Introduction, Freedom Farmers

Black farmers have formed the backbone for agriculture in the United States, from its earliest roots in slavery of the 17th century, through The Great Migration, Jim Crow, and into the modern era.  This essay traces the history of black farmers through the lens of works by historians of their fight for equal rights, including Isabel Wilkerson, Director of the Narrative Non-Fiction Program at Boston University, Jeff Harris, an attorney, and historian who at one time acted as legal representative of the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), and Professor Monica M. White at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, teaching environmental justice.  Collectively, black farmers have a history and presence in American life whose search for equality and justice has mirrored and even borrowed from the Civil Rights movement.  This untold history invites the participant to see black farmers as people deeply rooted in and ‘of the land,’ historically, and magnanimous and careful stewards of community-based farming and, although limited in number, in big agribusiness today.  The search for justice within these communities and its parallels and cooperation with the Civil Rights movement is brought to life by the authors.  Dr. Wilkerson provides insights into the structure of activism and cooperation that canvassed the Southern United States, lifting many thousands out of poverty and assisting with food banks, jobs, and other community efforts in her book Freedom Farmers: Agricultural Resistance and the Black Freedom Movement (2018). Harris, as legal counsel for the USDA during the 1990’s shepherded the lawsuits brought about by black farmer’s and their advocates through the courts, presents a human side to these events in Just Harvest: The Story of How Black Farmers Won the Largest Civil Rights Case against the U.S. Government.  In-line is an interview with Professor White from 2008 that offers insight into events of The Great Migration during an interview with famed historian Robert Louis Gates, Jr. This event helped propel black farmers into view of civil rights advocates, supercharging the tactics and organizational methods that helped make the black farmer movement successful in their fight for equality under the law in the face of great adversity. And writer and freelance photographer, with Edwin Marty, a modern urban farmer, share an overview of successful cooperative efforts in urban agriculture that reflect in the community-based economically oriented lessons from the civil rights era in Breaking Through Concrete: Building an Urban Farm Revival (2012).  Collectively, these authors present a history of black farmers, stories from the mouths of those involved in the black farmer movement, and renewal and revival in the 21st century that speak to broader solutions about equality and justice for all.

