Monica M. White: Freedom farmers: agricultural resistance and the Black Freedom Movement
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Monica M. White: Freedom farmers: agricultural resistance and the Black Freedom Movement The University of North Carolina Press, 2018, p. 208 Kristin Reynolds 1,2,3 Received: 21 September 2020 / Accepted: 22 September 2020/ # INRAE and Springer-Verlag France SAS, part of Springer Nature 2020
I first learned about Monica White’s work at the second annual Black Farmers and Urban Gardeners conference in 2011, held in the Bronx, NY, that year. I was in the process of developing a course on women and agriculture, and had recently read some of her analyses of the work of Black women using urban agriculture as resistance strategy in Detroit (White 2011), so I was excited and honored, to meet her. My interest in Dr. White’s work was also grounded in recognition of the societal need to know more about African-American and Black farmers’ realities and histories than was available in most mainstream written sources. Prior to meeting her that year, I had worked at the University of California, Davis’ Small Farm Center, whose mission was to serve “limited-resourced” farmers in the state. The director at the time, an agricultural economist originally from Jamaica, had served on the United States Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) National Commission on Small Farms in 1997, which included leading academics, extension agents, and Black farmers from throughout the USA. The Commission had been established during the then-ongoing Pigford class action lawsuit against the USDA and on behalf of African-American farmers alleging USDA’s discriminatory practices over the specific period of 15 years (see Penniman 2018; Newkirk 2019). Its mandate was to “examine the status of small farms” in the USA, and to offer policy recommendations to support their continuation. Its report specifically recognized that “discrimination had been a contributing factor in the dramatic decline of Black farmers” over the previous decades and that the Pigford case had given rise to the creation of the Commission itself (USDA National Commission on Small Farms 1998). Perhaps bolstered by the work of the Commission’s report much of the UC Small Farm Program’s work in the early 2000s focused on serving African-American and
* Kristin Reynolds [email protected]
1
Independent Scholar, New York, NY, USA
2
The New School, New York, NY, USA
3
Yale School of the Environment, New Haven, CT, USA
K. Reynolds
Black farmers, as well as women and Latinx farmers—those labeled “socially disadvantaged” in USDA terminology. As a young scholar, and white person just beginning to learn about the magnitude of the inequitable racial contours of agriculture in the USA, I came to understand that there was relatively little published information available about African-American and Black farmers, and even less that delicately walked the balance between recognizing on the one hand the horrific historical agricultural realities that were enslavement and the Jim Crow South, and on the other, seeing agriculture as a livelihood and a resistance strategy for collecti
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