Abigail Hebert

On Wednesday night, Dr. Teona Williams ’12 spoke to a crowded room of students, professors and community members in Mills Hall. Her talk, titled, “When Hunger was the Disaster: The Politics of Hunger and Food Justice in the Mississippi Delta,” focused on the work of Black feminists, including Fannie Lou Hamer.

Williams, a Bowdoin alum and assistant professor of geography at Rutgers University, started her talk by thanking Hamer.

Hamer was a civil and women’s rights activist who organized in Mississippi in the 1960s and 70s, well known for her role in Mississippi’s 1964 Freedom Summer voting rights campaign.

Williams’ talk focused on the hunger driven by systemic racism in the Mississippi Delta, which she also referred to as the hunger belt, between 1966 and 1977. Williams divided her talk into three segments: the making of the hunger belt, how hunger was visualized and the Black feminist response to the ecocide in the hunger belt.

Williams first argued that hunger in the Mississippi Delta can be directly attributed to anti-Black federal and state policies as well as the impact of agricultural mechanization. Williams argues that hunger was socially constructed and used as a political weapon to control Black labor.

Agricultural mechanization in the Mississippi Delta started in the 1940s when the federal government began to industrialize farming. This movement decreased the need for African American labor in cotton fields, leading to an increase in unemployment and poverty in the region. By 1967, white farmers had found themselves in a position of food dominance due to almost all federal aid heading directly to their pockets. One example of this phenomenon was Sunflower County, Miss.

“Sunflower County received $23.5 million in individual farm subsidies to reduce acreage and cotton production, which was disseminated to just 0.003 percent of the population,” Williams said.

At the same time, Sunflower County’s African American community, especially former sharecroppers, lived in abject poverty.

“Sixty percent of Sunflower County lived below the federal poverty line, and they had to share only $4 million in federal food relief aid,” Williams said.

These policies worked in conjunction with deliberately ineffective food relief programs. These programs often failed to reach African American families, who in the 1930s received one-third the aid of white families. The hunger crisis got worse after the 1965 Voting Rights Act was passed. Lists containing the names of African American sharecroppers who had registered to vote were published in newspapers. These sharecroppers were fired by white farm owners if they refused to cancel their voter registration.

“This certainly was the case for [Hamer], who was evicted from the plantation which she lived and worked on for 18 years when she registered to vote,” Williams said.

Williams continued, saying that Hamer described the attitude of white plantation owners as vindictive.

“[They said], ‘Go ahead and register, then you’ll starve,’” Williams said.

White farmers and Mississippi’s state government denied that the starvation was happening at all.

Williams then focused on how the hunger of African American communities was presented to the rest of the world. She discussed the Hunger Tours, where presidential hopefuls, doctors and activists, in response to the denials of the state government, went down to Mississippi to see the hunger and desperation for themselves.

“They wanted evidence of abject poverty. They came for proof of Black babies near death that they then circulated as they built their own political platforms,” Williams said.

The talk then centered on how the visual of the starving Black child fed into white colonial fantasies of what Blackness was. The goal for Black feminist activists like Hamer was for the federal government to declare the Mississippi Delta a federal disaster zone, which would allow for the federal government to bypass approval from the State of Mississippi and help the African American community there. The federal government never made such a declaration, which led to Hamer’s creation of the Freedom Farm Cooperative (FFC), an agricultural cooperative, in 1973.

“At its height, the FFC would become a cooperative that fed, between 1968 and 1973 alone, over 10,000 families across several Delta counties,” Williams said.

Attendee Gabe Silverman ’29 said he learned from the talk that Mississippi’s hunger problem was exacerbated by statewide power structures.

“The hunger problem in the Mississippi Delta could have been solved much earlier, but the U.S. used this as a political driving force to hold power over … the majority of people of color,” Silverman said.