Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: You Can’t Eat Freedom
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE:
CITY:
STATE:
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
https://history.unr.edu/people/greta-de-jong * https://www.unr.edu/history/history-people/greta-de-jong * http://struggleandhope.com/about/greta-de-jong/
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Female.
EDUCATION:University of Waikato, B.A., 1988, M.A., 1990; University of Pennsylvania, Ph.D., 1999.
ADDRESS
CAREER
University of Nevada, Reno, Nevada, associate professor of history, 2002–. Former fellow, Carter G. Woodson Institute for Afro-American and African Studies; also taught at George Mason University and University of Wisconsin—Parkside.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Greta de Jong holds the post of associate professor of history at the University of Nevada at Reno. “Her research and teaching,” wrote the contributor of a biographical blurb to the University of Nevada—Reno web site, “focus on the connections between race and class and the ways that African Americans have fought for economic as well as political rights from the end of Reconstruction through the twenty-first century.” She is the author of the monographs A Different Day: African American Struggles for Justice in Rural Louisiana, 1900-1970, Invisible Enemy: The African American Freedom Struggle after 1965, and You Can’t Eat Freedom: Southerners and Social Justice after the Civil Rights Movement,
A Different Day
In general, de Jong’s work shows how the standard narrative about the struggle for African Americans’ civil rights in twentieth century America tells only one part of the story. In A Different Day, de Jong looks at the ways in which civil rights were pursued in the Deep South from the early to the last quarter of the twentieth century. De Jong’s monograph “expanded the parameters of the civil rights struggle in two directions: longitudinally and geographically,” stated Jeannie Whayne, writing in the Journal of Southern History. “For de Jong the movement started long before the 1950s, and it started not in Birmingham or any other town or city. It began in rural areas in the early twentieth century with the everyday struggles of ordinary African Americans.”
“The rise of civil right demands in the first half of the twentieth century and the consolidation during the 1950s and 1960s of a political civil rights movement represent one of the major historical transformations affecting American society,” explained Giles Vandal in the Journal of Southern History. “In this reviewer’s opinion, this often lively and quite detailed book provides a fascinating account of the civil right movement in local rural in Louisiana and those who made it. In the process, de Jong’s broad and sensitive book reinstates the study of civil rights as a highly worthwhile endeavor.”
Invisible Enemy and You Can't Eat Freedom
De Jong’s Invisible Enemy explores the ways in which the conclusion of the civil rights struggle in the 1960s failed to secure equality for African Americans. “She argues that institutional racism and racial inequality were fixtures of the American republic from its beginnings and remain fixtures in American society in the early twenty-first century,” explained Jamie J. Wilson in the History Teacher. “The Civil Rights Movement of the mid-twentieth century undermined legal obstacles to African Americans’ search for freedom and justice, she suggests, but did little to break down the ‘mechanisms that continued to allocate wealth in racially biased ways.’” “De Jong examines how race informed public policy,” declared D.C. Catsam in Choice, “and also how public policy overlooked issues of race.”
In You Can’t Eat Freedom, de Jong continues the themes she examined in Invisible Enemy. “Originally, my plan for You Can’t Eat Freedom was to examine how black southerners continued to fight for racial justice after the 1960s and the obstacles that white supremacists continued to place in their way,” wrote Ibram X. Kendi in an interview with the author appearing in Black Perspectives. “I expanded my geographical scope to include the plantation regions of Alabama and Mississippi as well as Louisiana…. And there was so much to cover in the struggles over economic justice, education, social welfare policy, political power, and other concerns that continued in the late twentieth century.” “She convincingly spells out not only how agricultural mechanization shriveled job and economic opportunities,” said Evan Faulkenbury in the Journal of Southern History, “but also how government policies–enacted by white conservatives with political power–purposefully undercut African American voting strength, antipoverty programs, and business options to pressure black southerners to leave the South. African Americans had won political and legal rights, yet without greater economic opportunities they remained second-class citizens.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Choice, April, 2011, D.C. Catsam, review of The Invisible Enemy: The African American Freedom Struggle after 1965, p. 1552.
Journal of Social History, winter, 2003, Giles Vandal, review of A Different Day: African American Struggles for Justice in Rural Louisiana, 1900-1970, p. 531.
Journal of Southern History, May, 2004, Jeannie Whayne, review of A Different Day, p. 464; August, 2017, Evan Faulkenbury, review of You Can’t Eat Freedom: Southerners and Social Justice after the Civil Rights Movement, p. 747.
