In this episode, we meet June and Angie Provost, sugarcane farmers in Louisiana. According to The Daily, the Provosts "trace their family line to the enslaved workers on Louisiana’s sugar-cane plantations. The story they tell — of land worked, gained and lost — carries the weight of the discrimination and dispossession that have defined the brutal history of sugar farming."
Producer Adizah Eghan, right, with June Provost at the cemetery in Patoutville, La., where his father is buried. Credit: Annie Brown/The New York Times
Listen to the EpisodeIn 1865, Major General W. T. Sherman issued Special Field Orders No. 15 to give land to freed families to cultivate and reside on. In later conversations, he suggested providing former army mules to those families. When President Andrew Jackson took office, he reversed and annulled this and other efforts, but "40 Acres and a Mule" is a phrase that continues to resonate today in conversations about reparations and what was owed to Black people during post-Civil War Reconstruction.
Photo "Sharecropers" (1949), courtesy of Georgia Archives, Vanishing Georgia Collection
People have been calling for the harms done to enslaved people and their descendants to be "repaired" since before the end of slavery in the US (Brown Report on Slavery and Justice).
Trans-Africa executive director Randall Robinson published the book, The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks was published. In it, he explores the topic of reparations with both its historical context and a view towards the future. It became a bestseller. Ibram X. Kendi writes in Stamped from the Beginning that this book, and other antiracist efforts around the world, "smashed into a brick wall in the aftermath of September 11, 2001" (p. 477).
The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks by
"Randall Robinson makes a case for the enormous debt America owes to Africans and African Americans for the incalculable damage blacks have suffered and continue to suffer as a result of nearly two hundred and fifty years of slavery and segregation." "In Robinson's view, America must accept responsibility for the grievous wrong that has been committed against Africans and African Americans, and take steps to redress that wrong: and black Americans need to arm themselves with a more comprehensive awareness of their ancient history and a fuller recognition of their ongoing contribution to our nation and the world."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
The case for reparations gained renewed attention when Ta-Nehisi Coates published "The Case for Reparations" in The Atlantic Magazine in June, 2014, just two short months before Michael Brown was killed by police in Ferguson, Missouri, sparking a renewed national debate about police brutality and systemic violence against Black citizens.
Nikole Hannah-Jones added her voice to this conversation in the essay, "What is Owed," published in the New York Times Magazine. This was published a month and three days after George Floyd was killed during an arrest by Minneapolis police, whose death sparked worldwide protests, some policy changes, and ongoing effects in US culture and business.
According a 2012 USDA report, Characteristics and Influential Factors of Food Deserts, “'food deserts,' [are] regions of the country often feature large proportions of households with low incomes, inadequate access to transportation, and a limited number of food retailers providing fresh produce and healthy groceries for affordable prices." .
A 2009 report to Congress, Access to Affordable and Nutritious Food: Measuring and Understanding Food Deserts and Their Consequences (USDA), found "23.5 million people live in low-income areas that are further than 1 mile from a large grocery store or supermarket, and that 11.5 million of these people have low incomes themselves."
Use the link below to use the Food Access Research Atlas. The map is based on census tract data, so you may want to review the Atlas' documentation before using the tool.
According to his website, Ron lived in a food desert: "He knew what it’s like to drive 45 minutes just to get a fresh tomato." Listen to Ron Finley's TED Talk below to learn how he transformed the strip of land outside his house into a garden and the adversity he faced from the city.
According to the National Family Farm Coalition site, the Declaration of Nyéléni, the first global forum on food sovereignty (Mali, 2007) defines food sovereignty as:
"...The right of peoples to healthy and culturally-appropriate food produced through ecologically sound and sustainable methods, and their right to define their own food and agriculture systems. It puts the aspirations and needs of those who produce, distribute and consume food at the heart of food systems and policies rather than the demands of markets and corporations."
In her book Sisters of the Yam: Black Women and Self-Recovery, bell hooks writes, “Collective black self-recovery takes place when we begin to renew our relationship to the earth, when we remember the way of or ancestors….Living in modern society, without a sense of history, it has been easy for folks to forget that black people were first and foremost a people of the land, farmers.”
