This reinvention pushed more than three million farmers and their families off the land, including more than half a million African-Americans, abetted by discrimination against black farmers by the Department of Agriculture. Mrs. Hamer argued that a Johnson administration shift from commodity food distribution to a discounted food stamp purchase program, which too few could afford, had made matters worse. In a letter urging President Lyndon Johnson to bring back the troops he had sent to Vietnam and the Dominican Republic, Mrs. Hamer wrote, “If this society of yours is a ‘Great Society,’ God knows I’d hate to live in a bad one.”

For black Southerners, relationships to the land were tangled and tragic. Mrs. Hamer’s life embodied those tragedies. While cropping the Delta, her enslaved grandmother Liza Bramlett had given birth to 23 children. All but three resulted from rapes by white men. Lou Ella Townsend, Mrs. Hamer’s mother, was one of those three.

To earn a living during the Depression, Mrs. Townsend scavenged scrap cotton from picked-over fields, slaughtered pigs for neighbors in exchange for parts and tended a backyard garden. When she worked the fields, she hid a gun in her lunch pail to protect her children. To feed her family, she cut the skin of potatoes and the top of beets and served them with bread and salted onions. She also washed clothes in exchange for milk and butter.

Throughout Mrs. Hamer’s life, poverty and hunger would haunt her. As a child working the cotton fields of Mississippi, in bare feet wrapped with rags, she had gone hungry. When one of her daughters was a teenager, doctors fed her glucose to stave off malnutrition. Looking back on her mother’s work as an itinerant butcher, Mrs. Hamer recognized that livestock husbandry could be a solution.

With the help of Dorothy Height, the president of the National Council of Negro Women, she developed a Pig Bank in Sunflower County in 1969. Conceived as a complement to Freedom Farm, the idea was innovative and, for the moment and place, odd. Beginning with 35 gilts and five boars, she gave pregnant pigs to Delta families who agreed to care for them, return the mother pig to the bank and keep the remaining piglets as dividends. Poor families butchered those dividends once they reached an acceptable weight.

Instead of buying ham and lard from a plantation commissary, Ms. Height bragged, Delta women went a year without store-bought pork. The Pig Bank built pride. “I don’t be ashamed when someone comes here,” Mrs. Hamer said in 1972, “and I can go in the kitchen and fry some ham.”

By year two, 100 families slaughtered pigs in the fall, froze the meat and roasted hams for winter suppers. A cooperative gardening project followed. “When you’ve got 400 quarts of greens and gumbo soup canned for the winter, nobody can push you around or tell you what to say or do,” Mrs. Hamer said.