As Indigenous and Black people navigating a year of toxic politics and a global pandemic, many have returned to practices that help ground us in where we come from — the land. Sitting, walking, and planting in our backyards, community gardens, and the farms of our home towns has served for many as more than medicine. It has been a reclamation of our heritage and our power. 

With shelves bare of fresh food in stores across many urban centers for days, we have become more acutely aware of issues of food insecurity that for years have been met with strategies to build the health and self-sufficiency of urban and rural communities. These efforts have achieved milestones. Yet decades after civil rights workers established the Freedom Farms of the Mississippi Delta, Black Americans and people all over the globe find themselves in the same position as our forebears: without meaningful access to land. And so for many of us returning our focus in this area, the fundamental right to claim the land has become both a justice strategy and an organizing principle.  

But what does a successful land reclamation strategy look like? One could look to the thriving farm cooperatives that excluded Southern Black food growers and producers established as early as the Great Depression as a model. Later, the community land trust movement originated in response to agricultural land exclusion in rural Georgia during the 1960s. All of this work formed the necessary foundation for the community land trusts that later emerged in the urban centers of the North, like the Bronx, focusing more on access to green space and affordable housing. 

The return to land-based strategies also looks like the strategic building of community power toward the goal of reparations. According to the nonprofit Urban Institute, the wealth of White families was seven times greater than that of Black families in 2016. According to the Census of Agriculture, between 1920 and 1992 the number of Black American farmers declined from 925,000 to only 18,000. But white people today control at least 95% of the nation’s farmland. 

A returning generation of Black farmers — many of whose ancestors fled racial violence during the Great Migration or who faced discrimination from federal institutions that forced them to abandon their farm operations — have been finding their way back to the land. Others have turned to land-based strategies to address our deep social and economic inequalities. like Leah Penniman, the co-founder of Soul Fire Farm – a centered community farm committed to ending racism and injustice in the food system – have centered farming as a means to mobilize, train, lead, and heal Black and Brown communities. 

Soul Fire Farm has created the Black-Indigenous Farmers Reparations Map, a digital map, an example of one tool to help White farmers hold themselves accountable and pay it forward to Black farmers – particularly in areas where poverty and obesity rates are high. Dara Cooper is another organizer and BOLD alumni who established the Black Land and Power Fund. 

Ultimately, what is the case for a national land-based strategy? According to Dara Cooper who heads up the  National Black Food and Justice Alliance, a network that is leading the national push for land-based reparations, the approach must be two-fold. “We need to have access to land because the state and all of its systems will not take care of us as we deserve or require.” But also, we need the political power that the ownership of land provides, said Cooper.

Cooper’s organization has been conducting extensive education on what the equitable distribution of land and resources across the country could look like. Comprising hundreds of farmers, its Black Land and Power Fund is building on the legacy of the Federation of Southern Cooperatives/Land Assistance Fund. The fund supports land retention for Southern Black farmers and invests in cooperatives, farmland, legal and technical assistance, and food hubs advancing its work through a democratic funding model. 

These models hold foundational possibilities for community-based approaches to achieving national reparations. It can be noted here that  the Pigford v. Glickman settlement of 1999, widely lauded as the largest civil rights discrimination payout in the country’s history, awarded about $2 billion dollars, with a typical disbursement of $50,000 to an individual farmer. But the immediate outcome was that many farmers still remained heavily in debt, and beyond that, the settlement still fell far short of the real reparations Black people demand. 

We lift up the efforts to enable communities to have agency and hands-on control over the deployment of resources for their health, wellbeing, and economic independence. In the midst of great uncertainty, Black people’s physical return to land must be coupled with the political education needed to propel these movements into a national conversation about a further frontier of justice – the productive ownership of land by our communities.