Black Land Matters

By FRANK LINGO

The term “urban” in music has meant Black styles like Rhythm’n’Blues for decades. Recently, the music biz has stopped using “urban,” but the underlying association remains — that Black folks are concentrated in big cities.

It wasn’t always so. According to a Feb. 2 article in the New York Times, after the Civil War, rural Black communities spread across the South, cultivating a variety of crops. By 1920 there were nearly a million Black farmers, with about a quarter of them becoming landowners.

Jim Crow laws made farming difficult for Blacks. White backlash set in and the Ku Klux Klan committed bombings, as well as intimidation of Black farmers, which led them to migrate to cities in the North.

Georgia has lost over 98% of its Black farmers in the last century, according to the Times article, but one man looking to reverse the trend is Sedrick Rowe, who grows organic peanuts on a 30-acre tract in southwest Georgia.

After college, Rowe trained at a land trust called New Communities, which helps African-American farmers make a living. At the same time he’s running his farm, Rowe is pursuing a Ph.D. in soil health. He is a reminder that Black people knew how to work the land both during slavery and afterwards on their own.

Rowe is inspiring, but Black farming is in a grim situation. Nationally, only 1.3% of America’s farmers are Black. Those that try have faced closed doors for loans from both banks and government agencies that White farmers had access to.

Even many white farmers have gone broke. Big Ag has swallowed up tens of thousands of family farms in the last few decades. Big Ag is about money, not love for the land. Poisonous chemicals are the norm on corporate-owned land.

In the last century, there was a mass migration to cities by poor whites as well. The vast majority of Americans of all races have grown up with no touch of the Earth to sustain themselves. In this writer’s view, that’s not a good thing for the Earth, pertaining to our treatment of it. Urban living separates us from the ground, no matter your color. We can forget our roots and lose touch with the fertile dirt under all that concrete.

There are some encouraging responses to this dilemma. Community gardens have sprouted up in vacant lots and on rooftops in many cities. People work together to grow food, partly to save money but also to enjoy working with the soil.

An ABC News report from November 2020 highlighted the story of Kamal Bell, a 29-year-old Black farmer in Durham, N.C. Bell mentors Black youths on farming and good business practices. He aims for his operation to be a sustainable food source for urban food deserts.

Politically, there is some movement to help Black farmers. A Senate bill proposes to let them reclaim as much as 160 acres apiece thru federal land grants, according to the Times. If the bill becomes law, up to 32 million acres of land could be allocated, providing jobs and land to live on for thousands of Black farmers.

President Biden plans to put farmers at the forefront of fighting climate chaos. Hopefully, that will include incentives for organic crops, which leave a lighter carbon footprint and don’t pollute the air, land and water with chemicals.

But there’s still a problem with systemic racism at the Department of Agriculture, according to Lawrence Lucas, a former USDA official who now heads Justice for Black Farmers. Biden has tapped Tom Vilsack, who headed the department under Obama. But Lucas said that Vilsack was there for eight years and didn’t fix the problem.

Organic farming, like Sedrick Rowe practices, helps hold carbon in the soil. It also makes him much more money for his peanuts.

Referring to Biden’s plan, Rowe said, “You take care of the soil and the soil takes care of you.”

Frank Lingo, based in Lawrence, Kansas, is a former columnist for the Kansas City Star and author of the novel “Earth Vote”. See his new website Greenbeat.world. Email: lingofrank@gmail.com.

From The Progressive Populist, March 1, 2021

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