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By deepening our connection to the food system, we  can further connect with each other and the world around us.

Juneteenth and Farming as Activism

6/19/2020

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Today, June 19, is the holiday known as Juneteenth, which commemorates the day in 1865 when word reached the enslaved people of Galveston, Texas that they had been freed by Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation two and a half years earlier. Black communities across the county have celebrated Juneteeth ever since, making it the oldest annual celebration of the end of slavery and the fight for freedom. Festivities traditionally involve barbecue and a feast of foods specially prepared for the occasion, participants dressing in their finest clothes, prayer, speeches, and games. Understanding history in order to make progress as individuals and as a society has always been a primary focus of Juneteeth ceremonies.

In light of this focus, I’d like to share what I’m learning about the work of Fannie Lou Hamer and her Freedom Farm Cooperative, which exemplified a movement using farming as a vehicle for empowerment, self-determination, and resistance against oppression that stretches through history to the present.

Fannie Lou Hamer is best known for her voting rights work, her activism with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and her cofounding of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. But, born in 1917 into a Mississippi sharecropping family, she knew firsthand the way that the mainstream agricultural system oppressed People of Color, keeping them enslaved in all but name. Not only did the sharecropping system keep Hamer and others like her in constant poverty, hunger, and debt, but also deprived them of control over their own lives. When Hamer overcame the many barriers in place to disenfranchise Black citizens and successfully registered to vote, the owner of the plantation where she worked ordered her to rescind her voter registration. Hamer’s reply: “I didn’t go down there to register for you. I went down to register for myself.” He promptly fired her and evicted her from the property. This was a common experience among other Black folks fighting for the right to vote.

In 1969, Fannie Lou Hamer founded the Freedom Farm Cooperative (FFC) as an alternative farming model to that which forced Black Mississippians to labor either as sharecroppers or to struggle with poverty on their own small farms. “The time has come now when we are going to have to get what we need ourselves. We may get a little help, here and there, but in the main we’re going to have to do it ourselves,” Hamer stated. With financial backing from from a Wisconsin-based non-profit, Hamer bought 40 acres of farmland to grow vegetables to feed member families and cash crops to support the co-op’s operational expenses. In addition to vegetables, the farm also fed its members through a “pig bank” that raised and distributed thousands of pigs to participating families. Poverty was the only qualification for joining the co-op, Hamer explained. “This is the first kind of program that has ever been sponsored in the country in letting local people do their thing themselves.”

Under Hamer’s tireless leadership, the FFC grew exponentially over the next few years. By the early 1970s, the farm comprised nearly 700 acres, and the co-op expanded to a comprehensive system of community and individual empowerment. Its programs included child education, affordable housing, job training, and health care. It housed a sewing cooperative, a tool library, a commercial kitchen, and community gardens. The Freedom Farm Cooperative strived to address each of the various ways the community had been oppressed and deprived of opportunity, and to provide the tools and the space for members to reclaim their agency and liberate themselves. It envisioned a system that lifted people up rather than crushing them and grinding them down.

The Freedom Farm Collective received little institutional support and dissolved by the mid-1970s. However, other farmers have continued its work and legacy in various ways. Today, farms from Soul Fire Farm in New York’s Hudson Valley to Oakland, California-based Black Earth Farms work to end food apartheid and center People of Color in all they do. Soul Fire Farm offers a multitude of workshops and immersion programs for Farmers of Color, operates a sliding-scale CSA to fight food insecurity, and provides an interactive Reparations Map on its website that connects potential donors with Black and Indigenous-led farming projects seeking resources. Black Earth Farms is a collective of Black and Indigenous Farmers that works to decolonize the food system and provide fresh produce to the unhoused and others in need, including people protesting for racial justice in recent weeks. Other farms in this movement of farming as activism include:
  • Soil Generation, Philadelphia, PA
  • The Black Oaks Center for Sustainable Living, Chicago, IL
  • Cooperation Jackson, Jackson, MS
  • Rise and Root Farm, Chester, NY
  • Backyard Gardeners Network, New Orleans, LA
  • Hilltop Urban Gardens, Tacoma, WA
  • The Fannie Lou Hamer-Sundiata Acoli Farm at the Harriet Tubman House, Baltimore, MD
  • And many more around the country.
 
I am only scratching the surface of this movement, and am excited to start Monica M. White’s book Freedom Farmers: Agricultural Resistance and the Black Freedom Movement to learn more about Fannie Lou Hamer and others in the tradition of agriculture as a source of resistance and self-reliance.
 
