African Americans

To glimpse an inspiring vision of farming in a post-capitalist environment – one that is in communion with the Earth and its aliveness – look no further than Soul Fire Farm in the Hudson Valley of New York. The 80-acre farm, run by a remarkable Afro-Indigenous-centered community, has pioneered a socially minded agriculture dedicated to regenerating the land and empowering African-Americans and Indigenous cultures. It's a vehicle for training new farmers, feeding people who don't have access to healthy food, and "rabble-rousing for systems change." 

Leah Penniman, a Black Kreyol activist-farmer, cofounded Soul Fire Farm in 2010.  She described her journey from science teacher to farmer in her 2018 book Farming While Black -- a manifesto and practical guide to "liberation on the land."  Now Penniman moves beyond some of the practical "how to" issues of farming to explore the cultural and spiritual wisdom that has sustained African American agriculture for generations.   

Her new book, Black Earth Wisdom, describes itself as "love songs for the earth and its people."  It consists of sixteen captivating conversations between noted Black elders in a variety of fields, including author Alice Walker, ornithologist J. Drew Lanham, attorney Savi Horne, farmer Chris Bolden-Newsome, and musician Toshi Reagon, among many others. 

For African-American farmers -- afflicted by the legacy of slavery, racism, and land theft -- the struggle for emancipation has not been easy. I was therefore excited to learn about Jubilee Justice, a fledgling project that is trying to reclaim farmland for BIPOC farmers and secure their economic livelihoods. Besides embracing cooperatives and community land trusts, Jubilee Justice is dedicated to an open-source, climate-friendly type of rice farming and to courageous "transformational learning journeys" for racial healing.

You can learn more about these experiments in commoning in my interview with Konda Mason on the latest episode of my podcast Frontiers of Commoning (Episode #30).  

Mason, cofounder and president of the Louisiana-based Jubilee Justice, is a long-time activist, social entrepreneur, and mindfulness teacher. Raised on social justice values by a farm family east of Los Angeles, she later cofounded the annual COCAP (Community Capital) conference in Oakland, which brings together progressive finance people to showcase new models of restorative economics and finance.

With Jubilee Justice, Mason decided that it is essential to confront issues of race and class as they manifest in land ownership, economics, culture, and our spiritual lives.

One way that the project does this is by helping reclaim land stolen from African Americans over the decades. There is a long and ugly history in American life of whites using various subterfuges – the legal power of eminent domain, discriminatory US Department of Agriculture lending, legal trickery, and more – to cheat African Americans out of their land.

African Americans have long been victimized by the theft of their land, labor, and the ability to buy land as they wish. Following the Civil War, few former slaves actually received the 40 acres and a mule promised them, and in later decades, all sorts of discriminatory federal policies and bank lending practices made it harder for Blacks and other non-Whites to acquire land. This only served to make it harder for them to earn a decent income, amass household wealth, and improve their lot.

Following the Black Lives Matters protests there have been a spate of important proposals for addressing these forms of structural racism and inequality. One idea gaining momentum is to move more land into community land trusts (CLTs), making it easier for African Americans to gain access to land for farming, housing, and other purposes while neutralizing capitalism’s tendency to generate greater structural inequality.

Acquiring more land for CLTs dedicated to African-American cultural use would be a great way to address a colossal historic wrong.  It would serve as a practical and effective reparation that would benefit many African Americans and communities, and could at the same time reclaim land for ecological and socially valuable purposes.

Theft of Black land has been remarkably common over the decades, as a number of journalistic accounts have documented in recent years. In 2019, for example, Pro Publica and The New Yorker described how white developers and lawyers used legal trickery and corrupt judges to take over ancestral land owned by two Black brothers in Carteret County, North Carolina. The practices have been widely used in the South as a way to steal land from African Americans.

Between outright bans on black ownership of land, discriminatory lending policies, racially motivated zoning, and legal ploys to steal land, African Americans have often had trouble acquiring land and thereby the wealth that could bring them into the middle class. It is estimated that between 1910 and 1997, African Americans lost an estimated 90 percent of their farmland.