“Fight—Don’t Starve”: Hunger Marches and the Politics of Hunger, 1930–31

In the early years of the Great Depression, a coalition led by sharecroppers, miners, unemployed people, women and Black activists and Communist Party members, organized Hunger Marches under the banner, “Fight - Don’t Starve.” The hunger marchers’ slogan linked together the biological time of hunger (starvation) and the historical time of class struggle (the fight). Hunger marchers articulated a common political identity around being made hungry. Employers and welfare agents programmatically withheld food to enforce particular forms of labor, displacement, and political action. The result was a “state of organized debility,” which suspended workers’ liveliness and their capacity for protest. Poor people across the US mobilized to oppose these practices of power.