You Can't Eat Freedom: Southerners and Social Justice after the Civil Rights Movement by Greta de Jong (review)

Greta de Jong's You Can't Eat Freedom: Southerners and Social Justice after the Civil Rights Movement is one of the most important books about the black freedom struggle in a generation. If that feels like an overstatement, it is because de Jong has accomplished a feat that few historians can claim: persuasively articulating what went wrong after the civil rights legislative victories of the mid-1960s. De Jong joins a chorus of scholars writing about this topic, but she convincingly spells out not only how agricultural mechanization shriveled job and economic opportunities but also how government policies—enacted by white conservatives with political power—purposefully undercut African American voting strength, antipoverty programs, and business options to pressure black southerners to leave the South. African Americans had won political and legal rights, yet without greater economic opportunities they remained second-class citizens. "You can't eat freedom," de Jong quotes an activist from Alabama, making clear that casting ballots only went so far to improve living conditions (p. 3). "White supremacists," de Jong argues, "responded to black civil rights gains by accelerating the displacement of farm families from the land and blocking efforts to provide alternate means of support" (p. 12).

A history of such analytical weight could easily spiral into pure outrage, but de Jong keeps the focus on black social activists who organized against white supremacy, predatory capitalism, and antagonistic politicians from 1965 up to today. Wide-ranging primary sources—including government reports, oral histories, personal manuscripts, and organizational records of agricultural cooperatives—enable de Jong to explain how residents who had been kicked off the land and made to struggle in states with slashed social spending drew their resources and their labor together. She tells about the Southwest Alabama Farmers Cooperative Association and how African Americans converted cotton fields to vegetable farms and sold their produce collectively. She describes the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party and the Delta Ministry organizing a Poor People's Conference in 1966 to draw attention to poverty and hunger by staging a sit-in inside an air force base. And central to her narrative is the Federation of Southern Cooperatives (FSC), an umbrella group that stretched across Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana, bringing together over one hundred organizations and cooperative stores and operating a training center in Sumter County, Alabama. The FSC received investment from the Office of Economic Opportunity and from private philanthropic organizations such as the Ford Foundation, but as conservatives rolled back the War on Poverty, financing became scarce. Yet the FSC struggled on into the twenty-first century, working to help thousands of rural black families. The South was their home, and they fought to stay.

Focusing on the cotton plantation regions of Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi, de Jong's book is about the rural South, but she clarifies that right-wing policies aimed at black southerners affected people across the United States. Her work takes the historiography of color-blind conservatism to a new level. As African Americans won political rights through the civil rights movement, conservatives fashioned a new lingo devoid of outright white supremacy and full of laissez-faire economics. In the South, de Jong writes, "The emphasis on allowing the market to work its magic conveniently absolved plantation owners and political leaders from responsibility for the social problems created by centuries of racist oppression" (p.42).White political leaders preached the evils of federal involvement, which conditioned many voters to allow their representatives to gut antipoverty programs. Not only did conservatism discover color-blind rhetoric, but it also rationalized that displacing African Americans was "a natural phenomenon that was beyond human control [that] absolved planters from responsibility for the crisis, denied any need for redistributive economic policies, and preserved the disparities in wealth produced by generations of exploiting black people's labor" (p...