Historiography, The Great Migration

Since African American people first arrived in North and South America as slaves, historical narratives and a sense of community have propelled them, and similarly, the rest of humanity, to be ‘of the land.’ Besides their unspeakable treatment as chattel slaves, the resultant war, and Reconstruction, black farmers have persisted as members of communities, operating networks for food distribution among others and slowly realizing the American dream founded in land ownership.  As both acts of survival and resistance, black famers have engaged in all aspects of rural life as providers, caretakers of the land, and political entities.  Activist and founder of the Freedom Farm Cooperative, created at the outset of the modern civil rights movement in 1967, illuminated this notion clearly when she proclaimed, “down where we are, food is used as a political weapon. But if you have a pig in your backyard, if you have some vegetables in your garden, you can feed yourself and your family, and nobody can push you around.  If we have something like some pigs and some gardens and a few things like that, even if we have no jobs, we can eat and we can look after our families.” These sentiments are universal and speak to economic and cultural yearnings, as well as stability and structure in people’s lives that was expressed in the civil rights movement and other movements that still operate today. This yearning found its expression in the civil rights era and featured in the black farmer movement similarly.  For a theoretical framework used to illuminate on this topic, this analysis turns to Dr. Monica M. White, who explains that collective agency and community resilience (CACR) is one approach that builds upon and amplifies the social movement concept of everyday “strategies of resistance.” It does this by “offering new feminist, collective, community, and political dimensions, and the framework of CACR captures the activities community members enact as a means to be self-reliant and self-sufficient. ‘The communities [described herein] enacted CACR using three primary strategies…these are (1) commons as praxis, (2) prefigurative politics, and (3) economic autonomy.” Dr. White goes on to define these elements of the strategy for making communities self-reliant self-sufficient, detailing commons as praxis as a practice that “engages and contests dominant practices of ownership, consumerism, and individualism and replaces them with shared social status and shared identities of race and class.” Specifically, it is a an organizing strategy that emphasizes community well-being and wellness for the benefit of all.  The second element is prefigurative politics involving a strategy of re-thinking political discourse that is democratic and includes processes of self-reflection.  And finally, the third element of this theory envisions economic autonomy as a critical dimension of collective agency and community resilience.  Taken together, this theoretical framework serves as a break from past efforts of black farmers working across unknown vectors of time and space to deliver community-building food security initiatives and places them in a new light parallel with the civil rights activity of the 1960s and later. For some perspective, we consider the immediate history of black activism and agency in the story of The Great Migration.  The Great Migration, as Isabel Wilkerson, author of The Warmth of Other Sunds: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration, explained in her interview with Henry Louis Gates, Jr in 2010, was in response to political oppression by white Southerners.  “Even for White people who might have wanted to play checkers with somebody who was of a different race, they couldn’t do it.  That system was controlling of everybody.” She goes on to describe the migrants.  “They were country people, country folk. When they got to the North, they stood out; they didn’t easily blend in with the people who were already there. But that didn’t mean that they didn’t come to work hard. That was all they knew if you think about it. Particularly in the South, when you’re talking about World War I, the depression years, World War II—these were sharecroppers who often were merely working for the right to stay on the land that they were farming. So, they were used to working very hard and not being paid at all. And even those who were working and had jobs as janitors, maids, domestics, yard boys, whatever they might have been, were underpaid. Even the professionals were being woefully underpaid. Most of the teachers in the South at that time were being paid forty percent of a full salary, openly without apology by the powers that be, for doing the same thing that their White counterparts were doing as teachers. So, they were being woefully underpaid for their work, and they came to these cities in order to survive, in order to make it, and make life better for themselves and their children."  She talked with Dr. Gates about Northern black people as having to be successful after leaving the South, and eventually working their way into the culture, generating new art forms such as Jazz, among other cultural and social contributions.  In the South, ministers and other principals encouraged black people to stay. “Frederick Douglass famously said that a defection or a departure from the South would be a ‘disheartening surrender.’”  Reflecting on the Great Migration as a national migration, Wilkerson envisioned the exchange and movement of ideas and people like multiple “streams” flowing up and down the east coast, helping to underscore the affinity for the North and the drop in the numbers of black farmers and their families during the 1940s.  But today, she notes, the migration is reversed, with new life and new contributors pouring into the South, which bodes well for both traditional and urban farmers. “I do believe that it is a circular thing. I think that as African Americans begin looking at the genealogy, as in the work that you are doing, and they want to share that with their own children, where do they have to go to find it? Returning to the place of the ancestors is a way to reclaim one’s history, one’s culture. And it is a more welcoming place than it was at the time. In some ways it is more welcoming and certainly more livable than many parts of the harsher, anonymous northern cities that have become very challenging for people… This whole approach and focus on migration feels like it is one expression of yearning to be free.” Armed with this information, readers understand that enormous impact on Southern activists, including farmers, The Great Migration left in its wake.