ONLINE
Black Perspectives, http://www.aaihs.org/ (October 3, 2016), Ibram X. Kendi, review of You Can’t Eat Freedom.
History Teacher, http://www.societyforhistoryeducation.org/ (February 1, 2011), Jamie J. Wilson, review of Invisible Enemy.
Struggle & Hope, http://struggleandhope.com/ (January 10, 2018), author profile.
University of Nevada—Reno, https://www.unr.edu/ (January 10, 2018), author profile.
Greta de Jong
Historical Adviser
Greta-deJongDr. de Jong is an associate professor of history at the University of Nevada, Reno. Dr. de Jong completed her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in New Zealand and worked as an editor for eighteen months before coming to the United States to complete a Ph.D. degree at the Pennsylvania State University. She held a fellowship at the Carter G. Woodson Institute for Afro-American and African Studies at the University of Virginia and teaching positions at George Mason University and the University of Wisconsin-Parkside before joining the UNR faculty in 2002. Dr. de Jong’s research focuses on the connections between race and class and the ways that African Americans have fought for economic as well as political rights from the end of Reconstruction through the twenty-first century. Her book, A Different Day: African American Struggles for Justice in Rural Louisiana, 1900-1970 was published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2002. She is currently working on a study of rural black southerners in the post-civil rights era.
GRETA DE JONG, PH.D.
Professor
Contact Information
Email: gdejong@unr.edu
Phone: (775) 784-6455
Fax: (775) 784-6805
Office: Lincoln Hall 218
Mail Stop: 0308
Degrees
Ph.D., History, Pennsylvania State University, 1999
M.A., History, University of Waikato, 1990
B.A., History, University of Waikato, 1988
Biography
Professor de Jong completed her bachelor's and master's degrees in New Zealand and came to the United States in 1993 to complete a Ph.D. degree at Pennsylvania State University. She held a fellowship at the Carter G. Woodson Institute for Afro-American and African Studies at the University of Virginia and teaching positions at George Mason University and the University of Wisconsin-Parkside before taking a position at the University of Nevada, Reno in 2002. Her research and teaching focus on the connections between race and class and the ways that African Americans have fought for economic as well as political rights from the end of Reconstruction through the twenty-first century. She has written three books: A Different Day: African American Struggles for Justice in Rural Louisiana, 1900-1970 (University of North Carolina Press, 2002); Invisible Enemy: The African American Freedom Struggle after 1965 (Wiley-Blackwell, 2010); and You Can't Eat Freedom: Southerners and Social Justice after the Civil Rights Movement (University of North Carolina Press, 2016). Her current research examines tensions among family, community and justice that were evident during struggles to desegregate public schools in the mid-twentieth century United States.
Specialties
20th century African American history and social movements
United States since 1945
Racism in the post-civil rights era
Courses Taught
HIST 293C: Introduction to African American History
HIST 300: Historical Research and Writing
HIST 404C/604C: Social Movements in the United States
HIST 416B/616B: Contemporary America: The United States since 1945
HIST 433A/633A: The African American Freedom Struggle after 1865
HIST 479/679: Race and Ethnicity in American History
HIST 499: Senior Seminar History
HIST 722: Seminar in 20th-Century U.S. History
HIST 724: Topical Seminar in US History
CH 203: American Experiences and Constitutional Change
Publications
A Different Day: African American Struggles for Justice in Rural Louisiana, 1900-1970 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002)
Invisible Enemy: The African American Freedom Struggle after 1965 (Malden, Mass.: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010)
You Can't Eat Freedom: Southerners and Social Justice after the Civil Rights Movement (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016)
You Can't Eat Freedom: Southerners and
Social Justice after the Civil Rights
Movement
Evan Faulkenbury
Journal of Southern History.
83.3 (Aug. 2017): p747+.
COPYRIGHT 2017 Southern Historical Association
http://www.uga.edu/~sha
Full Text:
You Can't Eat Freedom: Southerners and Social Justice after the Civil Rights Movement. By Greta de Jong.
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016. Pp. xiv, 305. $34.95, ISBN 978-1-4696-2930-8.)
