1/25/2024 0 Comments Fannie lou hamer dom high schoolYet, in subsequent years their numbers declined at an alarming rate, approaching 50 percent nearly every 10 years during the second half of the Century. Impressively, by 1920 Black farmers neared the one million mark and owned roughly 15 million acres of farmland. Land acquisition has been central to this struggle. Since their emancipation Black farmers have fought to become economically independent and for the right to self-determine the paths of their lives. By focusing on improving the daily existence of citizens rather than mobilizing against the power structures, D-Town, a seven-acre model urban farm project of DBCFSN, activists participate in the revival of a city mired in racism and poverty, and all but abandoned by politicians, the automobile industry, and the merchants and supermarkets who once served Detroit’s residents. These farmers adopt a community-based model for increasing access to healthy food for the mostly African American citizens of Detroit. DBCFSN uses the farm (a) as a community center, (b) as a means to articulate culturally relevant language about healthy food and healthy lifestyles, and (c) as a tangible model of collective work, self-reliance, and political agency. In so doing, it creates new community spaces on vacant land. By using farming as a strategy of resistance against the structural factors that have left much of Detroit in a condition of food insecurity, DBCFSN not only meets citizens’ needs for fresh produce, but also builds community by transforming the social, economic, and physical environment. This article analyzes community building and political agency through an investigation of the Detroit Black Community Food Security Network (DBCFSN). Such implications provide insights into the possibilities of the food justice movement in the future and challenge the movement to include, more explicitly, issues of race, land, self-determination, and economic autonomy. I conclude with a brief discussion on what the cases teach us about this dual process and its implications for scholars and activists who work on issues of food justice. In this paper, I juxtapose two cases of black farm projects-the historical case of Freedom Farms Cooperative (FFC) in Mississippi and the contemporary case of the Rocky Acres Community Farm (RACF) in New York-to explore the dual process of food justice. However, we know very little about this dual process and how black communities engage in it. It also has deep roots in the historical arc of food politics in the Black Freedom Struggle of the civil rights era. This process is characterized by the simultaneous acts of dismantling oppressive forms of food power and building emancipatory forms of food power. Yet, the pursuit of food justice is a dual process related to power. Similarly, many food justice activists and organizations produce an analysis of oppressive forms of food power, while placing the goals of the movement to create sustainable community-based interventions in the periphery. While scholars who study issues of food justice use the term food power rarely-if at all-their arguments often position the rise of the food justice movement in the context of food power that sustains oppression in the food system. This article outlines someof these lessons. Hamer, offer us important and valuable lessons on rebuilding our communities and investing in sustainable cities around growing food. Using the principles of collective and shared ownership, Freedom Farms and the work of Ms. Using a historical method to analyze extensive archival records, this article offers an analysis of Freedom Farms and illuminates valuable lessons on agriculture as resistance, and alternative strategies of rebuilding and investing in sustainable communities. Freedom Farms offered these sharecroppers and tenant farmers educational and retraining opportunities including health care and disaster relief for those who wanted to stay in the Mississippi Delta. An agricultural cooperative built on 680-acres, Freedom Farms included a pig bank, Head Start program, community gardens, commercial kitchen, a garment factory, sewing cooperative, tool bank, and low-income, affordable housing as strategies to support the needs of African Americans who were fired and evicted for exercising the right to vote. This article brings to light an important project she started in 1969, Freedom Farms Cooperative (FFC) in Sunflower County, MS. Much of the scholarship on the work and legacy of activist Fannie Lou Hamer concentrates on her tireless efforts for civil/human rights and African American representation and access to electoral politics.
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