Pub Date : 2018-10-08DOI: 10.5149/northcarolina/9781469643694.003.0073
M. White
Drawing from the civil rights and Black Power movements, a cooperative movement swept the south in the late 1960s to address economic injustice and the lack of jobs. Rural African Americans organized cooperatives to resist the poverty and oppression that spurred northern and western migration, creating opportunities for community self-determination. Founded in 1967, the Federation of Southern Cooperatives (FSC) helped former tenant farmers and sharecroppers develop autonomy. By 1974, the FSC encompassed 134 cooperatives in fourteen states. Motivated to promote and protect Black land ownership, by 1977 the cooperative controlled more than one million acres. The FSC’s agricultural programs trained farmers in areas such as conservation, management, and cooperative purchasing and marketing. The FSC provided technical and financial assistance to the member cooperatives, growing to include initiatives such as credit unions, manufacturing cooperatives, housing programs, and health care centers. The FSC developed mechanisms for multistate collective organizing, engaged in local politics, and lobbied for policies that benefit their member organizations. The FSC’s successes in collective action and collective responsibility threatened white power structures, and white elites responded with political and legal attacks. While harming the FSC, it continues to organize southern cooperatives today, remaining a model for self-determination and resistance.
{"title":"Agricultural Self-Determination on a Regional Scale","authors":"M. White","doi":"10.5149/northcarolina/9781469643694.003.0073","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5149/northcarolina/9781469643694.003.0073","url":null,"abstract":"Drawing from the civil rights and Black Power movements, a cooperative movement swept the south in the late 1960s to address economic injustice and the lack of jobs. Rural African Americans organized cooperatives to resist the poverty and oppression that spurred northern and western migration, creating opportunities for community self-determination. Founded in 1967, the Federation of Southern Cooperatives (FSC) helped former tenant farmers and sharecroppers develop autonomy. By 1974, the FSC encompassed 134 cooperatives in fourteen states. Motivated to promote and protect Black land ownership, by 1977 the cooperative controlled more than one million acres. The FSC’s agricultural programs trained farmers in areas such as conservation, management, and cooperative purchasing and marketing. The FSC provided technical and financial assistance to the member cooperatives, growing to include initiatives such as credit unions, manufacturing cooperatives, housing programs, and health care centers. The FSC developed mechanisms for multistate collective organizing, engaged in local politics, and lobbied for policies that benefit their member organizations. The FSC’s successes in collective action and collective responsibility threatened white power structures, and white elites responded with political and legal attacks. While harming the FSC, it continues to organize southern cooperatives today, remaining a model for self-determination and resistance.","PeriodicalId":159841,"journal":{"name":"Freedom Farmers","volume":"429 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-10-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129223804","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2018-10-08DOI: 10.5149/NORTHCAROLINA/9781469643694.003.0081
M. White
Whereas previous chapters discussed strategies employed by those who stayed in the South, this chapter tells the stories of the descendants of those who migrated north, focusing on Detroit. While far in time and space from the other examples of Black agricultural resistance discussed in this book, contemporary communities in Detroit are similarly turning to agriculture as a strategy of survival and resistance. The Detroit Black Community Food Security Network (DBCFSN) formed in 2006, setting goals of improving education, food access, and collective buying. DBCFSN is rooted in a pan-African philosophy of pride and solidarity and draws from founders’ experiences in Detroit’s Black Power era and in city government. Central to DBCFSN’s approach to community food sovereignty are antiracist and anticapitalist principles that guide cooperative efforts, political education, and organizing designed to dismantle systems of white supremacy embedded in the food system. DBCFSN’s most well-known projects – the Detroit Food Policy Council, D-Town Farm, and the Ujamaa Food Buying Club – enact the strategies of prefigurative politics, economic autonomy, and commons as praxis to build collective agency and community resilience.