Greta de Jong's You Can't Eat Freedom: Southerners and Social Justice after the Civil Rights Movement is
one of the most important books about the black freedom struggle in a generation. If that feels like an
overstatement, it is because de Jong has accomplished a feat that few historians can claim: persuasively
articulating what went wrong after the civil rights legislative victories of the mid-1960s. De Jong joins a
chorus of scholars writing about this topic, but she convincingly spells out not only how agricultural
mechanization shriveled job and economic opportunities but also how government policies--enacted by
white conservatives with political power--purposefully undercut African American voting strength,
antipoverty programs, and business options to pressure black southerners to leave the South. African
Americans had won political and legal rights, yet without greater economic opportunities they remained
second-class citizens. "You can't eat freedom," de Jong quotes an activist from Alabama, making clear that
casting ballots only went so far to improve living conditions (p. 3). "White supremacists," de Jong argues,
"responded to black civil rights gains by accelerating the displacement of farm families from the land and
blocking efforts to provide alternate means of support" (p. 12).
A history of such analytical weight could easily spiral into pure outrage, but de Jong keeps the focus on
black social activists who organized against white supremacy, predatory capitalism, and antagonistic
politicians from 1965 up to today. Wide-ranging primary sources--including government reports, oral
histories, personal manuscripts, and organizational records of agricultural cooperatives--enable de Jong to
explain how residents who had been kicked off the land and made to struggle in states with slashed social
spending drew their resources and their labor together. She tells about the Southwest Alabama Farmers
Cooperative Association and how African Americans converted cotton fields to vegetable farms and sold
their produce collectively. She describes the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party and the Delta Ministry
organizing a Poor People's Conference in 1966 to draw attention to poverty and hunger by staging a sit-in
inside an air force base. And central to her narrative is the Federation of Southern Cooperatives (FSC), an
umbrella group that stretched across Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana, bringing together over one
hundred organizations and cooperative stores and operating a training center in Sumter County, Alabama.
The FSC received investment from the Office of Economic Opportunity and from private philanthropic
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organizations such as the Ford Foundation, but as conservatives rolled back the War on Poverty, financing
became scarce. Yet the FSC struggled on into the twenty-first century, working to help thousands of rural
black families. The South was their home, and they fought to stay.
Focusing on the cotton plantation regions of Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi, de Jong's book is about
the rural South, but she clarifies that right-wing policies aimed at black southerners affected people across
the United States. Her work takes the historiography of color-blind conservatism to a new level. As African
Americans won political rights through the civil rights movement, conservatives fashioned a new lingo
devoid of outright white supremacy and full of laissez-faire economics. In the South, de Jong writes, "The
emphasis on allowing the market to work its magic conveniently absolved plantation owners and political
leaders from responsibility for the social problems created by centuries of racist oppression" (p. 42). White
political leaders preached the evils of federal involvement, which conditioned many voters to allow their
representatives to gut antipoverty programs. Not only did conservatism discover color-blind rhetoric, but it
also rationalized that displacing African Americans was "a natural phenomenon that was beyond human
control [that] absolved planters from responsibility for the crisis, denied any need for redistributive
economic policies, and preserved the disparities in wealth produced by generations of exploiting black
people's labor" (p. 5).
In her conclusion, de Jong accurately labels what happened to rural black southerners after 1965 "a
humanitarian crisis" (p. 223). Without much outside help, they organized farming cooperatives to survive in
places where white leaders and landowners no longer needed or wanted them around. Within such a hostile
environment, African Americans held on. The attempt to displace black southerners, de Jong makes clear, is
one of the most important, yet understudied, reasons why the black freedom movement continues on as a
struggle.
Evan Faulkenbury
State University of New York at Cortland
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Faulkenbury, Evan. "You Can't Eat Freedom: Southerners and Social Justice after the Civil Rights
Movement." Journal of Southern History, vol. 83, no. 3, 2017, p. 747+. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A501078187/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=596dc12a.
Accessed 24 Dec. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A501078187
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De Jong, Greta. The invisible enemy: the
African American freedom struggle after
1965
D.C. Catsam
CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries.
48.8 (Apr. 2011): p1552.
