You Can't Eat Freedom - by Greta de Jong (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Two revolutions roiled the rural South after the mid-1960s: the political revolution wrought by the passage of civil rights legislation, and the ongoing economic revolution brought about by increasing agricultural mechanization. Political empowerment for black southerners coincided with the transformation of southern agriculture and the displacement of thousands of former sharecroppers from the land. Focusing on the plantation regions of Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi, Greta de Jong analyzes how social justice activists responded to mass unemployment by lobbying political leaders, initiating antipoverty projects, and forming cooperative enterprises that fostered economic and political autonomy, efforts that encountered strong opposition from free market proponents who opposed government action to solve the crisis.

Making clear the relationship between the civil rights movement and the War on Poverty, this history of rural organizing shows how responses to labor displacement in the South shaped the experiences of other Americans who were affected by mass layoffs in the late twentieth century, shedding light on a debate that continues to reverberate today.

Review Quotes

Focusing on the Black Belt counties of Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana, de Jong traces the struggle for economic justice from the collapse of sharecropping through the civil rights movement to the present."--Journal of Social History

A must read for scholars interested in southern history, civil rights history, or poor people's movements. . . . Challenges what we know about the post-1965 period and proves instructive as we confront twenty-first-century problems of poverty and racial injustice.--The Register of the Kentucky Historical Society

Links issues such as mass unemployment, poverty, and racial inequality to failures in policy in the late 20th century, when deindustrialization, automation and globalization eliminated many working-class jobs.--Nevada Today News

One of the most important books about the black freedom struggle in a generation.--Journal of Southern History