Farming While Black

by Leah Penniman

  † Name altered to protect privacy.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Healing from Trauma

  As Black farmers, we have to recognize the trauma that we are up against. Trauma is a grain of sand that gets into a clam. She can’t cough it out, so she keeps covering up. The result looks beautiful and it’s ours because it was passed down through the mothers, but what’s inside is a lot of deep trauma. We must notice the pearl and how important it is for people to hold onto the pearl. That pearl becomes part of the clam and part of our story too. If we yank it out, we will kill her and we don’t want to do that. Let’s figure out how to live, how to care for ourselves connected to our whole sovereignty and our whole liberation.

  —CHRIS BOLDEN-NEWSOME

  My first day as a farmer at The Food Project in Boston, Massachusetts, was a homecoming for me. I carried a lot of pain and trauma in my 16-year-old body, and was burdened with both personal and ancestral violence and loss. I felt unsure whether I was worthy of the air that I inhaled and questioned whether there was a place for me on this green earth. This summer job was not an explicitly healing space, just a program to get urban and rural youth together to grow food and learn leadership skills. Still, the land worked her magic on me. My task that first day was to harvest cilantro for the farmers market. I had never interacted with this powerful plant before and the aromatic oils lingered in the creases of my fingers long after my train ride home, infiltrated my dreams, and called me to the present. The next eight weeks of farm labor awakened me to who I was meant to be.

  While farming was initially healing for me, for many African heritage people, it is triggering and re-traumatizing. Almost without exception, when I ask Black visitors to Soul Fire Farm what they first associate with farming, they respond “slavery” or “plantation.” As Chris Bolden-Newsome says, “The field was the scene of the crime.” Hundreds of years of enslavement have devastated our sacred connection to land and overshadowed thousands of years of our noble, autonomous farming history. Many of us have confused the terror our ancestors experienced on land with the land herself, naming her the oppressor and running toward paved streets without looking back. We do not stoop, sweat, harvest, or even get dirty, because we imagine that would revert us to bondage. And yet we are keenly aware that something is missing, that a gap exists where once there was connection. This generation of Black people is becoming known as the “returning generation” of agrarian people. Our grandparents fled the red clays of Georgia, and we are now cautiously working to make sense of a reconciliation with land. We somehow know that without the land, we cannot return to freedom. In this chapter we bear witness to the racial atrocities committed against our people, reflect upon the ways we have internalized this trauma, and explore strategies for personal healing and resistance so that we can reclaim our sacred belonging to land and self.

  This generation of Black people is becoming known as the “returning generation” in terms of our relationship to land. Photo by Neshima Vitale-Penniman.

  UPLIFT

  Ruby Nell Sales

  According to civil rights activist Ruby Sales, the Black church hymn “I love everybody. I love everybody in my heart,” is an anthem of resistance against the supposed omnipotent power of the white enslaver. It says that even though white people may control our external lives, we are in charge of our internal lives, and we decide not to hate. No matter what is done to us, we will not hate. Martin Luther King Jr. echoed this sentiment: “I have decided to stick with love. Hate is too great a burden to bear.”

  In addition to marching from Selma to Montgomery and dedicating her career to human rights activism, Sales is now mentoring younger activists in the Black Lives Matter movement. At an Atlanta BLM convening, she apologized to the younger people in the room, saying, “I am sorry for the ways we abandoned you.” We all have a hunger to be claimed by our elders, and as a result of the destruction of our intergenerational communities, we feel incomplete. She said, “One of the greatest trigger-fingers of the empire, is to destroy intimacy, to destroy how we know each other. And that the Black community has been under this assault ever since enslavement where Black people’s families were sold away from each other. We’ve had to constantly fight to maintain that intimacy.”