Sisters of the Yam: Black Women and Self-Recovery by
In Sisters of the Yam, bell hooks reflects on the ways in which the emotional health of black women has been and continues to be impacted by sexism and racism. Desiring to create a context where black females could both work on their individual efforts for self-actualization while remaining connected to a larger world of collective struggle, hooks articulates the link between self-recovery and political resistance. Both an expression of the joy of self-healing and the need to be ever vigilant in the struggle for equality, Sisters of the Yam continues to speak to the experience of black womanhood.
Organizations like those linked below advocate for farmer rights and issues related to land use. The first three links are for organizations in Oregon and the Pacific Northwest.
Freedom Farmers: Agricultural Resistance and the Black Freedom Movement by
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.
In a recent podcast, Mother Jones sat down with author and agricultural activist, Leah Penniman, to discuss the rarely acknowledged history of African American farming in the United States.
Soul Fire Farm's Practical Guide to Liberation on the Land by
James Beard Foundation Leadership Award 2019: Leah Penniman Choice Reviews, Outstanding Academic Title "An extraordinary book...part agricultural guide, part revolutionary manifesto"--VOGUE In 1920, 14 percent of all land-owning US farmers were black. Today less than 2 percent of farms are controlled by black people--a loss of over 14 million acres and the result of discrimination and dispossession. While farm management is among the whitest of professions, farm labor is predominantly brown and exploited, and people of color disproportionately live in "food apartheid" neighborhoods and suffer from diet-related illness. The system is built on stolen land and stolen labor and needs a redesign. Farming While Black is the first comprehensive "how to" guide for aspiring African-heritage growers to reclaim their dignity as agriculturists and for all farmers to understand the distinct, technical contributions of African-heritage people to sustainable agriculture. At Soul Fire Farm, author Leah Penniman co-created the Black and Latinx Farmers Immersion (BLFI) program as a container for new farmers to share growing skills in a culturally relevant and supportive environment led by people of color. Farming While Black organizes and expands upon the curriculum of the BLFI to provide readers with a concise guide to all aspects of small-scale farming, from business planning to preserving the harvest. Throughout the chapters Penniman uplifts the wisdom of the African diasporic farmers and activists whose work informs the techniques described--from whole farm planning, soil fertility, seed selection, and agroecology, to using whole foods in culturally appropriate recipes, sharing stories of ancestors, and tools for healing from the trauma associated with slavery and economic exploitation on the land. Woven throughout the book is the story of Soul Fire Farm, a national leader in the food justice movement. The technical information is designed for farmers and gardeners with beginning to intermediate experience. For those with more experience, the book provides a fresh lens on practices that may have been taken for granted as ahistorical or strictly European. Black ancestors and contemporaries have always been leaders--and continue to lead--in the sustainable agriculture and food justice movements. It is time for all of us to listen.
In this video, Devita Davison, director of marketing and communications at FoodLab Detroit, shares the story of Prince’s Hot Chicken Shack, explaining the barriers there still are today for food entrepreneurs of color. FoodLab Detroit is transforming Detroit’s local food economy by supporting a diverse community of food businesses and allies working to make good food a sustainable reality for all Detroiters.
In 1997, Black farmers brought a class action lawsuit against the USDA alleging systemic discrimination in the farm loan process. The case, Pigford v. Glickman, resulted in one of the largest federal settlements for civil rights rights violations, approximately $1.06 billion in cash, tax and debt relief. However, problems with the settlement agreement resulted in many farmers filing too late to submit a claim. The subsequent litigation (In re Black Farmers Discrimination Litigation or Pigford II) resulted in a settlement of $1.2 billion.
LibrarySearch offers a streamlined interface for finding books and other media that combines the collections of UO Libraries and Summit libraries.
