Black Farmers Are Still Here, You’re Just Not Looking
By Rena Wetzel-Curtis, Wisteria Magazine
¨I am proof of life after death. I am dawning from decay, my belly of mass graves, my open palms spawn gardens¨ - Naima Pennimans ¨Black gold¨
In the 1920s, Black farmers made up 14% of farmers in the United States. Now, just 2%. Black farmers have a disproportionately harder time gaining access to land, loans, and supplies to maintain a successful, profitable, and inhabitable connection to the land. Farmers like Lizy Bryant, Naima Penniman, and Sedrick Rowe are working to connect more people within the Black diaspora with farming and stewardship.
White farmers in America have an endless supply of land that was never, and will never be theirs, Indigenous farmers have had their rightful land under treaty ripped away from their care, and Black farmers come from enslaved people who were forced to tend to land that isn’t their homeland and feed colonizers. The existence of any lucrative agriculture in the United States is a product of the enslavement of Black people, yet getting funds and supplies to grow a thriving farm now, has significantly more barriers for Black people. Owning any piece of land even is a long process for Black Americans that includes gaslighting, racism within the agriculture scene, and sometimes purposeful delay of funds and grants. In the time between the abolition of modern slavery and the beginning of Jim Crow Laws, the amount of successful Black-owned farms spiked. In 1865, more than 3 million enslaved people were “freed” but only to be freed into a country that refused them jobs, housing, education, and land. In the late 1860s, the “Black code” law was also fabricated to suppress Black people in a supposedly free country. So many Black families were put in a place where they couldn't support themselves on their own, prompting families to work together and buy land with pooled money, grow crops to support themselves, and be solely supported by their newly owned land. After less than a century of thriving Black farms, Jim Crow laws were enforced and deteriorated prosperous communities, implementing laws that allowed Black people access to fewer, poorly maintained, and impractical utilities, services, and property. The first era of blooming Black farmers had been forced into the shadows.
Fast forward to 2021, people are beginning to pay attention to Black land stewards again. The damage to Black land ownership and wealth is already done but farmers are determined to make a comeback and are hoping that this generation will produce young Black farmers to carry on a legacy.
People you should know:
Jewel Bronaugh, the 16th commissioner of the Virginia department of agriculture and President Biden's nominee for deputy secretary of agriculture
Naima Penniman, a Black nonbinary multi-dimensional artist and founder of Soul Fire Farms (soulfirefarms.org)
Lizy Bryant, a queer, Black, emerging land steward who is creating a farming infrastructure near the Twin Cities for Black Minnesotans (gofundme.com/f/blackland2020)