Narrative, Agency and Resilience

Returning to Professor White and her narrative, the reader discovers in-depth Fannie Lou Hamer. The Freedom Farm Cooperative (FFC) Fannie founded in 1967 would eventually give way to bigger programs and initiatives by the Federal government before its demise in 1976.  Nevertheless, the FFC was a key driver and model for the civil rights movement writ broad across Mississippi and the Southern U.S.  Fannie Lou was a pioneer in the civil rights movement and exported here knowledge of urban resistance tactics to the rural farming South.  “In 1962, Hamer attended a mass meeting sponsored by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in Ruleville, Mississippi and was among the first to volunteer as a field organizer to coordinate and organize the voter education and registration drives,” notes White.  After returning from the South in the mid-1960s Fannie Lou set about organizing the Freedom Farm Cooperative’s mission, including cooperative and resistance-oriented tactics that involved building affordable, clean, and safe housing, creating an entrepreneurial clearinghouse – a small business incubator, and developing and agricultural cooperative.  This cooperative would meet food needs for the most vulnerable community members. This activity caught the eye of organizers up and down the East coast further informing Hamer with developing strategies and activism about black civil rights and the rights of black farmers. Black agricultural cooperatives modeled on the FFC were essential to the black farm rights movement and show how engaging in community development efforts worked as a strategy of resistance. For example, the Tufts-Delta Medical Center in Mound Bayou was formed in cooperation with the Office of Economic Opportunity, a grassroots effort started in Mound Bayou and having as a key supporter the North Bolivar County Farm Cooperative (NBCFC).  Cooperatives often owned business, such as those involved in the production of dashikis and leather bags, which were in turn sold through co-op owned stores. White comments, “The cooperative movement was an outgrowth of the civil rights movement, cooperatives like Freedom Farm Cooperative and North Bolivar County Farmers Cooperative spread in the late 1960’s.  Like Martin Luther King’s Poor People’s Campaign, the cooperatives moved beyond the prevalent emphasis on civil rights and voting rights to address economic injustice, lack of jobs, disparate wealth, and an absence of opportunity for self-determined economics and businesses.  Both movements realized that addressing economic inequality and developing economic independence were intertwined…” Collective agency and community resilience were keys to success for the black farmer movements of the 1960’s as they are for social justice movements today. An example from the modern black farmer movement of today is the Detroit Black Community Food Security Network (DBCFSN), organized by a community of African Americans “who had been dismissed, whose labor had been exploited and discarded, and who struggled to access low quality food and other necessities…” DBCFSN “mobilized the black community for self-determination and articulated a community-based response…which began with conversations about community food sovereignty and security and about offering African Americans a change to participate in the redevelopment of [the] city,” resulting in a communitywide organization that promotes “day-to-day work grounded in an antiracist, anticapitalistic mindset and emphasizes cooperative effort and collective wealth building” in a modern urban environment, mirroring the model used on farms in Georgia and Mississippi in the 1950’s.  While supporting a small registration of members, these members have an impact on the national and international food justice conversation.  They focus on five substantive areas including the development of a citywide food policy, education, economics, marketing as used by farmers, and using agriculture “as a strategy to rebuild community.” An urban farming cooperative has been embraced in Detroit, named the D-Town, and has become a staple for people since many grocery stores have left the area. “We tend to be more familiar with the history of slavery, sharecropping, and tenant farming and the exploitation and oppression agriculture involved. That history is full of pain, trauma, exploitation, and even death.  But the blossoming and expansion of the current African America urban agricultural movement encourages us to dig deeper…and example what we thought we know about black people’s relationship to the land.” Farmers in Mississippi learned directly about agitating for change from the Freedom Riders, people who drove to the Southern United States to show solidarity with farmers.  These people mattered, the author explains, their labor and land resources provided support for other activists in areas such as voting rights and the fight against segregation. Fannie Lou Hamer’s Freedom Farm Cooperative offers an example of the benefits of pooling resources from within a community to build a cooperative agricultural civil rights movement.  Similarly, the North Bolivar County Farmers Cooperative, which operated similarly but on a countywide level, helped lift tens of thousands of people out of poverty, as well as providing health care and educational resources previously lacking in the black farming communities it served. “"When black farmers in the South in the 1960s tried to vote and were not allowed to – and were evicted from their plots of land for making the attempt – the collective helped them respond to that crisis in a way that was profoundly political,” emphasizing the role of resilience as a catalyst for change. “Freedom Farmers excavates the history of more than a century of African American farmers whose labor, on the land and in community, has been ignored.  But it also looks forward, for it aims to offer context, support, and suggestions to urban food activists like those in Detroit,” and elsewhere.

