Session summary:
This lecture challenges us to reconsider how we think and talk about food. Drawing on research from his award-winning book, Food Power Politics: The Food Story of the Mississippi Civil Rights Movement (UNC Press, 2023), Dr. Bobby J. Smith II narrates how food emerged as a contested site of Black freedom during the American Civil Rights Movement in Mississippi. He focuses on the emancipatory vision of Mrs. L. C. Dorsey, a woefully forgotten civil rights activist, and her role as the leader of the North Bolivar County Farm Cooperative, an innovate local Black food network of activists, community members, healthcare professionals, and farmers. While the development of the cooperative is overlooked in stories about the struggle for civil rights, Smith shows how Dorsey and the cooperative network used the civil rights movement as incubator for the creation of innovative food systems. Looking forward, such food systems provide blueprints for Black food futures—where Black communities have the full autonomy and capacity to imagine, create and sustain a self-sufficient local food system designed by them. 

 

About our speaker: 

Cornell Bouchet Society alum, Dr. Bobby J. Smith II is an interdisciplinary scholar of the African American agricultural and food experience. Trained as a sociologist, with a background in agricultural economics, Dr. Smith is an Associate Professor in the Department of African American Studies and Fellow in Policy Design Lab in the Department of Agricultural and Consumer Economics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, with affiliations in the Department of Food Science & Human Nutrition, and the Center for Social & Behavioral Science. 

 

His research program and teaching agenda cultivates an intellectual sphere and public space to interpret how Black people build agricultural and food systems amid inequalities that orbit the Black world. Dr. Smith is the author of Food Power Politics: The Food Story of the Mississippi Civil Rights Movement (University of North Carolina (UNC) Press, 2023). Thinking with multiple disciplines including African American Studies, critical food studies, and agricultural science, Food Power Politics brings into focus how food was used as a weapon against African Americans during the civil rights movement in Mississippi, and how they fought back, creating their own food programs and systems. Interfacing archival data, in-depth interviews, and oral histories, Food Power Politics illuminates how the food dynamics of the Mississippi civil rights movement provide a pathway for understanding how Black youth today—in Mississippi and beyond—are building food justice movements, grappling with inequalities that attempt to shape their lives. 

 

Dr. Smith earned a B.S. degree (summa cum laude) in Agriculture, with a focus on Agricultural Economics, from Prairie View A&M University in 2011. He earned a M.S. degree in Agricultural and Applied Economics in 2013 and a Ph.D. in Development Sociology in 2018 from Cornell University. 

About the Edward A. Bouchet Graduate Honor Society:
Yale University and Howard University established the Edward A. Bouchet Graduate Honor Society in 2005. Named for the first African American doctoral recipient in the United States (Ph.D. from Yale University in 1876), the Bouchet Society recognizes outstanding scholarly achievement and promotes diversity and excellence in doctoral education and the professoriate. Outside of the society’s founding universities, Yale and Howard, Cornell was among the earliest universities to establish a chapter of the Bouchet Society with its first members inducted in 2006.

The Bouchet Society seeks to develop a network of preeminent scholars who exemplify academic and personal excellence, foster environments of support and serve as examples of CLASS: Character, Leadership, Advocacy, Scholarship, and Service. In the spirit of Bouchet’s commitment to these pursuits both within and beyond the academic realm, inductees into the honor society exhibit these qualities and demonstrate a commitment to advancing diversity, inclusion, access, and equity in the academy, especially by those from backgrounds historically underrepresented in higher education.

 
EVENT SPONSORS: Graduate School Office of Inclusion & Student Engagement, CROPPS (Center for Research on Programmable Plant Systems), and the Cornell Chapter of the Bouchet Graduate Honor Society