with blackjacks before joining in himself and nearly blinding her. Mrs. Hamer rose to national prominence as the leader of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, which attempted to unseat the segregationist Mississippi delegation at the 1964 Democratic National Convention.
After recounting that beating in testimony before the credentials committee, she declared: “If the Freedom Democratic Party is not seated now, I question America. Is this America, the land of the free and the home of the brave, where we have to sleep with our telephones off the hooks because our lives be threatened daily, because we want to live as decent human beings, in America?”
In the late 1960s, as the civil rights movement shifted to address economic injustice, Ms. Hamer conceived agricultural solutions to the plight of her fellow Americans, including a communal farm and livestock share program in Sunflower County in the Mississippi Delta. That work set the stage for the progressive agricultural policies and practices of today, with their focus on food sovereignty and their reliance on community farms.
Near the end of his life, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. cautioned that not all of America flowed with the “milk of prosperity and the honey of equality.” He focused his energies on the “total, direct and immediate abolition of poverty.” To do that, Dr. King conceived the Poor People’s Campaign of 1968, in which poor Americans, many from the South, agitated for jobs and justice.
Mrs. Hamer worked a more pragmatic tack. She argued that black Southerners would achieve full citizenship only when they controlled their own diet and in particular where their food came from. Raising your own crops was key. Mrs. Hamer said that food “allows the sick one a chance for healing, the silent ones a chance to speak, the unlearned ones a chance to learn, and the dying ones a chance to live.”
From a region where slavery and sharecropping had made mono-crop agriculture possible — and a state where Senator James Eastland once said that the best fertilizer was the plantation owner’s foot — Mrs. Hamer argued that stewardship of the soil was man’s highest calling. With the help of the singer Harry Belafonte and a charitable group based in Madison, Wis., Measure for Measure, she founded Freedom Farm Corporation in 1969 on 40 to 60 acres of Delta land. The need was urgent, she told Northern supporters: “We must buy land immediately, or our people will die forgotten.”
Freedom Farm aimed to give farmers land to work and poor families food to eat. This bold promise threatened plantation agriculture and its scions. Conservative whites saw cooperative agriculture as a threat to their political and economic power. Across the region, white banks called in loans, white families fired cooks and night riders torched crosses.
Mrs. Hamer was unbowed. “If we have that land,” as she once put it, “can’t anybody starve us out.” By 1971, she had acquired 620 more acres of Delta farmland. She and her colleagues planted snap beans, squash, butter beans, peas and cucumbers. BY JOHN T EDGE.
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