Black to the Land

Here at the Unconfined podcast, we normally focus on topics directly related to industrial food animal production: its impacts on communities, workers, the environment, public health. But in our current spate of episodes—starting last month with Christine Grillo’s interview with Navajo-Diné Nation farmer James Skeet—we're widening our lens to take a look at the thing that makes all agriculture possible, and that's the land.

For this month’s entry, I interview Brea Baker, author of the terrific recent book Rooted: The American Legacy of Land Theft and the Modern Movement for Black Land Ownership. As her work shows, you can’t talk about the history and future of Black agrarianism without talking about land: Who owns it now, how they got hold of it, and who will control it in the decades to come. 

Adjusted for inflation, the market value of US farmland has nearly quintupled since 1950, and now stands at about $3.5 trillion. White people own 97 percent of this plum asset, despite making up 75 percent of the population. As Baker’s book shows in vivid detail, it wasn't always this way.  

Obviously, the demographics of contemporary farmland ownership can be traced to the seizure of the North American continent from Native Americans by European settler-colonialists starting in the 16th century. Enslaved Africans provided much of the labor required for settling this vast territory; and they were effectively banned from land ownership until 1865, with the defeat of the Confederacy. It's what happened next that Baker focuses on. By the early 20th century Black Americans owned 1 million farms, covering around 14 percent of US farmland, mostly in the South—an astonishing figure, given the present state of things. According to the US Department of Agriculture, fewer than 50,000 Black farmers exist today. 

The post-Emancipation surge in Black land ownership had nothing to do with the shattered promise of “forty acres and a mule.” In our conversation, Baker teases out why acquiring that property was a triumph of resilience and ingenuity by once-enslaved people and their descendants; and why its near-total loss since the 1920s represents an injustice that reverberates through Black America to this day. She recounts a harrowing episode from her own family’s history that illustrates the terror campaign that Black smallholder farmers experienced just a century ago; makes the case that (as she writes in her book) “Black liberation is bound with Indigenous liberation” because “if our collective subjugation has always been central to the project of land theft, our unity must be the antidote”; and shines a light on myriad efforts, including her own family’s, to reclaim the legacy and secure the future of African-American agrarianism.  

Finally, Baker delivers her take on the recent Ryan Coogler blockbuster Sinners, which is set in a 1920s Mississippi sharecropping community; and updates us on a story she touches on in the book: her experience as a lifelong urbanite raising chickens on her rural Georgia land.  

Listening to Baker, you’ll understand why Rooted is such an important book—and such a pleasure to read. In it, she weaves in-depth research with anecdotes from her own family’s experience to create a page-turning account of a vein of US history that deserves much more attention than it gets. It has earned a place on the shelf alongside such must-reads on the topic as Robin D. G. Kelley’s Hammer and Hoe, Pete Daniels’ Dispossession: Discrimination against African American Farmers in the Age of Civil Rights, and Leah Penniman’s Farming While Black: Soul Fire Farm's Practical Guide to Liberation on the Land. 

Note: Special thanks to my colleague, Unconfined producer Paulette O’Leary, for alerting me to Rooted and suggesting I interview Baker.