From Activist to Advocate— How I Became a Voice for Black Agriculture

Cheryl Smith
Photo Credit: Marianne MacQueen

From Activist to Advocate— 

How I Became a Voice for Black Agriculture

By Cheryl Wood Smith

Originally in the Summer 2021 Agraria Journal

My story begins in Dayton, Ohio in the early 1950s. Although I am a native of Newark, New Jersey, my earliest memories of “the land” started in Dayton. 

One of my most enduring memories is going to “market” with my grandparents. Standing on the corner of Third and Summit Streets, I watched as a caravan of trucks lined up along the block. Each truck was loaded with all kinds of food and almost every truck driver was Black. My grandparents, who lived nearby, carried home produce, herbs, and poultry. A crate of chickens would soon be released in our backyard, their necks wrung and their heads off, and shortly my grandmother’s freezer and cupboard would be brimming with food to sustain us through the winter. 

Even then, as a little girl, I knew the abundance of sustenance in my community was a barrier to the kind of racist violence we saw weekly in the Jet magazine my parents brought home. The west side was a safe place of Black-owned homes with backyard gardens and fruit trees, and Black-owned businesses where we were welcomed and treated well. We were a real community.

When I joined the Black Panther Party a decade and a half later, one of the cardinal principles that was constantly emphasized to us was the role of the vanguard party in meeting the needs of the people. It was our duty to see that the people were well fed, clothed, educated and healthy. Our social programs were the real legacy of our movement, not picking up the gun. Our programs were meant to provide for our people while we helped them prepare for revolutionary change.

Returning to Dayton after a short absence, I experienced what I called “culture shock.” Three major events had completely changed the landscape of my childhood. The first was when affluent and upper-middle-class Blacks traipsed behind the “white flight” crowd to other areas of town; it was a major economic blow to our neighborhoods. Following that, the exodus of industry and commerce for cheaper labor fields left Black people without viable opportunities for employment. And finally, the Crack epidemic sealed the deal. Our community was abandoned and dying. 

As I continued to work for the liberation and survival of Black people, I recognized the white power system would forever create poverty by making civic and urban policy that left us out, while they encouraged outside entities to rob us of our land and our resources under the dubious auspices of a hostile city government. I saw one neighborhood after another left to deteriorate and then be swept up by some corporate entity who thought a landfill or a parking lot or some other obnoxious structure would work well for them in our space. 

 Meanwhile Black Americans were once again becoming not just homeless but landless. 

I knew then that we had to find a way to save our land and produce the goods and services we needed to survive. And at the very top of that list was Food. We didn’t need food banks and food pantries or free food programs. We needed to create sustainable sources of revenue and goods by reclaiming our communities. 

At the same time food apartheid had created such a crisis we had to start with immediately addressing hunger. But, in the long run the survival of “all” people depends on the autonomy and ownership of the land, our land. 

I believe education, organization, and reparations are all necessary steps to our future success. This is my passion: to reintroduce descendants of Africans to the heart of our existence—our love for the earth and our allegiance to the land. We have been brainwashed to believe we were created as slaves to work someone else’s land. But we have within us generational knowledge of what we need to create and produce. We just have to unlock those secrets, remove the indoctrination, and return to the land. 

Cheryl Wood Smith is a member of the Agraria board of trustees and on the organizing committee for the Black Farming Conference.