Freedom Farmers: Agricultural Resistance and the Black Freedom Movement by Monica M. White (review)

Freedom Farmers: Agricultural Resistance and the Black Freedom Movement traces the roots of contemporary food justice activism to black intellectual traditions and agricultural practices dating to the colonial era. As Monica M. White shows, African Americans’ relationship to the land was not defined solely by the oppressions inflicted by slavery and sharecropping. Agriculture was a site of struggle where black people pursued goals of economic and political empowerment and fought to overturn racist structures that were designed to keep them powerless and poor. This history has largely been ignored in popular portrayals of the local and organic food movement, which is often cast as a form of food snobbery practiced by status-conscious white people who shop at Whole Foods. In fact, the origins of this movement lie in the civil rights movement and earlier struggles for justice by African Americans.

White notes that landownership and food production were central to black conceptions of freedom, from the gardens tended by enslaved people to supplement their diets, through the self-sufficiency and self-determination advocated by Marcus Garvey, to the black-owned farms, grocery stores, and restaurants established by Black Power advocates in the 1960s to supply African American communities with healthy food. Booker T. Washington’s training programs for farmers at Tuskegee Institute, George Washington Carver’s pioneering research into organic farming techniques, and W. E. B. Du Bois’s promotion of cooperative business models that provided alternatives to capitalist exploitation receive sustained attention for their contributions to strategies of “collective agency and community resilience (CACR),” a theoretical framework that White offers as a way to understand all of the activities described in the book (p. 5).

Using archival records, interviews, and newspaper sources, White analyzes four cooperative projects that enacted CACR in the late twentieth century. Civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer founded Freedom Farm Cooperative in 1967, providing employment, affordable housing, and training to members who saw clear connections between financial independence and the ability to exercise their political rights in Sunflower County, Mississippi, where white supremacists used economic reprisals to retaliate against African Americans who registered to vote. Similar motivations and strategies characterized the North Bolivar County Farmers Cooperative in neighboring Bolivar County, Mississippi. The Federation of Southern Cooperatives deployed CACR on a regional level, helping organize, finance, provide technical assistance, and train participants in cooperatives throughout the South from the late 1960s to the present. The descendants of southern migrants to Detroit, Michigan, including many who had participated in the civil rights and Black Power movements, formed the Detroit Black Community Food Security Network in 2006 after deindustrialization, white flight, and disinvestment left the city with only one remaining large chain grocery store. The case studies demonstrate how rural and urban social justice activism were connected, as African Americans responded to mass unemployment and poverty caused by the loss of agricultural jobs in the South and factory jobs in the North.

Writing consciously with an eye on the uses of the past for understanding the present and influencing the future, White recovers the lost stories of black activists who worked to ensure access to adequate and nutritious food for low-income communities, promoted alternatives to capitalist economic exploitation, and demanded a voice in the decisions affecting their lives. Scholars of African American history, agricultural history, and urban history will find much value in this book. Additionally, the brief length and clear writing style make Freedom Farmers ideal for classroom use.