November 11, 2024

By Katya Hrichak

For Bobby J. Smith II, Ph.D. ’18, now an associate professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, returning to Cornell to give the inaugural Bouchet Lecture on Nov. 14 is a full-circle moment.

The lecture, to be held Nov. 14 at 3:30 p.m. in G10 Biotechnology Building and on Zoom, will encourage attendees to reconsider how they think and talk about food, focusing on the forgotten civil rights activist L.C. Dorsey and her role as the leader of the North Bolivar County Farm Cooperative: a Black food network of activists, community members, health care professionals, and farmers.

Titled “The Emancipatory Vision of L.C. Dorsey: Black Food Futures and the Struggle for Civil Rights,” the talk will draw on research from Smith’s award-winning book, “Food Power Politics: The Food Story of the Mississippi Civil Rights Movement” – the origins for which came about while a doctoral student at Cornell.

A graduate class on community organizing and development led Smith to connect the dots between the work he was doing both inside and outside the classroom, leading first to the topic of his dissertation and later to his book.

“I had been doing broader advocacy work in and outside of Ithaca for awhile, my local work centered around food justice and issues of food access for Black communities in Ithaca,” he said. “I was thinking about how this community organizing class can connect the work I’m doing academically with the work that I’m doing on the ground in Ithaca and other places around the nation.”

The first time he presented this research was at the Annual Yale Bouchet Conference on Diversity and Graduate Education in the spring of 2018 when he was also inducted as a Bouchet Society scholar. To have found the topic at Cornell, shared it at the Bouchet Conference, and now returning to speak about it at the Bouchet Lecture at Cornell “really is a full circle moment,” said Smith.

“I want to invite people to really engage in meaningful and thoughtful discussion and conversation when we talk about people’s food realities,” he said. “I believe that solutions to our nation’s food problems can be found not only in the study of Black life, but also in the production of collective discussion in public spaces like this lecture series.”

Selecting Smith as the speaker for the inaugural lecture was an easy decision, according to Graduate School Associate Dean for Inclusion and Student and Faculty Engagement Sara Xayarath Hernández.

“When the idea for this lecture was initiated, Dr. Smith immediately came to mind as an ideal scholar to serve as the speaker, most especially because of the impact he has made through his interdisciplinary scholarship that includes food justice and equity, agricultural history, agricultural industry issues, equitable policy design, and African American studies,” she said. “This lecture is one way to honor and bring attention to the legacy of Dr. Bouchet and the graduate honor society that bears his name.”

The talk is sponsored by the Graduate School Office of Inclusion and Student Engagement, the Center for Research on Programmable Plant Systems (CROPPS), and the Cornell Chapter of the Bouchet Graduate Honor Society, named for Edward Alexander Bouchet, the first African American to receive a doctorate from a U.S. University.

“CROPPS has a vision of empowering a sustainable, resilient, and nutrient-rich agriculture through the development of programmable plant systems. To do this, we’re cultivating a diverse community of researchers and educators dedicated to a healthy future for people, plants, and our planet,” said Darius Melvin, assistant director for diversity, inclusion, and partnerships for CROPPS.

“Dr. Smith is a voice we want to hear from as his scholarship broadcasts the manner in which the Black community, particularly in the south, has navigated tribulation and inequity to build innovative agricultural systems,” he continued. “It is imperative that CROPPS learn from and integrate these lessons into the development of programmable plants, not only so that CROPPS’ vision can be realized, but also to further cement our core belief that unique perspectives and backgrounds must be included if we are to achieve optimal outcomes.”