Catfish Dream: Ed Scott's Fight for His Family Farm and Racial Justice in the Mississippi Delta (Southern Foodways Alliance Studies in Culture, People, and Place Ser.) - Hardcover

Rankin, Julian

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0820353604 ISBN 13: 9780820353609

Publisher: University of Georgia Press, 2018

Synopsis

Catfish Dream centers around the experiences, family, and struggles of Ed Scott Jr. (born in 1922), a prolific farmer in the Mississippi Delta and the first ever nonwhite owner and operator of a catfish plant in the nation.

Both directly and indirectly, the economic and political realities of food and subsistence affect the everyday lives of Delta farmers and the people there. Ed’s own father, Edward Sr., was a former sharecropper turned landowner who was one of the first black men to grow rice in the state. Ed carries this mantle forth with his soybean and rice farming and later with his catfish operation, which fed the black community both physically and symbolically. He provides an example for economic mobility and activism in a region of the country that is one of the nation’s poorest and has one of the most drastic disparities in education and opportunity, a situation especially true for the Delta’s vast African American population. With Catfish Dream Julian Rankin provides a fascinating portrait of a place through his intimate biography of Scott, a hero at once so typical and so exceptional in his community.

About this title

Book Description

A portrait of an African American family’s life in the Delta

About the Author

JULIAN RANKIN is the recipient of the Southern Foodways Alliance’s first annual residency at Rivendell Writers Colony and is the director of the Center for Art & Public Exchange at the Mississippi Museum of Art in Jackson.

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Georgia Press
• Publication date: 2018
• ISBN 10: 0820353604
• ISBN 13: 9780820353609
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 160