COPYRIGHT 2011 American Library Association CHOICE
http://www.ala.org/acrl/choice/about
Full Text:
48-4663
E185
2009-520 CIP
De Jong, Greta. The invisible enemy: the African American freedom struggle after 1965. Wiley-Blackwell,
2010. 248p index afp ISBN 9781405167178, $99.95; ISBN 9781405167185 pbk, $29.95
Placing her work firmly within that of scholars of the "Long Civil Rights Movement," De Jong (Univ. of
Nevada, Reno) takes a thematic look at the struggle for civil rights from 1965 to the present. The author
recognizes that issues of race and economics are inextricably bound and that one cannot understand one
without addressing the other. This is a vital point that drives her lucid synthesis. De Jong examines how
race informed public policy and also how public policy overlooked issues of race. She looks at
transformations in the post-civil-rights era that created "invisible" (and thus deniable) racism; reveals the
diffuse nature of the struggle for racial equality after 1965; addresses the fraught question of affirmative
action; shows how race informs politics; and explicitly addresses struggles for economic justice. She
concludes with an attempt to place the US struggle within the context of global struggles for justice. The
book is an important contribution in understanding a still largely overlooked period of contemporary
history. Summing Up" Highly recommended. *** All levels/libraries.--D. C. Catsam, University of Texas of
the Permian Basin
Catsam, D.C.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Catsam, D.C. "De Jong, Greta. The invisible enemy: the African American freedom struggle after 1965."
CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, Apr. 2011, p. 1552. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A253387524/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=29ca4575.
Accessed 24 Dec. 2017.
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A Different Day: African American
Struggles for Justice in Rural Louisiana,
1900-1970
Jeannie Whayne
Journal of Southern History.
70.2 (May 2004): p464+.
COPYRIGHT 2004 Southern Historical Association
http://www.uga.edu/~sha
Full Text:
A Different Day: African American Struggles for Justice in Rural Louisiana, 1900-1970. By Greta de Jong.
(Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, c. 2002. Pp. xviii, 316. Paper, $19.95, ISBN
0-80785379-8; cloth, $49.95, ISBN 0-8078-2711-8.)
Greta de Jong has rendered a provocative analysis of the civil rights struggle in Louisiana between 1900 and
1970. Significantly, she has drawn on a small but growing body of literature that reaches beyond treatments
of the urban civil rights movement commonly focusing on the 1950s and 1960s. Traditional studies
typically take as their benchmark the Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka decision in 1954, but de Jong
dates the origins of the movement much earlier. In other words, de Jong has expanded the parameters of the
civil rights struggle in two directions: longitudinally and geographically. For de Jong the movement started
long before the 1950s, and it started not in Birmingham or any other town or city. It began in rural areas in
the early twentieth century with the everyday struggles of ordinary African Americans.
Focusing on the way in which rural African Americans responded to the class oppression that was their lot
on the plantations and farms of southeastern and northern Louisiana, de Jong draws on the scholarship of
political scientist James Scott and historians Eugene Genovese, Herbert Aptheker, and E. P. Thompson. As
she suggests, in order to understand the way in which oppressed people resist the forces arrayed against
them, one must expand the notion of political. She adopts Scott's term "infrapolitics," which she defines as
meaning the "subtle or unorganized forms of resistance such as creating their own cultural worlds and value
systems, working slowly or poorly, stealing from their employers, destroying property, running away or
quitting work, and occasionally engaging in violent attacks against their oppressors" (p. 6). Acknowledging
the problems inherent in reading too much "resistance" into the activities of African Americans and
questioning the validity of including rap singers, for example, as political activists, de Jong argues that in
her study "'resistance' and 'infrapolitics' refer to those actions short of organized, open protest that suggest
an awareness of the sources of oppression and were aimed at circumventing white supremacists' attempts to
keep African Americans powerless and poor" (p. 7).
There are many things to admire in this sympathetic and sophisticated analysis. For example, de Jong
selected southeastern and northern Louisiana because these were the areas targeted by the Congress of
Racial Equality (CORE) in the 1960s, and thus she is able to demonstrate how these largely urban activists
had to cope with a rural people long familiar with the struggle on a more intimate level and resistant to the
nonviolent policies advocated by CORE. For one thing, rural Louisiana's African American population
understood all too well that whites on the local level would make nonviolence problematic. As whites
burned and bombed, the natural instinct of many African Americans was to respond in kind. De Jong
writes, "The most common response of African Americans to the numerous drive-by shootings and
bombings carried out by white supremacists in black neighborhoods was to reach for their firearms" (p.
189). In fact, de Jong suggests that this instinct "to fight back ... was crucial to the" success of the
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movement in rural Louisiana (p. 193). Thus she argues, in the final analysis, that CORE had as much to
learn from those who had engaged in the long struggle there as rural Louisianians had to learn from CORE.
