Black Farm Boys

“Smith highlights rural Black agriculturalists’ innovation, persistence, and pride in their effort to sustain their tradition and their relationship to the land, thus offering a much-needed departure from the prevailing narratives of rural Black folks and agriculture.”—Yuki Kato, author of Gardens of Hope: Cultivating Food and the Future in a Post-Disaster City

“Smith’s work on the experience of Black farmers during the Jim Crow era joins a vibrant field of scholarship focused on agriculture as a site of independence and self-sufficiency, not only as a site of exploitation.” —Adrienne Monteith Petty, author of Standing Their Ground: Small Farmers in North Carolina Since the Civil War

Bobby J. Smith II is associate professor of African American Studies at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and the James Beard–nominated author of Food Power Politics: The Food Story of the Mississippi Civil Rights Movement.