JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.Indiana University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Race/Ethnicity: Multidisciplinary Global Contexts This article analyzes an overlooked innovative experience led by black women activists, who participate in urban agriculture as a way of reassessing their cultural roots and reclaiming personal power, freed from the constraints imposed by consumerism and marketing, on the supply of food in the city of Detroit. By farming, they demonstrate agency and self-determination in their efforts to build a sense of community. Using an ecofeminist perspective, this article examines the relationship between women's resistance and the environment. By focusing on women's urban gardening, the article broadens the definition to include less formal, but no less important, forms of resistance.The article is divided into two parts. The first deals with the implementation of the project launched by the members of the Detroit Black Community Food Security Network (DBCFSN). Government statistics and secondary research provide the backdrop to the economic problems in the City of Detroit that triggered the community response. The second part presents women farmers' attempts to transform vacant land to create a community-based food system. These activists construct the farm as a community safe space, which operates as a creative, public outdoor classroom where they nurture activism and challenge the racial and classbased barriers to accessing healthy food. In addition to improving access to healthy food by repurposing vacant land, they are transforming their communities into safe and green spaces.

This article analyzes community building and political agency through an investigation of the Detroit Black Community Food Security Network (DBCFSN). By using farming as a strategy of resistance against the structural factors that have left much of Detroit in a condition of food insecurity, DBCFSN not only meets citizens' needs for fresh produce, but also builds community by transforming the social, economic, and physical environment. In so doing, it creates new community spaces on vacant land. DBCFSN uses the farm (a) as a community center, (b) as a means to articulate culturally relevant language about healthy food and healthy lifestyles, and (c) as a tangible model of collective work, self-reliance, and political agency. These farmers adopt a community-based model for increasing access to healthy food for the mostly African American citizens of Detroit. By focusing on improving the daily existence of citizens rather than mobilizing against the power structures, D-Town, a seven-acre model urban farm project of DBCFSN, activists participate in the revival of a city mired in racism and poverty, and all but abandoned by politicians, the automobile industry, and the merchants and supermarkets who once served Detroit's residents. Environmental Practice 13: 406-417 (2011)

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Most accounts of African Americans’ relationship to the soil focus on oppression and exploitation. This book offers the untold history of Black farmers’ fight to stay on the land in the southern United States, using agricultural cooperatives as a basis for resistance and community self-determination. This chapter introduces slave gardens as resistance, the Colored Farmers Alliance, the Universal Negro Improvement Association, and food and agriculture in the civil rights and Black Power movements as precursors to the examples of black agricultural cooperatives in Freedom Farmers. These cooperatives demonstrate what White calls collective agency and community resilience, using the primary strategies of prefigurative politics, economic autonomy, and commons as praxis. The archival, ethnographic, and interview-based methods of the book are grounded in the African principle of sankofa: investigating the past to understand the present as a basis of forging a future of our own making.

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