‘Freedom Farmers’ Tells the History of Black Farmers Uniting Against Racism
In her new book, Monica M. White details the cooperative practices of Black farmers in the Deep South and Detroit who played a key role in the Civil Rights movement.
In her new book, Monica M. White details the cooperative practices of Black farmers in the Deep South and Detroit who played a key role in t
“ Freedom Farmers tells the story of how Black farmers in the Deep South and Detroit—independent farmers who owned their property, sharecroppers, tenant farmers, and urban gardeners alike—banded together to counter white racism, fight economic deprivation in an age of increasing mechanization and commercial agriculture, and articulate a different vision of the future.
Many of these groups were founded in remote places that were hotbeds for grassroots labor agitation. Take Mississippi’s North Bolivar County Farm Collective (NBCFC). It was formed in 1965 when a group of Black farmers, many of whom were tractor drivers on a white-owned plantation, turned off their engines to demand a better hourly wage. After they were fired and evicted from their homes, they built a temporary tent settlement, Strike City, close to the plantation.
Two years later, the NBCFC was up and running, with its members loaning land, tools, and divvying up the resources and work. The collective fed farmers and their families, provided children with clothing so they could attend school, and launched conversations about the need to disrupt the entire food system—from decisions about what to plant to how to keep the power to process food out of factories.
Freedom Farmers is not your conventional Civil Rights narrative, couched in terms of campaigns for voting rights, school desegregation, and lunch counter seats, though there are familiar historical figures: W.E.B. Du Bois, Booker T. Washington, and Fannie Lou Hamer, whose Freedom Farm Cooperative gave the book its title. It’s a timely, connective, and expansive book; one that reframes the whiteness of agricultural history and calls us to remember the fact that the Black freedom struggle is an ongoing labor movement in places far and wide.
It also locates Black farmers in a Civil Rights narrative that goes beyond their historic and continuing legal struggles against USDA discrimination. Freedom Farmers moves beyond stories of subsistence and survival; it centers Black farmers as unsung food justice advocates and organic intellectuals who imagined better communities, food systems, and politics. And then, depending on one another, they started building.” - Read more from the article