More about the Freedom Farm Cooperative:
  • https://indianapublicmedia.org/eartheats/fannie-lou-hamers-freedom-farm-cooperative.php
  • https://lifeandthyme.com/commentary/fannie-lou-hamer-and-farming-as-activism/
  • https://foodheroespodcast.com/2018/07/03/fannie-lou-hamers-freedom-farm-cooperative-an-early-example-of-food-and-democracy-through-local-food-activism/
  • https://snccdigital.org/events/fannie-lou-hamer-founds-freedom-farm-cooperative/
  • https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/07409710.2017.1270647?journalCode=gfof20
  • https://popularresistance.org/black-co-ops-were-a-method-of-economic-survival/
  • https://www.crmvet.org/docs/mvmt/6508mvmt.pdf
“The people in the South are like seeds, each with the potential to grow and spread more seeds, for more growth: creating gardens and forests of themselves—lawns of living. They are planted in their lives.”
–"Fannie Lou Hamer, Crabgrass Politician,” in SNCC’s The Movement, August 1965. https://www.crmvet.org/docs/mvmt/6508mvmt.pdf.

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Fannie Lou Hamer. Photo from http://www.marcelinamartin.com/SouthernEthic/index22.html
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Freedom Farm Cooperative. Photo from http://www.marcelinamartin.com/SouthernEthic/index22.html
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Sunflower County, Mississippi Sewing Co-op. Photo from http://www.marcelinamartin.com/SouthernEthic/index22.html
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Honoring Paul Robeson in the Tomato Garden

5/18/2020

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Picture
Image from the BBC.
One of our favorite tomato varieties is the Paul Robeson. It is an exceptionally juicy beefsteak type variety with purple shoulders. I knew it was a Russian variety named after the African American actor, singer, and activist, but am embarrassed to say that I didn’t know much of anything about the man other than the fact that he had a delicious tomato named after him. We recently watched a PBS American Masters documentary about Robeson, and I am astounded that his name and life story aren’t better known.

Robeson was born in 1898. His father, a former slave, taught him early in life that he was just as capable and worthy as his white peers, and he took that message of equality to heart throughout his life. Robeson won a scholarship to Rutgers College, where he was the only black student. He gained a national reputation as a college football star and was valedictorian of his class. He graduated from Columbia Law School, but refused to accept a law career subject to racist barriers, and instead followed his passion for singing and acting.

Robeson’s incredible bass baritone voice is best known today from his performance of “Ol’ Man River” in the musical and film Show Boat, but his musical range was vast, crossing many styles and languages. Between concerts all over the world, Broadway performances, music recordings, and early films, Robeson became the most famous black man in the world. His performances of Othello in London and on Broadway were renowned (at this time, the role was typically played by a white actor in blackface) and he played to some of the first racially integrated audiences. While he struggled to land film roles that met his goal of uplifting the black experience, he continually used his platform to stand up for, and stand with, the downtrodden.

His activism ranged from black civil rights to anti-colonialism, labor rights to anti-fascism to the peace movement. He became enamored with the Soviet Union, where, when touring, he found himself treated as “a human being for the first time in my life,” he said. “I walk in full human dignity.”[1] His unbridled affection for the USSR got him in trouble with the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). Intense anti-communist pressure from Senator McCarthy and others caused many civil rights leaders to denounce Robeson out of fear. Robeson stood firm on principle, refusing to play the game. During his testimony to the HUAC, Robeson was asked why he didn’t leave the US and move to Russia. His reply: “Because my father was a slave, and my people died to build this country, and I am going to stay here, and have a part of it just like you. And no Fascist-minded people will drive me from it. Is that clear?”[2] His defiance did not help his case, and Robeson was entirely blacklisted in the US. His records and video footage were destroyed. His passport was even seized by the government so he could not tour abroad.

In 1958, a Supreme Court ruling restored Robeson’s passport and his career started a gradual recovery, but a mental and physical breakdown in 1961 forced him to retire from public life. He died in 1976 following a stroke.
Truly, Robeson had problematic blind spots when it came to his stalwart defense of Stalin’s Soviet Union. Yet his unflinching activism, dedication to his beliefs, brilliance, and sheer talent in arenas from music to sports to linguistics should make him an honored household name. With my new knowledge of Paul Robeson’s life and work, I now think of tending his legacy when tending his tomatoes.
 
Sources:
 https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/what-paul-robeson-said-77742433/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BUki-v-NvoE
http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/6440/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Robeson
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/paul-robeson-tomato

[1] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/what-paul-robeson-said-77742433/
[2] http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/6440/
Picture
Photo from Tomato Growers Supply Company
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