Teona Williams ’12 Delivers a Talk on Black Feminism, Hunger, and the Fight for Freedom

At Bowdoin, Williams majored in history and environmental studies. She earned a master's degree in environmental justice from the University of Michigan and a PhD in history and African American studies from Yale University. She is currently an assistant professor of geography at Rutgers.

Bowdoin Associate Professor of History and Environmental Studies Matthew Klingle introduced his former advisee before passing the microphone to his current student, Nicole Craighead '26, for a full introduction.

"One of the rewards of teaching is seeing students grow and develop and become their own people," Klingle said. "But another gift of knowing Teona this long is that I now have a colleague and a potential collaborator."

Williams began by explaining that her talk drew from her forthcoming book, which explores how Black women from rural communities "theorize and respond to disaster."

The particular chapter she drew on for the lecture focuses on how communities in the Mississippi Delta organized for food and land soverignty to combat food insecurity between 1966 and 1977. This topic, she added, is a particularly urgent one to revisit given recent cuts to SNAP benefits in the US and ongoing climate-related crises that are disrupting food supply chains globally.

Much of Williams's presentation centered on the work of Fannie Lou Hamer, a civil rights and food justice activist whom Williams described as her "chosen ancestor and life guide."

In 1968, Hamer founded the Freedom Farm Cooperative (FFC), a 640-acre collective that offered provisions to more than 10,000 families in Delta counties between 1968 and 1973. The cooperative also offered college scholarships for Black students and free health care for Black women.

"Black communities have long created geographies of self-reliance-spaces where people resist anti-Black food systems through mutual aid, urban and rural gardens, and cultural resilience," Williams said. "In this way, the FFC stands as one of the most powerful and early examples of this tradition."

The Freedom Farm Cooperative was responding to widespread hunger in the region, which Williams argued was "racialized and intentionally constructed."

"[It was] a political and economic weapon used to control Black labor. And when Black labor turned into surplus labor due to mechanization and the collapse of the sharecropping system, hunger became a means to remove Black people, who could now vote for the very first time, from the state of Mississippi."

Williams traced the roots of this displacement to agricultural automation in the 1940s, which forced many Black laborers off the land while white landowners benefited from government subsidies and loans that Black farmers were largely denied.

She also critiqued the origins of federal food relief programs, noting that they emerged from efforts to manage agricultural surpluses rather than from a coordinated plan to address hunger. "Domestic food aid programs emerged not as an effort to address poverty or hunger, but as a convenient mechanism to offload surplus commodities without the political fallout from publicly destroying food," she said. "Hunger relief was a secondary, if not incidental, concern."

Williams explained that state and county authorities were given wide discretion over who received food aid-an arrangement that, in the Jim Crow South, reinforced "systems of racial and economic control." She said it became evident that one way white Southerners tried to curb the Civil Rights Movement was to use food as a weapon.

Williams closed her talk with a reflection on freedom. "Nobody's free until we all are free, and food, like all other necessities, is a human right," she said. "I want to dedicate this talk to everyone who knows, deep down in their bones, that the only way to free the people is to feed the people."