Books by "J. Eric Smith"
2 books found
The Rise and Fall of Kansas Wesleyan University Basketball
by Jerry J. Jones
2017 · Xlibris Corporation
One hundred and sixteen years have passed since Kansas Wesleyan University (KWU) formed basketball teams known as the Wesleyans, the Methodists, the Preachers, and now, the Coyotes. Fathers, sons, and grandsons have worn the purple and gold colors, winning and losing but always striving to represent the university in a most positive manner. Head coaches had been students, middle school, high school, and college teachers. Like the players themselves, the coaches had come from different states, scattered in all directions. But they were here in Salina back in 1901 and continuing on in 2017 as teammates and brothers of the basketball, bound together by the mutual story that is Kansas Wesleyan basketball.
This book unearths a food story buried deep within the soil of American civil rights history. Drawing on archival research, interviews, and oral histories, Bobby J. Smith II re-examines the Mississippi civil rights movement as a period when activists expanded the meaning of civil rights to address food as integral to sociopolitical and economic conditions. For decades, white economic and political actors used food as a weapon against Black sharecropping communities in the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta, but members of these communities collaborated with activists to transform food into a tool of resistance. Today, Black youth are building a food justice movement in the Delta to continue this story, grappling with inequalities that continue to shape their lives. Drawing on multiple disciplines including critical food studies, Black studies, history, sociology, and southern studies, Smith makes critical connections between civil rights activism and present-day food justice activism in Black communities, revealing how power struggles over food empower them to envision Black food futures in which communities have the full autonomy and capacity to imagine, design, create, and sustain a self-sufficient local food system.