  Black Lives Matter has been our outcry since the moment of our captivity. We have resisted dehumanization at every turn, through escape, armed rebellion, litigation, nonviolent direct action, art and music, religious ritual, boycott, and countless other ingenious strategies. Even as we have fought for recognition of our humanity in material form—jobs, housing, freedom—we have also known that Black Lives Matter is about reclaiming our own sense of value and identity in the context of intergenerational Black community and in the spirit of love.1

  Historical Trauma: An Annotated Time Line

  A first step in the healing process is to grieve. We need to look with wide-open eyes at the atrocities committed against our ancestors and our people, to feel the pain of these events, and to mourn our losses. Later in this chapter we explore ways to compost our pain into wholeness, but first we need to be with that pain. What follows is a selective time line of traumatic events experienced by African people due to European enslavement and colonization.

  1455–Present: Doctrine of Discovery

  Pope Nicholas granted Christian nations the authority to loot and enslave non-Christian nations, saying, “Invade, search out, capture, vanquish, and subdue all Saracens and pagans,” take their possessions, and “reduce their persons to perpetual slavery.” This decree justified European settlers in their genocide against the Indigenous people of what became the United States, killing 90 percent of a population of 20 to 100 million, displacing those who survived, and stealing their land. It also set the stage for the transatlantic slave trade.2 The Doctrine of Discovery was upheld in US Supreme Court in 1823, which ruled that European discovery of land grants title annuls Native Americans’ right to “occupy” land. In 2005, the US Supreme court referenced the doctrine of discovery in its ruling that denied the Oneida Nation of New York tribal sovereignty over their original lands.

  1526–1857: Transatlantic Slave Trade

  Twelve and a half million Africans were kidnapped by Europeans to work the agricultural fields of the Americas in the transatlantic slave trade.3 The horrid conditions on the slave ship resulted in a mortality rate around 15 percent. “The space was so low that [the Africans] sat between each other’s legs and [were] stowed so close together that there was no possibility of their lying down or at all changing their position by night or day … the heat of these horrid places was so great and the odor so offensive that it was quite impossible to enter them.”4

  1619–1865: Slavery in the United States

  Six to 7 million enslaved African people labored in the tobacco, cotton, indigo, and sugar plantations of the American South, generating $6.5 to $10 trillion of wealth, in today’s dollars, for their enslavers.5 Enslaved people were subject to rape, torture, beatings, and murder, and prohibited from freedom of worship, learning to read, marrying, or moving about independently. Virginia laws allowed for the dismemberment of “unruly slaves,” prohibited racial intermarriage, and mandated that white churches seize all possessions belonging to slaves. After Congress abolished the African slave trade in 1808, the internal slave trade flourished, devastating 30 percent of Black families. “I had a constant dread that Mrs. Moore, her mistress, would be in want of money and sell my dear wife,” a freedman wrote, reflecting on his time in slavery. “We constantly dreaded a final separation. Our affection for each was very strong, and this made us always apprehensive of a cruel parting.”6 The 1857 Supreme Court decision in the Dred Scott v. Sanford case declared that Black people were “so far inferior, that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect; and that the negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit.”7

  1704–Present: Racialized Police Brutality

  North Carolina formed the nation’
s slave patrol force in 1704, a forerunner to the modern policing system.8 The system was nationalized in 1793, when Congress passed the fugitive slave laws allowing police, vigilantes, and dogs to hunt down both free and escaped Black people across state lines and drag them back into enslavement. At all points in US history, police have disproportionately detained, beaten, and even killed Black people as compared with white people. In 2002 Black people accounted for 13 percent of the US population, but 31 percent of the police killing victims.9

  Members of Capital Area Against Mass Incarceration prepare for an immigrant rights demonstration by creating a large banner that reads NO ES MI PRESIDENTE. Photo by Sun Angel Media.

  1862

  The Homestead Act provided federal land grants to western settlers, a mechanism for transferring 270 million acres of Native American land to white people. While Black people were included in the legislation, de facto discrimination prevented most from participating. At the same time, the Morrill Act granted 30,000 acres of federal land to each state, the proceeds of which would fund agricultural universities that excluded Black students.

