Land Access as Liberation: A Qualitative Study on Faith, Food, and Farming of Urban and Rural Black Land Stewards in the United States
Since 1920, Black farmers in the United States have held less than 2% of the nation's farmland, a direct result of race-based discriminatory policies embedded within federal, state, local, and county-level institutions (Daniel, 2013). Structural barriers—ranging from exclusionary lending practices by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) to the systematic dispossession of land through legal loopholes, heirs’ property laws, and violent racial terror—have contributed to this staggering decline in Black land ownership (Gilbert et al., 2002). The erosion of Black agrarian landholdings intensified in the latter half of the 20th century, as government programs, civil rights legislation, and technological advancements, which ostensibly aimed to foster prosperity and equity, often reinforced existing disparities instead of dismantling them (Daniel, 2013; Penniman, 2018). Black farmers and land stewards have long faced systemic challenges, including restricted access to capital and credit, exclusion from new markets and regional food hubs, and a lack of visibility and institutional support compared to their white counterparts (Reynolds & Cohen, 2016). These barriers are not incidental; they are the outcomes of policy-driven exclusion that sustains food apartheid and racialized food insecurity, disproportionately affecting urban and rural Black communities (Alkon & Agyeman, 2011). Understanding food apartheid requires examining the intersections of racial capitalism, land dispossession, and community self-determination, as well as recognizing how Black farmers and land stewards actively resist these structures through cooperative economics, agroecology, and land reclamation efforts (White, 2018). This research seeks to center the voices and experiences of Black farmers and land stewards, and underscores land access as a fundamental pillar of liberation and empowerment.
Racial Justice, Food, Farming, Storytelling, Black Farmers, Rural, Urban, Environmental Justice, Food Justice, Africana Studies, African History, Agricultural and Resource Economics, Civic and Community Engagement, Community-Based Research, Food Studies, Inequality and Stratification, Oral History, Place and Environment, Political History, Politics and Social Change, Public Affairs, Public Policy and Public Administration, Quantitative, Qualitative, Comparative, and Historical Methodologies, Race and Ethnicity, Rural Sociology, Social Justice
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