From a legal historical standpoint, a focus on the changing legal landscape and remediating past discriminatory conduct fell to Greg Francis, and undersecretary in the U.S. Department of Agriculture from the 1980s to the 1990s.  His was a responsibility to documentary proceedings before the federal courts, and for dispensing remuneration or collecting monies owed once cases had been dismissed.  For his part, after Pigford v. Glickman, heard on October 9, 1982 by federal Judge Bernard A. Friedman, Francis was responsible for paying each black farmer in the rural south $50,000 dollars for discrimination by the Farmers Housing Administration favoring white landowners and disfavoring blacks for three generations. Judge Friedman, remarked in his opinion that “the Department itself has recognized that there has always been a disconnect between what President Lincoln envisioned as the ‘people’s department,’ serving all of the people, and the widespread belief that the Department is ‘the last plantation,’ a department ‘perceived as playing a key role in what some see as a conspiracy to force minority and disadvantaged farmers off their land through discriminatory loan practices.’ ” Specifically, the Commission found that Black farmers were at competitive disadvantage because their farms were so much smaller than those owned by Whites. In 1978, the average commercial, Black-operated farm was 128 acres; the average, White-operated farm was more than three times as big at 428 acres. “The relatively small size of their landholdings combines with current economic conditions, governmental policies, and institutional practices to place black farmers at a competitive disadvantage with large farm operators and investors, most of whom are white,” the commission found. “Economies of scale, research and technology, tax benefits, government price and income supports, and commercial lending all militate against the survival of black-operated small farms.” After little to no investigation into the Black farmers’ individual claims, Friedman approved a settlement on April 14, 1999, that was estimated to total $2 billion for thousands of black farmers.  Francis took a sheet from the civil rights playbook and went to the communities where black farmers were situated and spoke to them directly about the settlement and offered education and resources on the required paperwork. Francis notes that, “early in my career, I came to understand that a client isn’t simply a name on a piece of paper, it’s someone’s life and livelihood. I knew we owed it to the farmers to actually hit the road and go from town to town, just as the civil rights workers did during the 1960s. We traveled throughout Mississippi and other parts of the country so we could get face-to-face with the farmers. Their stories inspired me and greatly fueled my efforts on their behalf.” Francis and the black farmers’ voices stand out in his narrative, exhibiting their affectation for the same resilience and renewal tactics Fannie Lou advocated twenty years earlier in the modern era, as black farmers recovered from decades of discrimination.

Conclusion, Renewal and Revival

            Black farmers continue to dwindle in numbers today as agribusiness reduces the raw number of independent and communal farmers across all racial groups and the U.S, generally.  Far from being deterred by the exorbitant costs and huge debt loads associated with modern suburban and rural farm ownership, the urban farm movement has swelled in numbers in recent years, including in African American and other minority communities across the United States.  David Hanson is a freelance writer and photographer, and Edwin Marty is founder of Jones Valley Urban Farm in Birmingham, Alabama.  They document this phenomenon brought on by a reverse Great Migration into Southern cities in 21st century America with extraordinary humanity and highlight the specter of climate change and the universal human impulse to contribute to environmental stewardship that drive the modern urban farming movement.  In their photo-packed book Breaking Through Concrete: Building an Urban Farm Revival (2012) the duo documented these urban centers across twelve American cities, including in California, Birmingham, Alabama, and Chicago, Illinois.  In Chicago, a convict to job pipeline has been built as a social service existing wholly in the productivity of the Growing Home program, a large and distributed urban farming cooperative administered by the African American community.  Growing Home is a farm and a job, but it’s also a training program. “The interns work in the greenhouses for three hours each morning, Tuesday through Friday. After lunch, they participate in classroom workshops on job training skills. The results are layered,” writes Hanson.  The story of urban black farmers continues to be written, but it also points to a universal impetus of human beings as people ‘of the land’.  As individuals across ethnic and social groups agitate for equal rights today, the messages from the black farmers and civil rights movements resonate with the themes of resilience, renewal, and revival, informing them with personal stories like those of Fannie Lou Hamer and Greg Francis and a documented history of the past to succeed in uplifting hearts and minds in the future.

References

Greg Francis, Just Harvest: The Story of How Black Farmers Won the Largest Civil Rights Case Against the U.S. Government. Forefront Books. Kindle Edition. 2021.

Hanson, David and Edwin Marty, Breaking Through Concrete: Building an Urban Farm Revival. Berkley. University of California Press. 2012.

Isabel Wilkerson, Ph.D. in discussion with Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. DuBois. Review: Social Science Research on Race. Massachusetts. Cambridge University Press. 2010.

Monica M. White, Freedom Farmers: Agricultural Resistance and the Black Freedom Movement. Chapel Hill. University of North Carolina Press. 2018.