Freedom Farmers is not your conventional Civil Rights narrative, couched in terms of campaigns for voting rights, school desegregation, and lunch counter seats, though there are familiar historical figures: W.E.B. Du Bois, Booker T. Washington, and Fannie Lou Hamer, whose Freedom Farm Cooperative gave the book its title. It’s a timely, connective, and expansive book; one that reframes the whiteness of agricultural history and calls us to remember the fact that the Black freedom struggle is an ongoing labor movement in places far and wide.
It also locates Black farmers in a Civil Rights narrative that goes beyond their historic and continuing legal struggles against USDA discrimination. Freedom Farmers moves beyond stories of subsistence and survival; it centers Black farmers as unsung food justice advocates and organic intellectuals who imagined better communities, food systems, and politics. And then, depending on one another, they started building.
Civil Eats spoke with White about the book, the ethos of Black farming communities, and why she coined the term “collective agency.”
This book made me realize how much of Civil Rights history really focuses on the urban South. What did you learn about rural folks and Black farmers, specifically?
Doing this work on rural Black Southerners flipped what I thought I knew about the South. When we were kids in Detroit, [my friends and I] would talk about what we wouldn’t do if we lived in the South and how we wouldn’t put up with [racism]. That was an overly simplistic view of how oppression manifests and people’s reaction and responses to it. One thing that I have fallen so in love with is the farmer’s freedom. There’s a certain kind of freedom that people who produce food have; they feel a sense of agency. And I don’t think it’s ever discussed when we talk about who farmers are.
I learned the genius of what it means to be a farmer, especially a Southern Black farmer. For example, Ben Burkett [of the National Family Farm Coalition] can look at a bag of seeds and tell you how many bushels he’ll get out of that, what the profit will be. Farmers don’t get credit for knowing applied mathematics.
I’m also fascinated by what rural Southern communities offered us in terms of open methods of communications—the way they supported each other, organized, and cared for each other. I feel like this book taught me a lot about the South that I didn’t understand but came to know through meeting Black folks who were raised there, but (unlike my family) never left.