Freedom Farmers

Agricultural Resistance and the Black Freedom Movement

By: Monica M. White, LaDonna Redmond - with

Narrated by: Monica M. White

In May 1967, internationally renowned activist Fannie Lou Hamer purchased 40 acres of land in the Mississippi Delta, launching the Freedom Farms Cooperative (FFC). A community-based rural and economic development project, FFC would grow to over 600 acres, offering a means for local sharecroppers, tenant farmers, and domestic workers to pursue community wellness, self-reliance, and political resistance. Life on the cooperative farm presented an alternative to the second wave of northern migration by African Americans - an opportunity to stay in the South, live off the land, and create a healthy community based upon building an alternative food system as a cooperative and collective effort.

Freedom Farmers expands the historical narrative of the Black freedom struggle to embrace the work, roles, and contributions of Southern Black farmers and the organizations they formed. Whereas existing scholarship generally views agriculture as a site of oppression and exploitation of Black people, this book reveals agriculture as a site of resistance and provides a historical foundation that adds meaning and context to current conversations around the resurgence of food justice/sovereignty movements in urban spaces like Detroit, Chicago, Milwaukee, New York City, and New Orleans.

©2019 The University of North Carolina Press (P)2021 Tantor

Good

Overall very good summary of blacks in agriculture. Would recommend it to any growers as a form of encouragement.

Excellent and Engaging

Very informative and a wealth of rich agricultural and community organizing history accurately portraying the contributions, cooperation, and courage of Black farmers towards their own liberation.

HEROIC & WISE COOPERATION TO STAY WITH THE LAND

Listen up, if there is a will, there is a way. These very real people were successful through the thick and the thin of what they encountered to rob them of what was theirs.

Alot of good history here within that can serve to open your mind to options available today before it is too late. There is no doubt the elite are in process of grabbing up as much land as they can, because they can. Money talks. Those highlighted in this book pooled their resourses in order to purchase land to survive on.

Without land not only no place to live BUT no place to grow real food rather than being fed fake foods, which is pretty much the bulk of what is made available in the markets.

Listen and read this book and put your critical thinking on to come up with solutions.

Note: I slowed up my Audible play back so I could concentrate on content, rather than concentrate on keeping up with the narrator. Then I purchased Kindle to retain portions.