Freedom Farmers: Agricultural Resistance and the Black Freedom Movement

by Monica M. White, LaDonna Redmond Narrated by Monica M. White

Overview

In May 1967, internationally renowned activist Fannie Lou Hamer purchased forty acres of land in the Mississippi Delta, launching the Freedom Farms Cooperative (FFC). A community-based rural and economic development project, FFC would grow to over 600 acres, offering a means for local sharecroppers, tenant farmers, and domestic workers to pursue community wellness, self-reliance, and political resistance. Life on the cooperative farm presented an alternative to the second wave of northern migration by African Americans-an opportunity to stay in the South, live off the land, and create a healthy community based upon building an alternative food system as a cooperative and collective effort.



Freedom Farmers expands the historical narrative of the black freedom struggle to embrace the work, roles, and contributions of southern black farmers and the organizations they formed. Whereas existing scholarship generally views agriculture as a site of oppression and exploitation of black people, this book reveals agriculture as a site of resistance and provides a historical foundation that adds meaning and context to current conversations around the resurgence of food justice/sovereignty movements in urban spaces like Detroit, Chicago, Milwaukee, New York City, and New Orleans.

Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

Writing consciously with an eye on the uses of the past for understanding the present and influencing the future, White recovers the lost stories of Black activists who worked to ensure access to adequate and nutritious food for low-income communities, promoted alternatives to capitalist economic exploitation, and demanded a voice in the decisions affecting their lives. Scholars of African American history, agricultural history, and urban history will find much value in this book.—Journal of Southern History



"Freedom Farmers stands literally as a landmark, ushering in a new era of community-based scholarship with and for agrarian justice. From here on out, scholars, activists, practitioners have a lodestar from which to research, practice, and advocate for food, farm, and racial justice: Dr. White's framework of 'collective agency and community resilience"—Journal of Agriculture, Food Systems, and Community Development



This book will fill the gaps in your knowledge of Black US agricultural history, with a mix of narrative and evaluation. . . . Freedom Farmers provides an uplifting perspective, showing agriculture was not only a site of oppression and exploitation of Black people, but also one of proactive political resistance and cooperative effort."—Virginia Association for Biological Farming



An excellent model of using the past to inform the present."—H-Environment



White brings forward the activity and thinking of women organizers…Freedom Farms traces a through-line of Black self-determination through economic empowerment—not through a narrowly meritocratic or exclusivist notion of progress and advancement but through democratic access to, and control over, land and life, and the central role of women therein."—Agrarian South: Journal of Political Economy



A timely work that convincingly demonstrates the power of agricultural resistance for African American communities."—Journal of African American History

Product Details

BN ID:	2940176016444
Publisher:	Tantor Audio
Publication date:	03/16/2021
Edition description:	Unabridged

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