The Sugar Masters: Planters and Slaves in Louisiana's Cane World, 1820-1860 by
Focusing on the master-slave relationship in Louisiana's antebellum sugarcane country, The Sugar Masters explores how a modern, capitalist mind-set among planters meshed with old-style paternalistic attitudes to create one of the South's most insidiously oppressive labor systems. As author Richard Follett vividly demonstrates, the agricultural paradise of Louisiana's thriving sugarcane fields came at an unconscionable cost to slaves. Thanks to technological and business innovations, sugar planters stood as models of capitalist entrepreneurship by midcentury. But above all, labor management was the secret to their impressive success. Follett explains how in exchange for increased productivity and efficiency they offered their slaves a range of incentives, such as greater autonomy, improved accommodations, and even financial remuneration. These material gains, however, were only short term. According to Follett, many of Louisiana's sugar elite presented their incentives with a "facade of paternal reciprocity" that seemingly bound the slaves' interests to the apparent goodwill of the masters, but in fact, the owners sought to control every aspect of the slaves's lives, from reproduction to discretionary income. Slaves responded to this display of paternalism by trying to enhance their rights under bondage, but the constant bargaining process invariably led to compromises on their part, and the grueling production pace never relented. The only respite from their masters' demands lay in fashioning their own society, including outlets for religion, leisure, and trade. Until recently, scholars have viewed planters as either paternalistic lords who eschewed marketplace values or as entrepreneurs driven to business success. Follett offers a new view of the sugar masters as embracing both the capitalist market and a social ideology based on hierarchy, honor, and paternalism. His stunning synthesis of empirical research, demographics study, and social and cultural history sets a new standard for this subject.
The Wartime Genesis of Free Labour by
Union occupation of parts of the Confederacy during the Civil War forced federal officials to confront questions about the social order that would replace slavery. This volume of Freedom, first published in 1991, presents a documentary history of the emergence of free-labor relations in the large plantation areas of the Union-occupied Lower South. The documents illustrate the experiences of former slaves as military laborers, as residents of federally sponsored 'contraband camps', as wage laborers on plantations and in towns, and, in some instances, as independent farmers and self-employed workers. Together with the editors' interpretative essays, these documents portray the different understandings of freedom advanced by the many participants in the wartime evolution of free labor - former slaves and free blacks; former slaveholders; Union military officers and officials in Washington; and Northern planters, ministers and teachers. The war sealed the fate of slavery only to open a contest over the meaning of freedom. This volume documents an important chapter of that contest.
Cooking in Other Women's Kitchens: Domestic Workers in the South,1865-1960 by
As African American women left the plantation economy behind, many entered domestic service in southern cities and towns. Cooking was one of the primary jobs they performed, feeding generations of white families and, in the process, profoundly shaping southern foodways and culture. Rebecca Sharpless argues that, in the face of discrimination, long workdays, and low wages, African American cooks worked to assert measures of control over their own lives. As employment opportunities expanded in the twentieth century, most African American women chose to leave cooking for more lucrative and less oppressive manufacturing, clerical, or professional positions. Through letters, autobiography, and oral history, Sharpless evokes African American women's voices from slavery to the open economy, examining their lives at work and at home.
Fertile Ground, Narrow Choices: Women on Texas Cotton Farms, 1900-1940 by
Rural women comprised the largest part of the adult population of Texas until 1940 and in the American South until 1960. On the cotton farms of Central Texas, women's labor was essential. In addition to working untold hours in the fields, women shouldered most family responsibilities: keeping house, sewing clothing, cultivating and cooking food, and bearing and raising children. But despite their contributions to the southern agricultural economy, rural women's stories have remained largely untold. Using oral history interviews and written memoirs, Rebecca Sharpless weaves a moving account of women's lives on Texas cotton farms. She examines how women from varying ethnic backgrounds--German, Czech, African American, Mexican, and Anglo-American--coped with difficult circumstances. The food they cooked, the houses they kept, the ways in which they balanced field work with housework, all yield insights into the twentieth-century South. And though rural women's lives were filled with routines, many of which were undone almost as soon as they were done, each of their actions was laden with importance, says Sharpless, for the welfare of a woman's entire family depended heavily upon her efforts.
