When is a farm not just a farm?
Monica M. White’s new, impressively researched book Freedom Farmers: Agricultural Resistance and the Black Freedom Movement (University of North Carolina Press, $28) highlights historical examples of black farmers using agricultural cooperatives “as a space and place to practice freedom.” And White explains how similar strategies are helping today’s underserved communities pool resources and alleviate poverty.
From slave society and plantation farming to Jim Crow-era segregation and the civil rights movement, Freedom Farmers provides enlightening accounts of how African Americans have used agriculture as a strategy of “self-reliance and political resistance” during times of extreme oppression.
White, an assistant professor of environmental justice at UW-Madison, focuses on such intellectual leaders as Booker T. Washington, George Washington Carver and W.E.B. Du Bois, each of whom devoted “considerable work on agriculture as central to wellness and a way to build community,” she writes.
Another chapter is devoted to Fannie Lou Hamer, a voting and women's rights activist who in the late 1960s launched the Freedom Farms Cooperative as an anti-poverty strategy in the Mississippi River Delta.
Through that historical lens, White examines current food justice and sovereignty movements in urban places like Detroit, Chicago and Milwaukee, where black farmers are using sustainable agriculture to transform vacant lots, revitalize local economies and provide alternatives to the unhealthy, over-processed foods that are prevalent in low-income neighborhoods.
Cooperative farms can become community centers, a means of counteracting major societal ills, she writes: “For many in Detroit, the new relationship they forge between land, food and freedom are a response to the housing foreclosure crisis, the closing of public schools, the water shut-off crisis, and issues of policing.”
White takes a largely scholarly approach to her research and storytelling; it’s not difficult to imagine Freedom Farmers as assigned reading in social justice classes at UW-Madison. But the book is strongest when she’s writing in a more personal voice. Particularly powerful is one passage where she visits Hamer’s former home in Mississippi and the storefront where Emmett Till was in 1955 accused of “inappropriate behavior” with a white woman — an offense for which Till was abducted and brutally murdered in a racist attack. The reader senses at once the depth of history involved and, most movingly, what it means to White herself.
White will discuss Freedom Farmers March 6, 2019, at 7 p.m. at the UW Discovery Building, 330 N. Orchard St.
