In 1984, at the age of 18, John Boyd Jr. bought a farm for the hefty sum of $51,000. Boyd’s
ancestors have always been tied to the land, whether willingly or forcibly. His great-grandfather
was enslaved and forced to work the land under the brutal chattel slavery system, and, during
Jim Crow, Boyd’s grandfather owned land but was always fearful of it being taken from
him so he slept with the deed under his bed every night. After Boyd purchased the land
of his future cattle and soybean farm, it was not as simple as sowing seeds and reaping
the harvest. At every step of the way Boyd was stymied, insulted, and degraded by the
racist machinations of the US Department of Agriculture local extension office. While
his white neighbors easily secured six figure loans without even applying, Boyd, a Black
farmer, had to struggle to even schedule a meeting with the extension agent. But what
Boyd experienced isn’t unusual for Black farmers in the United States, in fact it’s
the standard. Today we’re going to look at the history of Black farmers in the US.
A history of trauma, racism, and dispossession that has led to this graph, but also a history
that reveals the power of resilience and collective resistance in the face of oppression, and
the need to forge a new food system and relationship with the land that foregrounds reparations,
anti-colonialism, and an anti-capitalist mindset.
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A History of Trauma: The United States was built on a system of
chattel slavery, and the violent exploitation and dehumanization of enslaved people. And
to assume that the effects of this system are somehow in the past, is just incorrect
and ahistorical. The ramifications of the United State’s slave economy pervades every
aspect of policy and culture in this country, including farming. Most of the ancestors of
Black farmers today were enslaved people forced to work, bleed, and tend to land that was
stolen by white settlers from the thousands of tribes and first nations indigenous to
the land before the Europeans arrived. Farming in the United States is thus intertwined with
the dual legacy of settler colonialism and white supremacist, capitalist exploitation
of Black people. As a result, the Black American farmer’s experience is rooted in the trauma
caused by white settlers and farmers, and the discrimination they faced from institutions
and structures. But the history of Black american relationship with land doesn’t start and
end with chattel slavery., The legacy of Black farmers is a rich tapestry of resilience,
ingenuity and defiance against a white supremacist nation.
Exploitation: In the wake of the American Civil War, the
Secretary of War Edmund Stanton urged Union general William T. Sherman to sit down with
20 leaders of the Black community in Savannah, Georgia and ask them a simple question: “What
do you want for your own people?” The unequivocal answer from the participants, all of whom
were ministers and many of whom were formerly enslaved people, was that “The way we can
best take care of ourselves… is to have land, and turn it and till it by our own labor.”
These 20 men knew that in the capitalist settler colonial United States, owning and tending
to your own land was the surest form of freedom. Four days later, on January 17, 1965, Sherman
issued Special Field Order 15, which carved out 400,000 acres of land in the South for
formerly enslaved people to farm and steward. This order is the origin of the phrase “40
acres and a mule,” and was based on the ideas and recommendations of the local Black
community, not then President Abraham Lincoln. Over 40,000 Black Americans took to the land,
but the victory was fleeting. After Andrew Johnson assumed the presidency in April of
the same year, he worked to dismantle the proclamation and eventually began reversing
and stealing back the ceded land. Farming while Black after the Civil War was a constant
struggle. Most Black farmers were forced into exploitative sharecropping relationships with
white farmers who still owned much of the farmland around the United States. Sharecropping
preserved many of the profitable parts of the chattel slavery system for Southern white
landowners.. Black farmers were forced to rent farmland from white landholders “in
exchange for an often-­meager share of the harvest.” In short, white landholders stole
the harvests of Black sharecroppers claiming that it was the payment for renting their
land. Yet, despite the prominence of sharecropping, the number of Black farmers continued to rise
to its peak in 1920, when Black farmers totaled 925,708 or 14.3% of all the farmers in the
United States. But ever since, the constant racialized terror campaigns of white southerners
and institutional racism perpetrated by federal programs like the USDA, however, have pushed
Black farmers and communities to migrate en masse from the rural south to the industrial
north. Indeed, as Black folks in the South resisted Jim Crow laws, historian Pete Daniel
writes that “USDA programs were sharpened into weapons to punish civil rights activity.”
He goes on to add that “planters evicted tenants and sharecroppers who attempted to
register to vote and replaced them with machines and chemicals.” In addition, the consolidation
of farmland into fewer and fewer rich white hands, and the simultaneous industrialization
of those larger plots meant that farmers in 20th century America either had to get big
or get out. Getting big for white farmers was by no means easy, but was certainly simpler
than the Black farmer’s experience. White farmers could apply for large loans at local
agriculture extension offices and could expect help from their USDA agent who looked like
them. Black farmers on the other hand, like John Boyd Jr., had to fight tooth and nail
to even get a small loan to buy the needed machinery, chemicals, and seed required to
even begin to compete with white industrialized mega-farmers. And while redlining and racist
housing policies forced Black communities into undesirable areas in the city, the ag-extension
agents were making it difficult for Black farmers to buy land in rural areas, let alone
tend to it. All of this led to the precipitous decline of Black farmers in the United States
from 1920 to 1997. Black farmers went from 14.3% of the farming population to 1.4% as
of the 2017 agricultural census. One estimate puts the “total economic hit to Black wealth
from land loss could be in excess of $300 billion.” But despite the constant racial
oppression, Black farmers still resisted.