  1865–77: Black Codes

  The 13th Amendment abolished slavery except for when people were convicted of crimes. The South created laws called Black Codes to label African Americans as criminals and keep them working and living in neo-slavery conditions. The defining feature of the codes was a sweeping vagrancy law that allowed police to arrest Black people for unemployment, loitering, or failure to pay taxes, and force them into contract labor. “Law enforcement agencies and white farmers systematically colluded in arresting African American men via sweeping and groundless incarceration every harvest season in order to press them into unpaid field labor.”10 The codes also prevented landownership, congregating in churches, attending school, voting, bearing arms, or moving freely through public spaces. One law stated, “All freedmen, free negroes and mulattoes in this State, over the age of eighteen years, found on the second Monday in January, 1866, or thereafter, without lawful employment or business, or found unlawfully assembling themselves together, either in the day or night time … shall be deemed vagrants, and on conviction thereof shall be fined … and imprisoned.” A forerunner to the modern social service system, the law also allowed the state to seize custody of children whose parents were not “industrious and honest” and send them to be “apprenticed” to their former owners.11

  1865–1941: Convict Leasing

  In the 1840s states began leasing out prisoners to private employers looking for cheap labor, but this practice exploded across the South after Emancipation. Black Codes were used to lock up formerly enslaved African Americans and force them to labor in farming, railroad construction, mining, and logging. In 1898, 73 percent of Alabama’s entire state revenue came from leasing out its convicts, 90 to 95 percent of whom were Black. Working conditions were miserable, and death rates were high. At the Coalburg Prison Mine in Alabama, 90 men per 1,000 prisoners died during their sentence. The practice of convict leasing was not legally abolished until President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued a circular in 1941.12

  1865–1940s: Sharecropping

  Reverend Garrison Frazier and 20 other Black Baptist and Methodist ministers met with Union General William T. Sherman to request allotments of “40 acres” of land for each freed Black family in an area independent from whites. In a radical act of land reparations, Sherman issued Field Order #15 deeding “40 acres and a mule” over to Black families on the South Carolina and Florida coasts. However, President Andrew Johnson reversed the policy and land was seized from Black families and returned to their former enslavers.13 Most Black farmers were unable to save enough money to purchase land on their own, so they remained in a high-poverty debt peonage system of sharecropping or tenant farming, where they paid white landowners for land, tools, seeds, and supplies. Many Black farmers ended up owing the white landowners more at the end of the season than at the beginning, compelling them to remain on the land or face legal consequences. Over 3 million Americans succumbed to pellagra, a disease resulting from niacin deficiency and associated with extreme poverty; Black women sharecroppers were hardest hit. Eddie Earvin was a spinach picker who fled Mississippi in 1963 after being made to work at gunpoint. “You didn’t talk about it or tell nobody,” Earvin said. “You had to sneak away.”14

  1877–1950 Terror Campaign

  More than 4,000 African Americans were lynched in total between 1877 and 1950. In the two-year period from 1900 through 1901, known as the “Terror Campaign,” 214 lynchings of Black people were reported in the South. Black landowners were specifically targeted for not “staying in their place”—that is, not settling for life as sharecroppers. Black people were also attacked for not removing their hats, for refusing to hand over a whiskey flask, for disobeying church procedures, for “using insolent language,” for disputing labor contracts, and for refusing to be “tied like a slave.” Other attacks were intended to simply “thin out the niggers a little.” In 1921 a white mob destroyed Tulsa’s “Black Wall Street,” devastating independently owned Black businesses. In 1923 another white mob leveled the Black town of Rosewood, Florida, with impunity.15

  1881–1965: Jim Crow Laws

  These laws revived the principles of the Black Codes by enforcing racial segregation throughout the South in neighborhoods, schools, restrooms, restaurants, workplaces, juries, drinking fountains, and all public accommodations. By 1896 the Plessy v. Ferguson case put the federal stamp of approval on Jim Crow. The Jim Crow laws helped spur racist hysteria, lynching, rioting, and the rise of the Ku Klux Klan. “Jim Crow formalized second-class citizenship status for Black Americans.”16

