CHANGE
by Julie Gerstein illustrations by James McClung FIELDS
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REFORMING LAND OWNERSHIP
IKE ALL PLANTATIONS IN THE SOUTH, Inglewood Plantation in Alexandria, Louisiana, was once owned by white enslavers. Before the Civil War, Inglewood’s 1,500 acres were tended
Mason’s grandfather was a farmer in Alabama when discriminatory loan practices and Jim Crow laws forced him to give up his land and move West as part of the Great Migration, which saw Black people leave the South in record numbers after World War I. More than 6 million Black Americans left the South between 1910 and 1970, citing racism, segregation, and lack of opportunity. “He lost everything — he lost his land, he lost his store. They lost everything they had, other than what they had on their backs,” says Mason. “That story was always with me and a part of my DNA.” “After enslavement, there’s supposed to be 40 acres and a mule, but it never happened,” she says, referring to an unfulfilled promise made to freed slaves after the Civil War. “Suddenly, the people that they had enslaved were not being enslaved, but [Southern farmers] basically did everything they could to keep that kind of dynamic going.”
by the Black people who were forced to live on them. When slavery was abolished, many of those formerly enslaved people became sharecroppers, leasing that same land from the landowners in exchange for a cut of their crops’ profits. It was a predatory farming system often called “slavery by another name.” Today, Inglewood is home to a sprawling organic farm, 17 acres of which belong to Jubilee Justice, a nonprofit that supports Black farmers and promotes regenerative and sustainable farm practices, cooperative ownership, and economic security for farmers of color. Konda Mason, an entrepreneur from Oakland, California, founded the organization in 2017. Early on, Mason focused on facilitating conversations about what she calls the “four pillars” — land, race, money, and spirit — before moving her focus to agriculture. “I was thinking a lot about capitalism and what is the alternative to extractive capitalism as we know it in America,” Mason tells The Rooted Journal. She wanted to figure out a way to rewire the connections between capitalist structures, land ownership, money, and spiritualism to create a program that could benefit Black farmers. This pursuit led her to the System of Rice Intensification (SRI), a type of regenerative farming developed in Madagascar that is less resource-intensive and environmentally damaging than conventional rice farming. Now Mason is working with smallholder Black farmers on a pilot program trialing SRI techniques in the United States.
JUBILEE JUSTICE IS PLANTING A HOPEFUL FUTURE FOR BLACK
FARMERS ONE GRAIN OF RICE AT A TIME.
Mason’s grandfather’s story illustrates the widespread degradation of the country’s Black farming community. Prior to 1920, there were nearly 1 million Black farmers in the United States, though many of them were sharecroppers who didn’t own the land they farmed on. Today that number has dwindled to less than 50,000, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA); the Black Farmers & Agriculturalists Association says the number is closer to 5,000. Mason says racism still pervades the agricultural community. “There’s a central belief that Black folks are not supposed to have land,” she says. “The theft of land continues to happen.” In the early 1900s, Black farmers owned more than 15 million acres of land. By the ’90s, that number had diminished to 2 million, representing less than 1% of U.S. farmland ownership.
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