JEANNIE WHAYNE
University of Arkansas
Whayne, Jeannie
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Whayne, Jeannie. "A Different Day: African American Struggles for Justice in Rural Louisiana, 1900-
1970." Journal of Southern History, vol. 70, no. 2, 2004, p. 464+. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A117423145/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=0b6d6906.
Accessed 24 Dec. 2017.
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A Different Day: African American
Struggles for Justice in Rural Louisiana,
1900-1970
Giles Vandal
Journal of Social History.
37.2 (Winter 2003): p531+.
COPYRIGHT 2003 Oxford University Press
https://academic.oup.com/journals
Full Text:
By Greta de Jong (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2002, xvi plus 316 pp.).
The rise of civil right demands in the the first half of the twentieth century and the consolidation during the
1950s and 1960s of a political civil rights movement represent one of the major historical transformation
affecting American society. In this reviewer's opinion, dais often lively and quite detailed book provides a
fascinating account of the civil right movement in local rural in Louisiana and those who made it. In the
process, de Jong's broad and sensitive book reinstates the study of civil tights as a highly worthwhile
endeavor.
The thesis is straighforward and succinctly summarized by the author as she demonstrates through a close
look at CORE's activities in nine Louisiana rural parishes, how the civil right movement and strategy
differed largely in rural communities as compared to urban settings. Despite its limited parameters and
highly focused reseach design, it stands out as providing a persuasive account of the strengths and
weakenessses of the civil rights movement. The book displays an impressive range of research and an
admirable willingness to move beyond narrow civil rights history to provide the reader with a more
comprehensive view.
De Jong starts her study with an examination of the oppressive charater of Jim Crow and the degrading
consequence it had on African American activism. Besides providing a good description of African
American life under Jim Crow, she emphasizes the importance of the informal strategy of resistance
developped by African Americans in response to white supremacist violence. As a result, the particularly
strong qualities of the de Jong history are its broad, systematic and evenhanded coverage of such standard
subjects as the segregation laws, disfranchisment and limited economic opportunies offered to African
Americans. By her analysis of the involvement of white elites and officials in violence and lynchings and
their determination to limit education for African Americans, she clearly describes the mechanism by which
a labor system close to slavery persisted in Louisina until 1940.
De Jong persuasively shows how rural African American people developed by the turn of the century a
variety of strategies in order to circumvent plantation owners' efforts to deny them knowledge and power.
African Americans in rural Louisiana found in blues, churches and joke joints a respite from the harsh
realities of plantation life. De Jong vigorously argues that, despite the importance of their role in community
and political life, churches and fraternal societies were not strong enough to overcome white racism since
general poverty and powerlessness generally prevailed during the Jim Crow period.
De Jong shares the conventional view that in rural Louisiana, as well as the urban south, World War I
provided African Americans with an opportunity to challenge the repressive social system. As the Great
Migration of 1916-19 affected African American communities in the south, a small number chose to
organize themselves and openly challenge white society. On the other hand, de Jong also argues
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convincingly that the New Deal represents another important social upheaval: a period when African
Americans joined radical workers and farmers' movements to fight to end forced labor and peonage.
Although the intervention of the Federal authorities played a paramount role, de Jong convincingly argues
that African Americans achieved most progress when they themselves took up the fight. During World War
II, civil right leaders in rural Louisiana were quick to point out the contradiction between the fight for
democarcy overseas and the segregation, disfranchisement and violence they suffered at home. In this way,
they were able to rapidly obtain the prohibtion of discrimination in the Selective Service Act. As national
politics came to to favor African Americans' strength for emancipation, the latter were better placed than
ever before to intiate organized, sustained attacks on white supremacy.
The most original and important sections of de Jong book deal with the period after 1940. Supported and
encouraged by the Federal government, inspired by civil rights leaders and stimulated by their economic
upward mobility, African Americans launched the strongest attack so far against white supremacy. The GI
Bill and other federal programs had a profound effect along with the rise of a new African American middle
class in launching a powerful attack against discrimination in voting registration, segregation and
inadequate education.
De Jong shows that the economic transformation of the south after World War II, heralded by the
mechanization of the agriculture and the movement of manufacturing into rural areas, led to increased
wages and a rise in African Americans' living standards, despite white resistance and conitnued
discrimination. These underlying economic processes had a strong influence on the freedom struggle.