  1908–Present: Theft of Black-Owned Land

  In one detailed investigation by the Associated Press alone, white people violently stole at least 24,000 acres of land from 406 Black people, depriving them of tens of millions of dollars and often at the cost of their lives. For example:

  After midnight on Oct. 4, 1908, 50 hooded white men surrounded the home of a black farmer in Hickman, Ky., and ordered him to come out for a whipping. When David Walker refused and shot at them instead, the mob poured coal oil on his house and set it afire, according to contemporary newspaper accounts. Pleading for mercy, Walker ran out the front door, followed by four screaming children and his wife, carrying a baby in her arms. The mob shot them all, wounding three children and killing the others. Walker’s oldest son never escaped the burning house. No one was ever charged with the killings, and the surviving children were deprived of the farm their father died defending. Land records show that Walker’s 2½-acre farm was simply folded into the property of a white neighbor. The neighbor soon sold it to another man, whose daughter owns the undeveloped land today.17

  Recently, a participant in our Black Latinx Farmers Immersion program shared that her family’s land in Virginia has been gradually seized by white neighbors who showed up uninvited to her grandmother’s house demanding that she sign papers “or else.” Families seeking redress in court today are often told that the “statute of limitations has expired.”

  1910–Present: Heir Property Exploitation

  Black landowners often do not have access to legal services in order to create wills, so their property is inherited in common by their descendants, who become legal co-owners. Heir property is usually not eligible for mortgages, home equity loans, USDA programs, or government housing aid, tying the hands of property owners to invest in their land. Heir property is also vulnerable to corrupt lawyers and predatory developers because they only need to convince one heir to sell in order to force the sale of the entire property, known as a partition sale. Developers hunt down distant relatives, often in other states, and offer them cash for their share of the land, then force sale of the entire property at auction. It is estimated that over 50 percent of Black land loss since 1969 was due to partition sales. “If we don’t have our land, we don’t have our family,” says Queen Quet, chieftess of the Gullah/Geechee Nation. “T
his is the battle we’re in now.”18

  1933–Present: Federal Discrimination Against Black Farmers

  Throughout the South, USDA agents withheld crucial loans, crop allotments, and technical support services from Black farmers as well as excluded them from USDA county committees. For example, when Mississippi farmer Lloyd Shaffer went to the USDA office to apply for the programs to which he was entitled, “On three separate occasions, the white FHA loan officer took Lloyd Shaffer’s loan application out of his hand and threw it directly into the wastebasket. Once Lloyd was kept waiting eight hours, from the time the office opened until after it closed at night, while white farmers came and went all day long, conducting business.”19 By the 1950s USDA programs had been “sharpened into weapons to punish civil rights activity.” During the 1962 Greenwood Food Blockade, the White Citizens Council also weaponized the Federal Surplus Food Commodity Program to punish sharecroppers who organized for civil rights, cutting off food and driving 20,000 Black farmers to the edge of starvation.20 The founder of the Citizens’ Council drew up a plan to remove 200,000 African Americans from Mississippi by 1966 through “the tractor, the mechanical cotton picker … and the decline of the small independent farmers.” Black farmers who held on to their land used their independence to support civil rights workers, which often made them targets for lynch mobs and local elites.21 In 1965 the US Commission on Civil Rights, an independent agency created by the Civil Rights Act of 1957 to investigate and report on a broad spectrum of discriminatory practices, released a highly critical study revealing how the ASCS, the FHA, and the Federal Extension Service bitterly resisted demands to share power and resources with African American farmers, leading to a precipitous decline in Black landownership.22 In 1983 President Reagan pushed through budget cuts that eliminated the USDA Office of Civil Rights—and officials admitted they “simply threw discrimination complaints in the trash without ever responding to or investigating them” until 1996, when the office reopened. In 1920 there were 925,000 Black farmers owning 16 million acres of land, 14 percent of the US farmland. By 1970, 90 percent of the farmers and the farmland were lost to the Black community.23 “It was almost as if the earth was opening up and swallowing black farmers,” wrote scholar Pete Daniel in his book Dispossession.24