You Can’t Eat Freedom

“Links issues such as mass unemployment, poverty, and racial inequality to failures in policy in the late 20th century, when deindustrialization, automation and globalization eliminated many working-class jobs.” — Nevada Today News

“One of the most important books about the black freedom struggle in a generation.” — Journal of Southern History

“A must read for scholars interested in southern history, civil rights history, or poor people’s movements. . . . Challenges what we know about the post-1965 period and proves instructive as we confront twenty-first-century problems of poverty and racial injustice.” — The Register of the Kentucky Historical Society

“Focusing on the Black Belt counties of Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana, de Jong traces the struggle for economic justice from the collapse of sharecropping through the civil rights movement to the present.”—Journal of Social History

“Beautifully written, elegantly argued, and exhaustively researched, You Can’t Eat Freedom provides a cutting-edge outlook on just how quickly it became dangerous for black southerners to struggle for economic justice in the years after the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts were passed. Broadening our understanding of what constituted political action in the civil rights and antipoverty struggles, this book offers a completely fresh analysis of post-1965 rural African American social justice activism, highlighting just how inextricable political and economic justice were in activists’ vision for change.” — Annelise Orleck, Dartmouth College

“With an impressive breadth of research, You Can’t Eat Freedom takes us inside communities fighting for civil rights after 1965, looking beyond the much studied earlier period to show us how these ongoing racial struggles were contested on the ground. This book does not shy away from highlighting the prevalence of black poverty after 1965, avoiding the temptation to find silver linings in what is quite a sobering — even bleak — story. This is a nice corrective to the triumphal nature of some civil rights historiography.” — Timothy J. Minchin, coauthor of After the Dream: Black and White Southerners since 1965