by Daniel Johnson
May 10, 2025
In Mississippi’s Delta, fresh produce returns to the shelves at J’s Grocery—thanks to local farmers, community organizers, and a vision to reclaim food justice.
Clarksdale, Mississippi, the setting of Ryan Coogler’s blockbuster film Sinners, is enjoying a moment of newfound media attention. However, its residents are fighting for food justice — in a town that often doesn’t have access to fresh vegetables — through J’s Grocery, the only Black-owned supermarket in the Clarksdale area.
According to The Guardian, the supermarket — an established presence in Clarksdale since 1997 — underwent more than a year of renovations before reopening to the community on May 2. Thanks to a partnership between local farmers and owner Al Jones, the store now offers fresh produce for the first time.
Jones told the outlet that the renovation was needed to support the collaboration because the store was often too hot for them to sell fresh produce. “We started with a storefront, then we added a piece on the back. But we still didn’t have fresh vegetables. The store was too hot all the time to carry vegetables,” Jones said.
Novo Nordisk, the pharmaceutical giant based in Denmark; Partnership for a Healthier America (PHA), a nonprofit that focuses on providing access to healthy food; Rootswell, a group based in the Mississippi Delta that focuses on shifting food apartheid systems; and other food justice groups came together to work on the new fresh food stocks. A collaboration between Jones and the local farmers reshaped the community’s ability to reliably access fresh food.
Noreen Springstead, PHA’s president and CEO, noted the juxtaposition between what the groups were doing to support the local Clarksdale community and the federal government pulling funding for various federal divisions at the opening of the store.
“At a time in our country when the federal government is just pulling money back everywhere, we invested in people and community,” Springstead said.
Clarksdale lost its only grocery store, a Kroger, in 2017. Although residents wanted another big box store to take its place, Tyler Yarborough, the director of Mississippi Delta programs for PHA, and some others, wanted the town to get back to its locally owned, locally operated roots that also featured storefronts serviced by a number of Chinese, Lebanese, and Italian immigrants who came to call Clarksdale home, as depicted in Coogler’s film.
“It is in our food-system history of having these neighborhood corner stores,” Yarborough told The Guardian, as he noted that the Brickyard neighborhood and downtown Clarksdale once had 12 such shops. “This project is honoring that legacy and reminding us that we can own our food and the stores that we shop from.”
Clarksdale, a town of nearly 14,00, still remains primarily Black, and although the Mississippi Delta has abundant farmland, there are gaps in what the region produces and what ends up on the tables of the community, according to Robbie Pollard, one of the farmers who sells his produce at J’s Grocery.
Farms in the Mississippi Delta “produce a lot of commodity crops, like corn, soybean, cotton. They don’t produce a lot of food that we eat,” Pollard said. “We’re trying to change the landscape to start producing more food in the Delta, like converting some of that land that’s used for row-crop production.”
He continued, “It feels good to just be able to offer people the types of food that they’re looking for, not just trying to push something off to them. Being able to provide them with a lot of the food that they grew up on – it’s an honor to be able to provide fresh produce to my community.”
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