In episode 5, part 1 of the 1619 Project podcast, June Provost discusses farming sugarcane in Louisiana. A well-known narrative of a formerly-enslaved sugarcane worker comes from a marron (cimarrón in Spanish), a runaway slave in Cuba who worked on sugarcane plantations. This narrative is fascinating for both its content and how it came to be. The early edition by Miguel Barnet is considered to be the first Latin American testimonial novel, blurring the lines between fiction and nonfiction.
There are multiple editions of this book, and these are just a few of the copies available through UO Libraries.
Biography of a Runaway Slave by
In this remarkable testimony, Cuban novelist and anthropologist Miguel Barnet presents the narrative of 105-year-old Esteban Montejo, who lived as a slave, as fugitive in the wilderness, and as a soldier in the Cuban War of Independence. Honest, blunt, compassionate, shrewd, and engaging, his voice provides an extraordinary insight into the African culture that took root in the Caribbean.
Biografía de un cimarrón estudios y ensayos by Additional links to narratives from those who survived slavery and primary sources like photographs and oral histories can be found on other pages of this guide.
The second part of this episode opens with June Provost, a sugar cane farmer, and his wife Angie praying the "Our Father" or "Lord's Prayer," which comes from the Bible in the Christian tradition. In the prayer, people ask God to "give us our daily bread."
These books below are just a few titles that explore the complex history of Christianity and Afro-descendent peoples in the US.
The First Prejudice: Religious Tolerance and Intolerance in Early America by
In many ways, religion was the United States' first prejudice--both an early source of bigotry and the object of the first sustained efforts to limit its effects. Spanning more than two centuries across colonial British America and the United States, The First Prejudice offers a groundbreaking exploration of the early history of persecution and toleration. The twelve essays in this volume were composed by leading historians with an eye to the larger significance of religious tolerance and intolerance. Individual chapters examine the prosecution of religious crimes, the biblical sources of tolerance and intolerance, the British imperial context of toleration, the bounds of Native American spiritual independence, the nuances of anti-Semitism and anti-Catholicism, the resilience of African American faiths, and the challenges confronted by skeptics and freethinkers. The First Prejudice presents a revealing portrait of the rhetoric, regulations, and customs that shaped the relationships between people of different faiths in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century America. It relates changes in law and language to the lived experience of religious conflict and religious cooperation, highlighting the crucial ways in which they molded U.S. culture and politics. By incorporating a broad range of groups and religious differences in its accounts of tolerance and intolerance, The First Prejudice opens a significant new vista on the understanding of America's long experience with diversity.
The Origins of Proslavery Christianity: White and Black Evangelicals in Colonial and Antebellum Virginia by
In the colonial and antebellum South, black and white evangelicals frequently prayed, sang, and worshipped together. Even though white evangelicals claimed spiritual fellowship with those of African descent, they nonetheless emerged as the most effective defenders of race-based slavery. As Charles Irons persuasively argues, white evangelicals' ideas about slavery grew directly out of their interactions with black evangelicals. Set in Virginia, the largest slaveholding state and the hearth of the southern evangelical movement, this book draws from church records, denominational newspapers, slave narratives, and private letters and diaries to illuminate the dynamic relationship between whites and blacks within the evangelical fold. Irons reveals that when whites theorized about their moral responsibilities toward slaves, they thought first of their relationships with bondmen in their own churches. Thus, African American evangelicals inadvertently shaped the nature of the proslavery argument. When they chose which churches to join, used the procedures set up for church discipline, rejected colonization, or built quasi-independent congregations, for example, black churchgoers spurred their white coreligionists to further develop the religious defense of slavery.
Slave Missions and the Black Church in the Antebellum South by
Slave Missions and the Black Church in the Antebellum South examines the fascinating but perplexing interactions between white missionaries and slaves in the 1840s and 1850s, and the ways in which blacks used the missions to nurture the formation of the organized black church.
Janet Cornelius uses church records and slave narratives and autobiographies to show that black religious leaders - slave and free - took advantage of opportunities offered by missions to create a small break in the oppression of slavery: to conduct their own meetings, become literate, and build the black community. Slave missions also provided whites with a rationale for training and supporting black leaders and protecting black congregations, particularly in the visible city churches.
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