Black Agricultural Resistance, A Legacy that Persists
Fannie Lou Hamer inspires my perspective on racial justice, food systems, agriculture, and public policy. The Freedom Farm Cooperative was Fannie’s vision to liberate the Black residents of Sunflower County, Mississippi through agricultural resistance. She connected civil and voter rights with land stewardship in the Jim Crow South, helped uphold the Civil Rights Movement, and made major contributions to the ongoing Black liberation canon. The Cooperative became an ecosystem where residents could grow nutritious food, access affordable housing, pool resources, incubate businesses, gain new skills, and organize politically. In the face of blatant and intentional racial discrimination, Fannie Lou Hamer innovated a food system that was productive, protective, and restorative.
I share the same vision of food abundance created by community-based, need-specific, agriculturally regenerative, and culturally restorative food systems. That is both my research and professional objective, as well as my perspective. In Georgia, I have had the privilege of connecting with a network of land stewards, organizers, food producers, cultural workers, and food systems coordinators. Their fiber farms, flower farms, urban food forests, urban gardens, composting collectives, farmers markets, agricultural businesses, and rural food systems work autonomously yet collaboratively in a food ecosystem. I am learning about their struggles with funding, losing ancestral land, aging farmers, the shrinking forest canopy, the militarization of city police, and racial discrimination. We practice Sankofa as we look to the past for progress in the future.
Fannie Lou Hamer’s life experiences inspired generations of Black agricultural resistance in Atlanta and beyond.
Ms. Hamer was a sharecropper and domestic worker on the Marlowe Plantation for 18 years before she led a group of Black Mississippians to the state courthouse to apply to register to vote. She returned to an ultimatum from her employer, “either withdraw her application for voter registration or be fired.” From that moment, Hamer spent her life critiquing racist public policies and the exploitative relationship between landowners and farm workers in Mississippi. Hamer connected the starvation of Sunflower County with the Segregationist agenda of Black voter suppression and pressure to migrate out of the state when she said, “down in Mississippi, they are killing negroes of all ages, on the installment plan, through starvation. If you a negro and vote, if you persist in dreams of Black power to win some measure of freedom in white-controlled counties, you go hungry.”
Fannie Lou Hamer testifying at the 1964 Democratic National Convention. Credit: Library of Congress.
In Mississippi, local and regional politicians and business persons used public policy, social services, and federal funding to advance a white supremacist agenda of voter suppression and forced migration. In the mid-1900s, the federal government used several strategies to back the agricultural economy, including issuing subsidy checks to farmers to refrain from planting in efforts to control the price of crop commodities on the market. Federal funds also supported the mechanization, industrialization, and modernization of farms. These subsidies often went to wealthy white planters like John Easton–a U.S. Senator and segregationist leader who got a check from the USDA in 1960 worth over $167,000. Federal funds and resource support tipped the scales of power towards white leaders in Mississippi because they could now afford to fire Black agricultural workers who dared to organize for their rights and freedoms. This power and resource imbalance led to mass unemployment and homelessness for Black agricultural workers, sharecroppers, tenant farmers, and farm managers. Because of these disparities, Sunflower county – a predominantly Black county – had some of the highest rates of poverty, malnourishment, and food-related chronic illness in the country. When a community clinic opened in the next county over, many residents had diagnoses related to malnourishment, and many of the prescriptions made were just for food.
Today, Black farmers in Atlanta and beyond use agricultural resistance methods inspired by Hamer to combat food apartheid, repair local food systems, organize politically, and protect the environment. Their example pushed me to join a collective of Black land stewards who create and coordinate exchanges of labor, funding, growing techniques, resources, and information between farmers and youth via volunteer events, mutual aid efforts, communications advocacy, and cultural excursions. In the Hamer tradition, we tackle the socially and environmentally destructive practices of racism with a cooperative approach to land stewardship, food production, and community organizing.
Fannie Lou Hamer focused on the root causes of hunger in her community and held policymakers and elected officials accountable for their discrimination, intimidation, and neglect. She encouraged Black Mississippians to register to vote, run for local and state offices, and identify potential candidates who supported their cause. She then innovated a collective movement towards food and racial justice.
The next steps for the anti-hunger movement should follow her example by reinforcing social justice, systemic change, and institutional repair as the North Star of our collective goals.
Those goals should include getting to the root causes of hunger, keeping our elective officials accountable for addressing them, and making our social safety net more effective as we work towards creating and reinforcing thriving food systems.