Black Farmers, Agriculture, and Resistance

Abstract

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.

Practices of Care and Relationship-Building: A Qualitative Analysis of Urban Agriculture’s Impacts on Black People’s Agency and Wellbeing in Philadelphia

“…While the USDA has stricter guidelines concerning what qualifies someone to be a farmer [ 55 ], I choose to adopt an approach that includes and values the labor of all people who tend to and grow food on land of considerable size. This definition of urban agriculture and urban farmers is consistent with what others have outlined in sociological literature [ 36 ].…”

“…They are a means of strengthening social capital and support [ 18 , 34 ] and offer community members spaces to gather and celebrate without fear of crime or state-sanctioned violence. Agricultural spaces led by people of the global majority (PGM) [ 35 ] demonstrate the capacity of a community to engage in shared decision-making and community-based solutions to health inequities [ 17 , 18 , 19 , 36 , 37 ]. PGM refers to people of the global majority.…”

“…Scholars in anthropology and sociology have used case studies to show that agriculture fosters power and collective agency within Black communities [ 17 , 18 , 20 , 21 , 37 ]. A major way that Black communities, particularly agricultural communities, organize is through creating access to resources that have historically and socially been denied to them [ 36 ].…”

“…Collective agency and community resilience are widely practiced within Black agricultural communities [ 18 , 20 , 21 , 56 ]. In her book entitled Freedom Farmers: Agricultural Resistance and the Black Freedom Movement , Dr. Monica White describes the theoretical framework of collective agency and community resilience (CACR) as capturing “the activities communities enact as a means to be self-reliant and self-sufficient ” [ 36 ].…”

Cultivating Community Resilience With Agency and Sociality in Gardens for Health and Healing

“…Findings suggest that reflexivity-individuals reflecting on their adaptive strategies and discussing those actions with others-may facilitate a move from individual to collective agency for resilience (Otsuki et al, 2018). Similarly, White's (2018) historical analysis of black farmers' cooperatives in the U.S. indicates that shared, futureoriented political consciousness is necessary for communities to unify for collective agency and resilience. Scholars have defined community-level agency as "a process of building relationships that increase the capacity of local people to unite, act and adapt to changing conditions, " highlighting the role of social interaction in this process (Matarrita-Cascante et al, 2010, p. 738;Matarrita-Cascante et al, 2017).…”