In her analysis of the role of CORE, de Jong demonstrates that not all African Americans shared the CORE
ideals about the best way to overcome white supremacists. In the process, the book includes a modest effort
to analyse the social composition of the civil rights movment at the local level in Louisiana. One of de
Jong's particularly interesting findings is the fact that the civil rights movement drew relatively more of its
activists from among landowners than from among professionals such as teachers and ministers. The latter
were reluctant to become involved since teachers were afraid of losing their jobs and ministers feared that
their churches could fall prey to arson.
De Jong's book not only offers a fresh look and adds new dimensions to the appreciation of the history of
civil right movement, but it also makes an important statement about the nature of the American south and
how the south came to grips with its demons. While political participation for African Americans and the
end of the use of violence as a systematic means of repression stand out as the main achievements of the
civil rights movement, de Jong notes that the fight for equal education was only partly achieved and
persistent poverty still represents an obstacle to progress. In particular she points out that the swing towards
a conservative domination over national politics led to a backlash against the ideas of the civil rights
movmeent during the 1970s. Despite these reverses, she argues that the movement had deep consequences
which profoundly affected the condition of African Americans in the south.
Giles Vandal
University de Sherbrooke
Vandal, Giles
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Vandal, Giles. "A Different Day: African American Struggles for Justice in Rural Louisiana, 1900-1970."
Journal of Social History, vol. 37, no. 2, 2003, p. 531+. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A111897856/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=52b92ff3.
Accessed 24 Dec. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A111897856
You Can’t Eat Freedom: A New Book on Rural South Activism after the Civil Rights Movement
By Ibram X. Kendi October 3, 2016 Comments Off
This post is part of a recurring blog series I am editing, which announces the release of selected new works in African American and African Diaspora History. Today is the official release date for You Can’t Eat Freedom: Southerners and Social Justice after the Civil Rights Movement, published by The University of North Carolina Press.
***
de-jong-author-photo-1The author of You Can’t Eat Freedom is Greta de Jong. Professor de Jong is an associate professor of history at the University of Nevada, Reno. She completed her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in New Zealand and worked as an editor for eighteen months before coming to the United States to complete a Ph.D. degree at the Pennsylvania State University. She held a fellowship at the Carter G. Woodson Institute for Afro-American and African Studies at the University of Virginia and teaching positions at George Mason University and the University of Wisconsin-Parkside before taking a position at the University of Nevada, Reno in 2002.
de Jong’s research focuses on the connections between race and class and the ways that African Americans have fought for economic as well as political rights from the end of Reconstruction through the twenty-first century. She has written two other books, A Different Day: African American Struggles for Justice in Rural Louisiana, 1900–1970 (University of North Carolina Press, 2002) and Invisible Enemy: The African American Freedom Struggle after 1965 (Wiley-Blackwell, 2010). Her current project is a study of the tensions among family, community, and justice that emerged during struggles over school desegregation in the mid-twentieth century.
getpart
Two revolutions roiled the rural South after the mid-1960s: the political revolution wrought by the passage of civil rights legislation, and the ongoing economic revolution brought about by increasing agricultural mechanization. Political empowerment for black southerners coincided with the transformation of southern agriculture and the displacement of thousands of former sharecroppers from the land. Focusing on the plantation regions of Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi, Greta de Jong analyzes how social justice activists responded to mass unemployment by lobbying political leaders, initiating antipoverty projects, and forming cooperative enterprises that fostered economic and political autonomy, efforts that encountered strong opposition from free market proponents who opposed government action to solve the crisis.
Making clear the relationship between the civil rights movement and the War on Poverty, this history of rural organizing shows how responses to labor displacement in the South shaped the experiences of other Americans who were affected by mass layoffs in the late twentieth century, shedding light on a debate that continues to reverberate today.
“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
***
Ibram Kendi: Did you face any challenges conceiving of, researching, writing, revising, publishing, or promoting this book? If so, please share those challenges and how you overcame them?
Greta de Jong: I did have trouble conceiving of the project in a way that made it manageable. I had studied the freedom struggle in Louisiana for my dissertation research and first book. Originally, my plan for You Can’t Eat Freedom was to examine how black southerners continued to fight for racial justice after the 1960s and the obstacles that white supremacists continued to place in their way. I expanded my geographical scope to include the plantation regions of Alabama and Mississippi as well as Louisiana, which meant it took longer to research than if I had chosen to focus on a single state. And there was so much to cover in the struggles over economic justice, education, social welfare policy, political power, and other concerns that continued in the late twentieth century. I also took a detour to write Invisible Enemy for Wiley-Blackwell, which meant that some chapters of this book were drafted years apart and at different stages of my thinking on these topics.
