Written by: Kiara Kamara

In 1969, the fight for Civil Rights touched every sector of society in the United States. Many of us are familiar with the grassroots efforts that took place in the churches and college campuses where urbanites, theologians, and everyday people gathered to envision a better America. Emblazoned into the American consciousness are the images of sit-ins, marches, and the speeches given within the hallowed spaces of our democracy by the voices of a generation tired of waiting and unwilling to back down. 

For many, the Civil Rights movement is closely tied to the topography of the cities where Jim Crow laws and voter disenfranchisement forced millions of Black Americans and other people of color to face humiliation, violence, and second-class citizenship. However, in recent years works by authors like Dr. Jessica Nembhard Gordon and Dr. Monica White have illuminated the power of grassroots efforts in rural communities where Black Americans who worked the soil faced over a century of oppressive conditions within the system of sharecropping.  Disenfranchisement took on a different form through the system of sharecropping and tenant farming seen in the Mississippi Delta and agrarian regions. Land ownership remained systematically inaccessible to Black farmers within these systems. Despite these additional forms of oppression, Black farmers and rural communities organized their own efforts to secure voting rights. 

Fanny Lou Hamer spoke on the backlash these efforts received stating, “ If you are a negro and vote, if you persist in dreams of black power to win some measure of freedom in white-controlled counties, you go hungry ….” (White, 23). Land inaccessibility and dependence on exploitative, quasi-slavery systems like sharecropping forced Black farmers into a precarious position. Like their urban and suburban counterparts, the fight for civil rights often meant facing racialized violence with death-dealing consequences like an eviction from their only source of income and starvation.

Throughout her life, Fannie Lou Hamer had faced the dual harms of racism and sexism uniquely visited upon black women otherwise known as mysoginoir. She endured medical violence in the form of state-sanctioned sterilization against her will and without her knowledge that was designed to curb African American birth rates in Mississippi and further harm through an attack staged by law enforcement officials that damaged her kidney permanently. The psychic and physical toll of these acts of violence were not enough to silence her voice. In spite of these acts, Fannie Lou Hamer went on to be a mother of four adoptive daughters with her husband, fellow farmer Perry “Pap” Hamer.

By 1964 Fannie Lou Hammer had made a name for herself as a prominent activist for voting rights and black liberation. She led protests songs, soothed crowds, and used her gifts as a speaker and storyteller to stand up against discrimination.  Fannie Lou Hammer also took her activism work into the realm of collective ownership, land sovereignty, and food justice through projects that merged her work as a farmer with her passion for empowering African Americans through civil rights leadership. One such project was the Freedom Farms Cooperative, a massive grassroots endeavor that allowed 1,500 families to collectively own, manage, and cultivate roughly 680 acres of land in Mississippi. The Freedom Farms Cooperative or FFC hosted a plethora of resources and programs intended to empower Black farmers to elevate their skills, mobilize around activism, and live on land that couldn’t be taken from them as punishment. The programs included health care training, a collectively owned sewing factory, and a community garden complete with pigs bred and cared for by members of the FFC.

This project offered Black farmers a form of liberation from exploitative work present in the sharecropping system by allowing them to have an egalitarian and active role in ownership, project management, and professional development. The FFC demonstrated the power of community-based solutions from someone like Fannie Lou Hamer who intimately knew the harms of land dispossession and the intersections of harm that oppressed so many black families in the Delta. The FFC also became a beacon of hope and a shining example of what is possible through cooperation and leaning into life-sustaining practices like farming, localized food systems, and an ethic of land sovereignty.

The project allowed black agrarian families to stand up against the existence of exploitation, forced dependency, and alienation from the land they worked on and to resist efforts to thwart their rights to vote and speak up for themselves. Today projects like Soul Fire Farm, Detroit Black Food Security Network, Gem City Market stand as testaments to the legacy of cooperative, land-based acts of resistance. Fanny Lou Hamer set a precedent that brought black agrarianism into the light as a viable route of activism and grassroots organizing. We owe so much to the work Fannie Lou Hamer and the 1,500 families did in the 1960s and 70s. As we step into an era of food insecurity exacerbated by the climate crisis and a global pandemic, let us take heart in knowing there is hope in the community and there is hope in the soil.

White, Monica M. "“A pig and a garden”: Fannie Lou Hamer and the Freedom Farms Cooperative." Food and Foodways 25.1 (2017): 20-39.