Food for Freedom: The Struggle for Food Access in the Civil Rights Movement, 1960–65

In this paper, Teona Williams explores the struggle over food access, food stamps, and welfare in the 1960s Mississippi Delta. As the Civil Rights Movement grew in strength in the Delta, the White Citizens Council intervened in the field of food commodities and welfare reform in order to use food as a deterrent to rural Black joining the Movement. In response rural Black feminists such as Annie Rankin and Unita Blackwell launched a region wide food and clothing distribution drive to help provide shelter for those who faced the backlash of civil rights organizing. Even as the civil rights movement is often put at odds with the environmental justice, food access and security was a major mobilizing factor for the rural Black poor in the Delta, who risked their jobs and their housing, in the hopes of not only to win the right to vote, but to use that right to ensure that their families qualified for food stamps and economic security. In this way the Civil Rights Movement did attempt to address the impacts of environmental racism, even if to more limited success than winning the 1965 Voting Rights Act.