Aiken Lecture featuring Bobby J. Smith II

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Founded in 1935, the New Farmers of America (NFA) was the first national organization for Black farm boys studying vocational agriculture at segregated public high schools across the South—and as far north as New Jersey.

Sociologist and award-winning author Bobby J. Smith II charts new terrain in Black history by uncovering the hidden story of the organization, which grew to an annual membership of more than 55,000 members and empowered Black boys to challenge racial exclusion in agriculture by becoming farmers and pursuing careers in agriculture. But by 1965, the NFA had vanished—unraveled by a hostile takeover by the predominantly white Future Farmers of America (FFA). The NFA, and the generation of Black agricultural leaders it helped shape, were largely erased from the historical record. In vivid prose, Smith confronts the haunting paradox of the NFA: an organization that transformed rural Black life yet remains almost entirely absent from American memory. Reconstructing the NFA’s rise, influence, and disappearance, Black Farm Boys reshapes the history of the Black agricultural experience and restores a vital chapter in the story of education, rural life, and racial justice in the United States.

 Language provided by publisher.

The Aiken Lecture Series is supported by the Lucy Rucker Aiken Foundation.

Dr. Bobby J. Smith II is an award-winning author, social scientist, and Associate Professor of African American Studies at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Trained as a sociologist with a background in agricultural economics, Dr. Smith’s research examines how Black people’s historical and contemporary relationships to agriculture and food have shaped their lives and the world. He is the James Beard–nominated author of Food Power Politics: The Food Story of the Mississippi Civil Rights Movement and Black Farm Boys: The Untold Story of the New Farmers of America. Dr. Smith’s other work has appeared in outlets including Time, The Conversation, Word In Black, and Journal of Black Studies.