EBOOK
Catfish Dream
Ed Scott's Fight for His Family Farm and Racial Justice in the Mississippi Delta
Julian RankinSeries: Southern Foodways Alliance Studies in Culture, People, and Place(0)
About
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.
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.
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Reviews
"Catfish Dream is a significant resource on the history of race in the Mississippi Delta. Julian Rankin eloquently describes how Ed Scott courageously struggles with the bureaucracy of racism, only to discover that the system is embedded in our society at both the local and the national levels. Most important, Rankin shows how Scott and his family resisted and ultimately defeated that system."
William Ferris, author of The South in Color: A Visual Journey
"Early on in Bill Belleville's exploration of Florida's St. Johns River he asks: 'Could I still find an authentic experience here, in a go-fast state that seems either in a swoon with 'progress' and contrived theme-worldish fun or randomly sullied by crime and violence?' Belleville's rich and detailed book about his trip downstream, River of Lakes, is thus cast as a quest for the 'real' Florida, a
Smithsonian Magazine
"In his debut work, Catfish Dream, Julian Rankin tells an important story. Anyone interested in agriculture, the American South, foodways, and African American enterprise will be fascinated by this book. Mr. Ed Scott is a hero our country needs to learn about, and this portrait of him is strong and beautifully written. His situation and his fate are central to the American experiment. I cannot rec
Randall Kenan, author of The Fire This Time