{"title":"Drawing on the Past toward a Food Sovereign Future","authors":"M. White","doi":"10.5149/NORTHCAROLINA/9781469643694.003.0081","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5149/NORTHCAROLINA/9781469643694.003.0081","url":null,"abstract":"Whereas previous chapters discussed strategies employed by those who stayed in the South, this chapter tells the stories of the descendants of those who migrated north, focusing on Detroit. While far in time and space from the other examples of Black agricultural resistance discussed in this book, contemporary communities in Detroit are similarly turning to agriculture as a strategy of survival and resistance. The Detroit Black Community Food Security Network (DBCFSN) formed in 2006, setting goals of improving education, food access, and collective buying. DBCFSN is rooted in a pan-African philosophy of pride and solidarity and draws from founders’ experiences in Detroit’s Black Power era and in city government. Central to DBCFSN’s approach to community food sovereignty are antiracist and anticapitalist principles that guide cooperative efforts, political education, and organizing designed to dismantle systems of white supremacy embedded in the food system. DBCFSN’s most well-known projects – the Detroit Food Policy Council, D-Town Farm, and the Ujamaa Food Buying Club – enact the strategies of prefigurative politics, economic autonomy, and commons as praxis to build collective agency and community resilience.","PeriodicalId":159841,"journal":{"name":"Freedom Farmers","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-10-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115956628","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2018-10-08DOI: 10.5149/NORTHCAROLINA/9781469643694.003.0013
M. White
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.
{"title":"Black Farmers, Agriculture, and Resistance","authors":"M. White","doi":"10.5149/NORTHCAROLINA/9781469643694.003.0013","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5149/NORTHCAROLINA/9781469643694.003.0013","url":null,"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.","PeriodicalId":159841,"journal":{"name":"Freedom Farmers","volume":"22 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-10-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132460111","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2018-10-08DOI: 10.5149/NORTHCAROLINA/9781469643694.003.0050
M. White
Much of the scholarship on the work and legacy of activist Fannie Lou Hamer concentrates on her tireless efforts for civil/human rights and African American representation and access to electoral politics. This chapter brings to light an important project she started in 1969, Freedom Farms Cooperative in Sunflower County, MS. An agricultural cooperative built on 680-acres, Freedom Farm included a pig bank, Head Start program, community gardens, commercial kitchen, a garment factory, sewing cooperative, tool bank, and low-income, affordable housing as strategies to support the needs of African Americans who were fired and evicted for exercising the right to vote. Freedom Farm offered these sharecroppers and tenant farmers educational and re-training opportunities including health care and disaster relief for those who wanted to stay in the Mississippi Delta. Using a historical method to analyze extensive archival records, this chapter offers an analysis of Freedom Farm and illuminates valuable lessons on agriculture as resistance, and alternative strategies of rebuilding and investing in sustainable com- munities. Using the principles of collective and shared ownership, Freedom Farm and the work of Ms. Hamer, offer us important and valuable lessons on rebuilding our communities and investing in sustainable cities around food production.
{"title":"A Pig and a Garden","authors":"M. White","doi":"10.5149/NORTHCAROLINA/9781469643694.003.0050","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5149/NORTHCAROLINA/9781469643694.003.0050","url":null,"abstract":"Much of the scholarship on the work and legacy of activist Fannie Lou Hamer concentrates on her tireless efforts for civil/human rights and African American representation and access to electoral politics. This chapter brings to light an important project she started in 1969, Freedom Farms Cooperative in Sunflower County, MS. An agricultural cooperative built on 680-acres, Freedom Farm included a pig bank, Head Start program, community gardens, commercial kitchen, a garment factory, sewing cooperative, tool bank, and low-income, affordable housing as strategies to support the needs of African Americans who were fired and evicted for exercising the right to vote. Freedom Farm offered these sharecroppers and tenant farmers educational and re-training opportunities including health care and disaster relief for those who wanted to stay in the Mississippi Delta. Using a historical method to analyze extensive archival records, this chapter offers an analysis of Freedom Farm and illuminates valuable lessons on agriculture as resistance, and alternative strategies of rebuilding and investing in sustainable com- munities. Using the principles of collective and shared ownership, Freedom Farm and the work of Ms. Hamer, offer us important and valuable lessons on rebuilding our communities and investing in sustainable cities around food production.","PeriodicalId":159841,"journal":{"name":"Freedom Farmers","volume":"5 22","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-10-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114018446","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2018-10-08DOI: 10.5149/NORTHCAROLINA/9781469643694.003.0028
M. White
This chapter analyses the theoretical and applied contributions to Black agriculture of three influential African American intellectuals of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Booker T. Washington built institutions, developed agricultural extension services, and organized conferences for Black farmers. George Washington Carver produced, systematized, and disseminated scientific agricultural knowledge. W. E. B. Du Bois focused on strengthening Black communities by advocating agricultural cooperatives as an economic and political strategy. While the three had different – and sometimes controversial – approaches, all saw agriculture as a strategy of resistance and community building. Through a historical analysis of these thinkers’ ideas about Black agriculture, this chapter offers fresh perspectives on classical African American intellectual traditions. This history challenges contemporary ideas that community agriculture is new, unearthing Black intellectual contributions to current conversations about sustainable, organic, and local food, as well as food security and food sovereignty. In doing so, it offers a historical precedent and framework for contemporary food justice movements for enacting the connection between agriculture and freedom.
