April 2022 - “Farming While Black"
To mark the blossoming of spring, I’ll turn to Leah Penniman, author of Farming While Black. She explains that Africans were kidnapped to slave in North American colonies not simply because of their stamina and strength. They had valuable agricultural wisdom. Europeans could grow northern foods like potatoes, wheat and cabbage, but Black people from overseas brought expertise in growing rice, cotton and other subtropical crops.
As the trade in humans grew, Penniman said that her “grandma’s grandma’s grandma” wanted to assure that agricultural powers from their homeland would stay with those kidnapped. So, they braided food seeds into their hair so that wherever they ended up, they would be better prepared to farm. The winds of the slave trade spread African agriculture to the Americas.
Generationally shared agricultural expertise was passed down to enslaved Americans such as Harriet Tubman. As Smithsonian Magazine highlighted last month, her deep wisdom about flora and fauna helped Tubman and her passengers survive journeys north. She trapped muskrats. She knew how to distinguish nutritious plants from poisonous ones. Civil War surgeons relied on her to save lives by healing wounds and curing dysentery with herbal medicines.
Many know about George Washington Carver’s peanut fame, but few know that he was motivated to create cost-efficient farming solutions to help struggling Black farmers. Crop rotation and nitrogen fertilizer led to increased yields. In his 47 years at the Tuskegee Institute, Carver taught techniques of self-sufficiency and sustainability that were embraced by farmers of all races, especially during the boll weevil pest plague of the early 1900s.
While thousands of people of color helped build America’s agricultural empire, it was not until after the Civil War that Black people could feel what W. E. B. DuBois called, “land hunger.” Land ownership by Black people grew to its highwater mark of 14-16 million acres in 1910, twice the size of my home state of Maryland, despite violent land theft by Klansmen and other whites.
Beginning in the twentieth century, semi-legal methods stripped land titles from Black farmers. Loan discrimination, denial of farm insurance, and lack of access to quality seeds bankrupted many Black farmers and sent them into impoverished sharecropping or northward as part of the Great Migration. In an article in The Atlantic entitled, “The Great Land Robbery,” Vann Newkirk estimates that over one million black families were stripped of their land. As he explains, the effects are evident today: “The crimes of Jim Crow have been laundered by time” so that “the legacy of ill-gotten gains has become a structural part of American life.”
Despite gains of the civil rights movement, land theft accelerated in the 1950s and 1960s. Black farmers lost about 6 million acres. In 1965, according to the United States Commission on Civil Rights, government loan programs “served to accelerate the displacement and impoverishment of the Negro farmer.” That, combined with recent waves of agricultural workers from Latin America, racial disparity today is astounding: 85% of agricultural workers are people of color, but only 1-3% of farms are owned or managed by people of color.
Currently Black-led groups like Atlanta’s decade old Grow Where You Are transform urban neighborhoods through community food gardens. Its founder, Eugene Cook, guides efforts to spread self-sufficiency, better health, and environmentally sustainable methods. For the past five years, Baltimore’s Black Yield Institute has worked for Black land and food sovereignty as part of a Pan-African power building movement.
Growing up with the stereotype that farmers in America were all white, I have much to learn from Black farmers who reach back to their ancestors for wisdom and inspiration. While offering ecologically better food alternatives, Leah Penniman’s work at Soul Fire Farm aims “to reclaim our inherent right to belong to the earth and have agency in the food system as Black and Brown people.” Her work continues spreading the wisdom of her ancestors who so long ago sent seeds from Africa around the world.
Further Actions:
1) Contribute financially to any of the groups mentioned in this blog, or, better yet, support similar Black-led farms and gardens in your region. Check out “The Ultimate List of Black Owned Farms & Food Gardens” as well as news about rural farms at the Black Farm Network
2) Learn about how $4 billion in debt relief allocated for Black farmers as part of pandemic aid measures has been stalled due to lawsuits. Urge your legislator to block any foreclosures while the courts deal with this delay. See NYT article, "Black Farmers Fear Foreclosure as Debt Relief Remains Frozen."
3) Learn more about Black leaders in U. S. agricultural history, like George Washington Carver whose fame is built around his 400 uses for peanuts; that tells only part of a remarkable story. Born enslaved in Missouri in 1864, he called himself a “cookstove chemist.” His teenage botanical interests earned him the nickname "plant doctor." While he humbly called himself a “cookstove chemist,” in 1891 he became the first Black man enrolled at Iowa State University. In college he excelled in academics, art, debate, and athletics, a legacy that led Time magazine in 1941 to call him “Black Leonardo.” He soon gained national recognition as a botanist at the Iowa Experiment Station. Perhaps his most underappreciated contribution was the development of the Jesup Agricultural Wagon which got information to illiterate farmers who could not read his many printed Tuskegee Bulletins. Words on his gravestone honored him: “He could have added fortune to fame, but caring for neither he found happiness and honor in being helpful to the world.”
4) Learn about Booker T. Whatley’s contribution to what is now the now popular Community-Supported Agriculture movement, or CSAs. As the oldest of twelve children, Whatley knew how hard it was to feed a growing family. Traditional agricultural marketing often involved many middlemen which raised prices. At Tuskegee University he championed sustainable agriculture and alternative models for food production, particularly small farms, direct pick-your-own marketing, and bulk CSA distribution systems.
5) Gain a deeper understanding of how Black farmers are being squeezed out of farming by reading Vann Newkirk’s analysis of how TIAA, one of the largest pension firms in the U. S., has organized acquisition of more than 130,000 acres of southern farmland. Admittedly, says Newkirk, TIAA was late in the game that helped create thousands of dispossessed Black farmers. He writes, “The land was wrested first from Native Americans, by force. It was then cleared, watered, and made productive for intensive agriculture by the labor of enslaved Africans, who after Emancipation would come to own a portion of it. Later, through a variety of means—sometimes legal, often coercive, in many cases legal and coercive, occasionally violent—farmland owned by black people came into the hands of white people. It was aggregated into larger holdings, then aggregated again, eventually attracting the interest of Wall Street.”