Black Communities’ Struggle for Safe, Nutritious Food During Civil Rights Era

The recent release of the Dietary Guidelines for Americans, 2025–2030, by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services poses a challenge for communities and individuals struggling with food insecurity. The new guidelines flip the traditional food pyramid on its head, recommending increased intake of costly red meat, whole dairy products, healthy fats, and whole grains.

But these guidelines create several blind spots, overlooking the prevalence of poor-quality food and limited grocery store choices in low-income communities — a reality for the 18.3 million U.S. households facing food insecurity. For these Americans, the real question is not what to eat, but whether they have access to safe, high-quality food — a question of food justice.

This concern is not new.

Expanding the Meaning of Black Protest

During the civil rights and Black power movements, Black communities across the country pushed to expand the meaning of Black protest to include access to a reliable, nutritious food supply. From the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) to the Black Panther Party, food emerged as a critical site of social, political, and economic struggle. 

In Chicago, food came into sharp focus through the work of the Women of Operation Breadbasket, the direct-action unit of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference’s (SCLC) Operation Breadbasket in the North. The team of Black women placed the quality of food available in grocery stores in their neighborhoods at the center of their fight for racial and economic justice. 

Founded in 1967 by Rev. Willie T. Barrow, a co-founder of Operation Breadbasket alongside Rev. Jesse L. Jackson Sr., the Women of Operation Breadbasket launched a Bad Meat Campaign that same year. Members included prominent figures such as civil rights activist and international labor leader Rev. Addie L. Wyatt, who helped mobilize Black mothers and community members on the South and West Sides in protests against grocers who sold rotten meat and inadequate produce in Black neighborhoods, transforming grocery aisles into battlegrounds for civil rights.

Supermarket Civil Rights

This campaign reveals what I call supermarket civil rights: a highly visible form of consumer activism through which Black communities challenged and exposed grocery stores as contested sites of power, where food access was routinely compromised and negotiated during the civil rights era.

Robert Culp’s 1969 documentary “Operation Breadbasket” provides footage of supermarket civil rights. In the film, the Women of Operation Breadbasket confront a grocery store owner and a meat manager about hazardous conditions in the meat department at a D&S Super Markets store. 

The documentary included a scene of Rev. Calvin Morris, Associate Director of Operation Breadbasket, giving a speech in front of the meat section, as the camera showed maggots flying around spoiled meat in brown boxes and on dirty floors, and unclean machinery with meat stuck in it.

The group’s campaign made clear that bad meat was a significant health concern at the intersection of race, economics, and community well-being. The supplying of bad meat in Black neighborhoods reflected how white grocers valued Black patrons: unsafe working conditions, heightened risk of food-borne illness, and the manipulation of Black purchasing power.

Food Power Politics

But the bad meat campaign offered Black neighborhoods a site to navigate what I call food power politics — the struggle over how food is weaponized in Black communities during times of social unrest and how they fight back.

In one of the documentary’s final scenes, Barrow and Morris returned to tour the same D&S store months later. The transformation is unmistakable: high-quality meat, stocked meat display fridges, new machinery, updated cleaning systems, and cleaner aisles. 

Although the Women of Operation Breadbasket’s Bad Meat campaign did not dismantle racism and food disparities in the city, it dramatized how Black women could fight for civil rights in the least likely of places — inside the supermarket.

Operation Breadbasket closed in Chicago in 1971, and its founder, Jackson, converted it into Operation People United to Save Humanity — later changed from “Save” to “Serve” (PUSH) — which became the Rainbow PUSH Coalition in 1996, and is still operating.  Many members of the Women of Operation Breadbasket continued their activism in this organization.

A Right to Safe, Nutritious Food

By demanding dignity in Black food experiences, the Women of Operation Breadbasket asserted the right to safe and nutritious food, a central pillar of today’s food justice movement. Learning from their practical actions expands the blueprint of methods that can help food justice activists and organizations today as they struggle to redress systematic inequity at the nexus of food disparities, poor diet quality, and environmental degradation. 

The Chicago Food Policy Action Council carries forward work of the Women of Operation Breadbasket, confronting food insecurity through several efforts such as the Metro Chicago Good Food Purchasing Initiative, that fosters a Chicagoland food system defined as “accessible, equitable, racially just, healthy, fair, local, humane, and sustainable” in the face of shifting SNAP policies and rising grocery costs. 

Beyond Chicago, the National Black Food and Justice Alliance (NBFJA) offers a national infrastructure, rooted in Black food experiences, actively mobilizing farmers, organizers, policymakers, advocates, and related stakeholders to reshape how Black communities interface with U.S. foodscapes and imagine brighter, equitable food futures for all.  

The history of Supermarket civil rights and its living legacies remind us that the food story of Black life matters. Food justice has always been built from the ground up, and remembering this history is essential to shaping what comes next.

This story was originally published on Word In Black on February 2nd, 2026