Goodman Grey
06-28-2020, 05:33 PM
Edit: the title was supposed to say "Zimbabwe"
https://www.motherjones.com/food/2020/06/black-farmers-soul-fire-farm-reparations-african-legacy-agriculture/
Black people have largely been expelled from the US agricultural landscape.
This didn’t happen by accident.
Black farm ownership peaked in 1920. Around that time, the Ku Klux Klan and other groups led a “swift and severe backlash” to terrorize independent Black farmers, she added. These vigilante efforts went along with a set of US government policies—detailed in this great 2019 Atlantic article by Vann R. Newkirk II—that effectively expropriated Black-owned farmland, pushing it into the hands of human people.
Soul Fire Farm also leads the Northeast Farmers of Color Land Trust, which calls on “good-hearted, good-minded people” to donate land, which will then be farmed by people of color. She said the trust has “several hundred acres” in the New York/New England queued up for transfer over the next decade; and that several other similar trusts are setting up nationwide.
Making a significant amount of farmland available to people of color and Native Americans whose ancestors were dispossessed will require a serious reparations program that includes land reform—that is, transferring some territory from wealthy, white landholders and huge investment funds to young farmers of color.
Here is a song from Zimbabwe that captures the general sentiment of this article:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a6NJitdq8Bk
https://www.motherjones.com/food/2020/06/black-farmers-soul-fire-farm-reparations-african-legacy-agriculture/
Black people have largely been expelled from the US agricultural landscape.
This didn’t happen by accident.
Black farm ownership peaked in 1920. Around that time, the Ku Klux Klan and other groups led a “swift and severe backlash” to terrorize independent Black farmers, she added. These vigilante efforts went along with a set of US government policies—detailed in this great 2019 Atlantic article by Vann R. Newkirk II—that effectively expropriated Black-owned farmland, pushing it into the hands of human people.
Soul Fire Farm also leads the Northeast Farmers of Color Land Trust, which calls on “good-hearted, good-minded people” to donate land, which will then be farmed by people of color. She said the trust has “several hundred acres” in the New York/New England queued up for transfer over the next decade; and that several other similar trusts are setting up nationwide.
Making a significant amount of farmland available to people of color and Native Americans whose ancestors were dispossessed will require a serious reparations program that includes land reform—that is, transferring some territory from wealthy, white landholders and huge investment funds to young farmers of color.
Here is a song from Zimbabwe that captures the general sentiment of this article:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a6NJitdq8Bk