Resilience: Butting up against the racist exploitation
of Black farmers is their ironclad resilience in the face of oppression. Black farmers popularized
efficient farming on small acreage. It is because of Black farmers that we have the
Community Supported Agriculture (or CSA) models. And it’s because of Black farmers that we
have mechanized seed planters. Despite centuries of racist oppression and exploitation, Black
farmers have been at the vanguard of liberation and regenerative farming practices. Take for
example the Tuskegee Institute, an educational institution originally helmed by Booker T.
Washington, which fostered the research of George Washington Carver who traveled the
country during the late 1800s educating Black farmers on the importance of crop diversification,
composting, and proto-organic techniques to help sharecroppers “make enough profit to
purchase their land, feed their families, and achieve economic autonomy.” Later on
in the late 1920s and early 1930s, rural farmers from the “Black Belt” and communists from
city centers banded together to resist the exploitative circumstances of sharecropping.
Historian Robin G. Kelley chronicles this in his book, Hammer and Hoe. He writes that
after the 1931 harvest in rural Tallapoosa County for example, “several landlords withdrew
all cash and food advances [from Black tenant farmers] in a calculated effort to generate
labor for the newly built Russell Saw Mill.” As a result of this clear wage exploitation,
“Black sawmill workers and farmers in the vicinity ‘...enthusiastically welcomed Communist
leadership,’” and hundreds joined the local union. The movement had seven basic
demands like “the continuation of food advances…the right of sharecroppers to market their own
crops… [and] a minimum wage of one dollar per day.” Kelley goes on to write, however,
that although the newly organized laborers did achieve small wins, white fears of a growing
Black farmer uprising quickly escalated the situation. Egged on by the white landlords
and the local sheriff, a group of deputized white vigilantes raided a meeting of organized
sharecroppers “brutally beating men and women alike.” In the days that followed,
violent raids and assaults of Black farmers continued, yet the union still continued to
agitate for better conditions. All over the country and across the late 1800s and into
the 1900s, Black farmers organized themselves to create better conditions. For example,
the Colored Farmers’ National Alliance and Cooperative Union, which pooled money and
resources to buy land for landless Black farmers boasted 1.2 million members at its peak. These
collective resources were essential because even when Black farmers freed themselves from
the debt peonage of tenant farming, the US Department of Agriculture made the reality
of being a Black farmer extremely difficult. In 1997, however, a group of Black farmers
took the federal government to court for its decades of racist policies and actions, and
two years later won the most money of any civil rights case in the country’s history.
In 1998 the USDA released a report admitting that decades of discrimination led to the
decline in Black-owned farms, and some $1 billion was payed out to roughly 20,000 Black
farmers. But as farmer James McGill notes, this is way too little too late. “We got
$50,000 a piece and that was an insult because when you needed three or four hundred thousand
dollars and they gave you 50 how could you survive on $50,000 to recover what you lost”
Black farmers in the United States have carved out spaces for themselves via resistance and
struggle, but at each and every stage the white supremicist institutions of this country
have sought to reverse any piece of liberation that they’ve achieved.
Reclaiming the Stolen The United States has stolen the land it now
settles on twice. Once from those already living, farming, and stewarding the land before
settlers planted their European heels into its mud, and twice when it stole land from
under the hoe of Black growers. But today Black farmers still continue to farm, reclaiming
the stolen and standing up in defiance against the a white supremicist capitalist agricultural
system. We see this in places like the Earthseed Land Collective, a community a Black creatives
and visionaries who came together to buy and then build a working farm rooted in justice,
food sovereignty, and community relationships. We see also this in Soul Fire Farm, which
draws on afro-indigenous roots to grow food for marginalized communities in the greater
Albany area while educating and sharing wisdom on anti-colonial, anti-capitalist, and anti-racist
farming practices. Each carve out their pieces of land, and integrate into the larger tapestry
of Black farmers and farmers of color spread across the U.S. that are showing us the importance
of land as a vessel for liberation, but also for healing relations between the earth and
people.
Land is the Future There have been a number of solutions proposed
by members of congress on how to repair the damage and trauma stacked on Black farmers.
Senator Corey Booker proposed legislation that would “would devote $8 billion annually
to buying farmland and granting it to Black farmers.” But cattle farmer Chris Newman
argues that the “bill is so loaded with oversights, anti-­solidarity, and implied
acceptance of settler-­colonial agricultural ethics that it can’t even be viewed as incremental
progress or a step in the right direction.” So what then might just reparations look like?
How might white folks repair the harm our ancestors and us, today, have caused? What
does a future that prioritizes Black farmers look like? And how might the United States
repair the violent damage caused by twice stolen land? Leah Penniman of Soul Fire Farm
writes that reparations should incorporate three principles: “Dispossessed people get
to define what reparations look like… transfers of land and resources without oversight or
conditionality… give the land, money, and jobs away, even and especially when it entails
personal and organizational sacrifice.” Land, in this white supremacist, settler-colonial,
and capitalist country is and has always been a battleground of oppression. So changing
our relationship to that land is essential to creating change.
If you want to learn more about black farmer co-operatives and organizations in the early
20th century and how they’ve come to influence modern farming, well you’re in luck. I created
a whole section examining that history but it was too much for this video. So, I’ve
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