Current concerns in the United States, including Black Lives Matter protests and ongoing unemployment issues, rattle the mind, as one may wonder how society came to be this way. ƼӰԭ Associate Professor of History Greta de Jong touches on these topics in her newly published book, "You Can't Eat Freedom," which was just released this week on Oct. 3, 2016.
You Can’t Eat Freedom: Southerners and Social Justice after the Civil Rights Movement, written by Greta de Jong, earned de Jong the 2017 Theodore Saloutos Award for the best book on any aspect of agriculture history in the United States from the Agricultural History Society. To be eligible for the award, works must be based on substantial primary research and must present a major new scholarly interpretation. de Jong will be presented with the award at the annual Immigration and Ethnic History Society banquet. Award information updated April 2017.
de Jong's inspiration to write "You Can't Eat Freedom" grew from the research she was conducting for her first book regarding the black freedom struggle in Louisiana and the interviews she conducted of people who grew up on plantations and who were involved in the civil rights movement in the 1960s.
"What struck me was that almost all of them wanted me to know about current conditions in their communities and how they were still dealing with things like poverty, unemployment, police brutality, poor schools and unresponsive political leadership," de Jong said. "So I wanted to find out more about the ways African Americans continued their struggles for justice beyond the 1960s and the obstacles to equality that remained after the passage of civil rights legislation."
In her book, de Jong 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. The unemployment rate affected black communities particularly hard, while the effects spread to white communities as well. Social justice activists advocated for better social services and programs to retrain workers or create jobs in the 1960s, but instead, political leaders cut government spending and relied on the private sector and free markets to solve economic problems. According to de Jong, political leaders drew support from many white voters by promising to restore "law and order" and by portraying poverty and unemployment as "black" problems that were caused by laziness and welfare dependency rather than economic restructuring. She further explains that the decisions of the political leaders led to the economic marginalization of white as well as black workers, and the violent repression of African Americans through increasingly militarized policing.
"Unemployment was the No. 1 problem confronting black southerners in the plantation regions," de Jong said. "Mechanization had been displacing workers for several decades and then began to occur even more rapidly in the wake of the civil rights movement."
de Jong focuses on the plantation regions of Alabama, Louisiana and Mississippi where she traveled to conduct a majority of her research. She visited numerous depositories including the Amistad Research Center in New Orleans, which provided de Jong with a majority of the archival material for her book, the Special Collections and Archives Department of the Draughon Library at Auburn University, Alabama, the Hill Memorial Library at Louisiana State University, the Wisconsin Historical Society, the McCain Library and Archives at the University of Southern Mississippi, among many other libraries, archives, museums and special collections. She conducted several interviews with older activists, and was able to use various interviews conducted and shared by other scholars.
"You Can't Eat Freedom," was a phrase used by Ezra Cunningham, a social justice activist who explained that the political and legal rights won by the civil rights movement weren't enough, and that people needed jobs, income and economic security in order to truly attain freedom and equality.
de Jong has been at the ƼӰԭ since 2002, and teaches courses on African American history, race and ethnicity, social movements and post-1945 U.S. history. She also teaches Core Humanities 203 courses, where she is able to bring her expertise in these areas into those courses.
"I want my students to see that racism can be understood historically, by studying the laws and policies that created racial inequality and racist beliefs," de Jong said. "When you look at the history of it, it becomes clear how it is a system that was constructed by the people in power. And when you see racism as something that was created, as opposed to just being ‘human nature,' you can start to think about how it might be un-created, and that's an empowering concept that I hope students come away with."
She plans to research and write her fourth book focusing on the tensions among family, community and justice that became evident during struggles over school desegregation in the mid-20th century.
"You Can't Eat Freedom" and other books authored by Jong are available for purchase through .
