Ashanti Shih discusses how Japanese American politician Patsy Mink navigated conflicting alliances as an environmental advocate in Hawai‘i during a growing Native Hawaiian sovereignty movement that saw white environmentalists from the “mainland” as occupiers.

Allison Puglisi explores struggles over race, recreation, and nature in Great-Society Era New Orleans. As War on Poverty officials sought “behavioral” explanations for trash, pests, and pollution in Black neighborhoods, Black mothers in New Orleans’s Desire Area recast these as matters of environmental racism.

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.

Sherri Sheu examines the National Park Service’s Summer in the Parks Program that ran in Washington, DC. The Summer in the Parks Program sought to address social inequality while simultaneously working towards a goal of quelling rebellion through recreation. This paper examines how a federal agency known for its experience managing large, non-urban western areas worked to make the city a more livable place and how it responded to the recreational needs of urban residents, and the limits of this simultaneously progressive and paternalistic program.