Working on Invisible Enemy in between my first book and this one delayed completion of this project for several years, but it also helped me to develop a better sense of what I wanted to do and the contributions I was seeking to make to the historiography. In the end, it all came together after I narrowed the focus down to the problem of labor displacement and the ways that plantation owners, social justice activists, and federal policy makers responded to that. Once I did that, it was much easier to revise the earlier chapters and write new ones that would frame everything into a coherent whole.
Invisible Enemy: The African American Freedom Struggle after 1965, by Greta de Jong. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010. 248 pages. $29.95, paper. The History Teacher Volume 44 Number 2 February 2011
304The History TeacherIn Invisible Enemy: The African American Freedom Struggle, Greta de Jong, Associate Professor of History at the University of Nevada, Reno, offers a compelling narrative about the roots of black inequality in the United States and African Americans’ responses to these developments in the closing decades of the twentieth century. She argues that institutional racism and racial inequality were fixtures of the American republic from its beginnings and remain fixtures in American society in the early twenty-first century. The Civil Rights Movement of the mid-twentieth century undermined legal obstacles to African Americans’ search for freedom and justice, she suggests, but did little to break down the “mechanisms that continued to allocate wealth in racially biased ways” (p. 1). Thus, after Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (1954), the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and black activism of the 1950s and 1960s, when white policy makers, legislators, and large segments of the white population were calling for a color-blind society, millions of black people in the United States remained victims of racism that may have changed in appearance but did not change in its debilitating consequences of black geographic isolation, high unemployment, compromised health, and disparities in wealth acquisition. The gaps in life chances between blacks and whites led many to participate in activist pursuits to push for multifaceted and far-reaching local, state, and nationwide reform to address institutional racism even in the face of white opposition.The narrativeis organized into eight thematic chapters with a loose chronology. Chapters one, two, and three look at the historical origins of racism, state-supported segregation, and how anti-black policies developed and became entrenched in the United States. Chapter four provides the reader with a survey of the political issues that post-Civil Rights Movement activists confronted from 1965 to the early twenty-first century, including, but not limited to, education reform, the criminalization of black people, and the environmental justice movement. Chapter five considers the national debate about affirmative action, while chapters six and seven discuss attempts to reform electoral politics and redistribute wealth, respectively. The final chapter reminds the reader that the African American freedom struggle and the attempts to contain it by local, state, and federal governments and white popular opinion must be understood as part of larger trends in global capitalism, transnational corporations, and international political movements.The value of the book lies in de Jong pushing the reader to question insipid notions of color-blindness and reconsider the so-called meritocratic nature of our society—ideas to which broad segments of contemporary society cling, but have little evidence to support. The era she discusses and the myths she dispels should be incorporated into every United States history class from grade school to the university. In this way, her ideas and evidence would expand easy textbook renderings of modern United States history. Consequently, this book is necessary reading for anyone who teaches post-1865 United States history or courses wherein the Civil Rights Movement and black activism are discussed, including grade school, middle school, high school, college, and university instructors.The book itself, however, would only be suitable for college and university students examining contemporary developments in United States history and politics. Because so many traditional college-age students unquestioningly hold to notions of color-blindness and tend to see racism as individually based rather than institutionally situated, instructors should guide them through the book carefully and explain de Jong’s findings. Since one of the author’s goals is to document the continued existence of racially based inequalities and African Americans’ responses to them, one helpful method of guiding students through the book would be to consult several of the many primary sources de Jong utilizes as the students read each chapter. This will allow students to situate the documents chronologically, determine African Americans’ concerns and goals, and extend the timeline for the African American freedom struggle. They can then see history unfold,
Reviews 305place black people in this unfolding process as active participants, and use de Jong as an historical interpreter.De Jong has demonstrated a deft understanding of modern United States history through a compelling, well-supported, concisely written, and timely narrative. Invisible Enemy discusses an era in United States history that has only recently come under evaluation by historians and de Jong has succeeded in expanding the boundaries of our knowledge, especially the African American experience.Salem State University Jamie J. Wilson