Black Farmers, Agriculture, and Resistance

Most accounts of African Americans’ relationship to the soil focus on oppression and exploitation. This book offers the untold history of Black farmers’ fight to stay on the land in the southern United States, using agricultural cooperatives as a basis for resistance and community self-determination. This chapter introduces slave gardens as resistance, the Colored Farmers Alliance, the Universal Negro Improvement Association, and food and agriculture in the civil rights and Black Power movements as precursors to the examples of black agricultural cooperatives in Freedom Farmers. These cooperatives demonstrate what White calls collective agency and community resilience, using the primary strategies of prefigurative politics, economic autonomy, and commons as praxis. The archival, ethnographic, and interview-based methods of the book are grounded in the African principle of sankofa: investigating the past to understand the present as a basis of forging a future of our own making.

Drawing on the Past toward a Food Sovereign Future

Whereas previous chapters discussed strategies employed by those who stayed in the South, this chapter tells the stories of the descendants of those who migrated north, focusing on Detroit. While far in time and space from the other examples of Black agricultural resistance discussed in this book, contemporary communities in Detroit are similarly turning to agriculture as a strategy of survival and resistance. The Detroit Black Community Food Security Network (DBCFSN) formed in 2006, setting goals of improving education, food access, and collective buying. DBCFSN is rooted in a pan-African philosophy of pride and solidarity and draws from founders’ experiences in Detroit’s Black Power era and in city government. Central to DBCFSN’s approach to community food sovereignty are antiracist and anticapitalist principles that guide cooperative efforts, political education, and organizing designed to dismantle systems of white supremacy embedded in the food system. DBCFSN’s most well-known projects – the Detroit Food Policy Council, D-Town Farm, and the Ujamaa Food Buying Club – enact the strategies of prefigurative politics, economic autonomy, and commons as praxis to build collective agency and community resilience.

Intellectual Traditions in Black Agriculture

This chapter analyses the theoretical and applied contributions to Black agriculture of three influential African American intellectuals of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Booker T. Washington built institutions, developed agricultural extension services, and organized conferences for Black farmers. George Washington Carver produced, systematized, and disseminated scientific agricultural knowledge. W. E. B. Du Bois focused on strengthening Black communities by advocating agricultural cooperatives as an economic and political strategy. While the three had different – and sometimes controversial – approaches, all saw agriculture as a strategy of resistance and community building. Through a historical analysis of these thinkers’ ideas about Black agriculture, this chapter offers fresh perspectives on classical African American intellectual traditions. This history challenges contemporary ideas that community agriculture is new, unearthing Black intellectual contributions to current conversations about sustainable, organic, and local food, as well as food security and food sovereignty. In doing so, it offers a historical precedent and framework for contemporary food justice movements for enacting the connection between agriculture and freedom.

Conclusion

The book concludes by demonstrating how Freedom Farmers offers a more complex – and empowering – picture of Black people’s relationship to agriculture than in typical portrayals which emphasize oppression and exploitation. Freedom Farmers also offers a rich counterpoint to social movement literature that often focuses on urban narratives of struggle and more obvious resistance strategies, such as protests. Challenging common perceptions about African Americans’ relationship to the land, Freedom Farmers demonstrates the history of Black farmers fighting to maintain their livelihoods and identities as farmers, using agricultural-based strategies to build collective agency and community resilience. This notion of community resilience demonstrated by Freedom Farmers encourages us to expand the concept of social and ecological resilience to account for the structural factors that have caused the ongoing catastrophes of racial and economic oppression. Freedom Farmers uncovers a history of African American farmers’ strategies of collective agency and community resilience to offer a historical grounding and inspiration for current food justice movements in their work toward liberation.

Agricultural Self-Determination on a Regional Scale

Drawing from the civil rights and Black Power movements, a cooperative movement swept the south in the late 1960s to address economic injustice and the lack of jobs. Rural African Americans organized cooperatives to resist the poverty and oppression that spurred northern and western migration, creating opportunities for community self-determination. Founded in 1967, the Federation of Southern Cooperatives (FSC) helped former tenant farmers and sharecroppers develop autonomy. By 1974, the FSC encompassed 134 cooperatives in fourteen states. Motivated to promote and protect Black land ownership, by 1977 the cooperative controlled more than one million acres. The FSC’s agricultural programs trained farmers in areas such as conservation, management, and cooperative purchasing and marketing. The FSC provided technical and financial assistance to the member cooperatives, growing to include initiatives such as credit unions, manufacturing cooperatives, housing programs, and health care centers. The FSC developed mechanisms for multistate collective organizing, engaged in local politics, and lobbied for policies that benefit their member organizations. The FSC’s successes in collective action and collective responsibility threatened white power structures, and white elites responded with political and legal attacks. While harming the FSC, it continues to organize southern cooperatives today, remaining a model for self-determination and resistance.

Bypass the Middlemen and Feed the Community

In the 1960s, Bolivar County, Mississippi was one of the nation’s most impoverished due to systemic oppression and the decline of the agricultural industry. Residents responded by drawing from the local area’s history of autonomous Black communities and creating a network of Black agricultural cooperatives and community organizations. Operating on a regional scale within Mississippi, the North Bolivar County Farm Cooperative used agriculture as a strategy of self-determination and self-reliance, offering farmer-members an alternative to participation in the regional economy that was controlled by white elites. It utilized strategic relationships with university and industry partners. The cooperative was committed to community-based governance, relying on, for instance, a board of directors with locally-elected representatives, specialized committees, stores that sold cooperative-grown produce, and community listening sessions used to decide which crops to grow. Importantly, the cooperative decided to bypass intermediaries by establishing its own food processing facilities, critical for building economic autonomy in community food systems.

A Pig and a Garden

Much of the scholarship on the work and legacy of activist Fannie Lou Hamer concentrates on her tireless efforts for civil/human rights and African American representation and access to electoral politics. This chapter brings to light an important project she started in 1969, Freedom Farms Cooperative in Sunflower County, MS. An agricultural cooperative built on 680-acres, Freedom Farm included a pig bank, Head Start program, community gardens, commercial kitchen, a garment factory, sewing cooperative, tool bank, and low-income, affordable housing as strategies to support the needs of African Americans who were fired and evicted for exercising the right to vote. Freedom Farm offered these sharecroppers and tenant farmers educational and re-training opportunities including health care and disaster relief for those who wanted to stay in the Mississippi Delta. Using a historical method to analyze extensive archival records, this chapter offers an analysis of Freedom Farm and illuminates valuable lessons on agriculture as resistance, and alternative strategies of rebuilding and investing in sustainable com- munities. Using the principles of collective and shared ownership, Freedom Farm and the work of Ms. Hamer, offer us important and valuable lessons on rebuilding our communities and investing in sustainable cities around food production.