In my self-employment, I've been incredibly lucky to finally have the time to get involved with a network of organizations and activists across Madison and Wisconsin working on so many of the issues I care about: voter rights and money in politics, climate change legislation, feminism, criminal justice reform, and last but not least, local food, veganism, and sustainable cities.
In the vein of the last of these, I've been volunteering as a front desk staff member at the Badger Rock Neighborhood Center, with the Center for Resilient Cities. There are so many wonderful things to say and share about this place and how fortunate I am to have found it, and I thought I’d start with how I’m filling my time sitting at the front desk. There can be a lot of down time, so I picked up a book that was sitting on the table behind me: Will Allen of Growing Power’s The Good Food Revolution.
About 100 pages in, it occurred to me that I could be sharing what I’ve learned. These posts will typically involve more of my view and fewer quotations, and they will also return after this first post to more of the chronological order that Allen himself follows.
However, this section of just six pages on the history of discrimination against black farmers (pages 98 - 103 in my edition) was what really drove me to reflection and writing, so I’ll be starting there.
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The story begins, as you may remember, with General Sherman during the Civil War. It was actually his special military directive that established the memorable requirement that “‘each family shall have a plot of not more than forty acres of tillable ground’ and that ‘the military authorities will afford them protection until such time as they can protect themselves’” (98-99): that is, forty acres and a mule. Unfortunately, soon after, with President Lincoln’s assassination, these commitments were abandoned by President Andrew Johnson, all the land was returned to the former slave owners, and it was only an override of Johnson’s veto that led to the creation of the Freedmen’s Bureau, an important organization but not one that provided those forty acres and a mule.
The most interesting thing about this history, though, is the attitude and the language of the debate. As Allen writes, “Many Southern whites...perceived the policy of ‘forty acres and a mule’...as a handout to lazy blacks who didn’t have the discipline to work hard enough to buy their own property” (100). Allen and Wilson don’t talk about the evidence backing up this claim, but I was struck by just how familiar it sounded: from the very first instance of social welfare that benefited blacks in America, the upper, mostly white classes were using the same horrible tropes against it.
We jump ahead in time now to black farmers in the twentieth century. In 1982, the bipartisan U.S. Commission on Civil Rights issued a report called ‘The Decline of Black Farming in America’, investigating the reasons behind this decline, and “the committee found that one important reason was that black farmers were small farmers” (100).
There were numerous social and structural forces working against small, and thus black, farmers at this time. For example, “almost all of the technological innovations that the United States government had subsidized over the previous decades...were geared toward increasing the productivity of large farms--and not to making small farms sustainable” (100). The same goes for the income support programs that are still in place today: “By the late 1970s, payments for participating small farmers were as low as $365. Farms with more than 2,500 acres, on the other hand, received as much as $36,000 a year. These policies, the authors of the 1982 report wrote, allowed large farms ‘to borrow and invest capital in more land and improved technology, resulting in increased production on their part’ and provided for an ‘increased disadvantage for small farmers.”
It’s amazing for me to understand how closely tied the issue of race is with our history in America of growing factorization of farming and the abandonment of local food systems. Living in Madison as a vegan, the re-creation of these local systems is of deep importance to me, and it’s so awesome to look out the window here at Badger Rock and to see every single middle schooler managing their own garden.
It’s also impossible to ignore the more explicit racism that aided this decline as well. Allen tells the story well:
As black farmers have tried to compete with larger farms, they have also needed progressively larger lines of credit…. As the agricultural economy became more concentrated in the hands of fewer and fewer companies...the lender of last resort for black farmers became the federal government. Decisions on such loan applications were often administered by local offices of the U.S.D.A.’s Farmers Home Administration, or FmHA. Local farmers were elected to sit on the county committees of the FmHA…. I later served on one of those committees, where I learned that the system was largely a good ol’ boy network where farmers supported their friends and punished their enemies.”
This reality led to a flood of lawsuits to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Civil Rights Offices in the 1970’s and 1980s. Then what happened? “In 1983, President Ronald Reagan closed that office, and the USDA stopped responding to claims of discrimination” (103). Infuriating, right? For me, it called to mind Ta-Nehisi Coates’ brilliant piece in the June issue of the Atlantic, “The Case for Reparations”. Mr. Coates spends much of his piece discussing mid-20th century housing policy in cities like Chicago, and his point is this:
And this destruction did not end with slavery. Discriminatory laws joined the equal burden of citizenship to unequal distribution of its bounty. These laws reached their apex in the mid-20th century, when the federal government—through housing policies—engineered the wealth gap, which remains with us to this day. When we think of white supremacy, we picture Colored Only signs, but we should picture pirate flags.
I’m certainly not writing this afternoon, looking out at the early Wisconsin snow, to get deeply into a conversation about reparations. My point instead is to bring home the nearness and the recentness of these issues, and I write to connect--to connect race to local food, to connect national and state-level agricultural policy to a neighborhood on the South side of Madison: the kids are in the next room hand-crafting their own calzones right now.
I hope you enjoyed this introductory post and that you’ll check in regularly to read more. Again, you can find the book online here, although I hope you’ll run over to a great local bookstore instead, like Madison's a Room of One’s Own. Have a wonderful afternoon, and as its approaching quicklyas it just passed, [I hope you and your family had] a happy Thanksgiving.