本章分析了19世纪末和20世纪初三位有影响力的非裔美国知识分子对黑人农业的理论和应用贡献。布克·t·华盛顿建立机构，发展农业推广服务，并为黑人农民组织会议。乔治·华盛顿·卡弗创造、系统化并传播科学的农业知识。W. E. B.杜波依斯致力于通过提倡农业合作社作为一种经济和政治战略来加强黑人社区。虽然这三个人有不同的——有时是有争议的——方法，但他们都把农业看作是一种抵抗和社区建设的策略。通过对这些思想家关于黑人农业思想的历史分析，本章为经典的非裔美国人知识传统提供了新的视角。这段历史挑战了社区农业是新事物的当代观念，发掘了黑人对当前关于可持续、有机和当地食品以及食品安全和食品主权的对话的智力贡献。在这样做的过程中，它为当代粮食正义运动提供了一个历史先例和框架，以制定农业与自由之间的联系。
{"title":"Intellectual Traditions in Black Agriculture","authors":"M. White","doi":"10.5149/NORTHCAROLINA/9781469643694.003.0028","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5149/NORTHCAROLINA/9781469643694.003.0028","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter analyses the theoretical and applied contributions to Black agriculture of three influential African American intellectuals of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Booker T. Washington built institutions, developed agricultural extension services, and organized conferences for Black farmers. George Washington Carver produced, systematized, and disseminated scientific agricultural knowledge. W. E. B. Du Bois focused on strengthening Black communities by advocating agricultural cooperatives as an economic and political strategy. While the three had different – and sometimes controversial – approaches, all saw agriculture as a strategy of resistance and community building. Through a historical analysis of these thinkers’ ideas about Black agriculture, this chapter offers fresh perspectives on classical African American intellectual traditions. This history challenges contemporary ideas that community agriculture is new, unearthing Black intellectual contributions to current conversations about sustainable, organic, and local food, as well as food security and food sovereignty. In doing so, it offers a historical precedent and framework for contemporary food justice movements for enacting the connection between agriculture and freedom.","PeriodicalId":159841,"journal":{"name":"Freedom Farmers","volume":"26 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-10-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116754653","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2018-10-08DOI: 10.5149/northcarolina/9781469643694.003.0068
M. White
In the 1960s, Bolivar County, Mississippi was one of the nation’s most impoverished due to systemic oppression and the decline of the agricultural industry. Residents responded by drawing from the local area’s history of autonomous Black communities and creating a network of Black agricultural cooperatives and community organizations. Operating on a regional scale within Mississippi, the North Bolivar County Farm Cooperative used agriculture as a strategy of self-determination and self-reliance, offering farmer-members an alternative to participation in the regional economy that was controlled by white elites. It utilized strategic relationships with university and industry partners. The cooperative was committed to community-based governance, relying on, for instance, a board of directors with locally-elected representatives, specialized committees, stores that sold cooperative-grown produce, and community listening sessions used to decide which crops to grow. Importantly, the cooperative decided to bypass intermediaries by establishing its own food processing facilities, critical for building economic autonomy in community food systems.
在20世纪60年代，由于系统性的压迫和农业的衰落，密西西比州的玻利瓦尔县是全国最贫困的地区之一。作为回应，居民们借鉴了当地黑人自治社区的历史，并创建了一个黑人农业合作社和社区组织网络。北玻利瓦尔县农场合作社(North Bolivar County Farm Cooperative)在密西西比州的区域范围内运作，将农业作为自决和自力更生的战略，为农民成员提供了参与由白人精英控制的区域经济的另一种选择。它利用了与大学和行业合作伙伴的战略关系。合作社致力于以社区为基础的管理，例如，依靠由当地选举产生的代表组成的董事会、专门委员会、出售合作社种植的农产品的商店，以及用于决定种植哪种作物的社区倾听会议。重要的是，合作社决定通过建立自己的食品加工设施来绕过中介机构，这对于在社区食品系统中建立经济自治至关重要。
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