Freedom Farmers

“Writing consciously with an eye on the uses of the past for understanding the present and influencing the future, White recovers the lost stories of black activists who worked to ensure access to adequate and nutritious food for low-income communities, promoted alternatives to capitalist economic exploitation, and demanded a voice in the decisions affecting their lives. Scholars of African American history, agricultural history, and urban history will find much value in this book.”—Journal of Southern History

“Freedom Farmers . . . expose[s] the extractive and oppressive realities of the past that can continue into present-day food systems while spotlighting equitable alternatives. . . . White’s book challenges urban planners to support solidarity economies, such as collective ownership of land, housing, and businesses. She demonstrates how cooperatives reject economic models dependent on extraction and exploitation, creating spaces for knowledge sharing, community gathering, mutual aid, and distribution of material resources.”—Journal of the American Planning Association

“Amid the Black Lives Matter movement and a time of growing civil unrest throughout the United States, Monica White’s Freedom Farmers provides an inspiring narrative of a lesser-known method of nonviolent action known as ‘liberatory agriculture’.”–Agriculture and Human Values

“A cornerstone in helping to rewrite narratives about African American and Black agrarianism and resistance in the USA. Through archival research, field visits, interviews, and participant observation spanning a decade, White skillfully interweaves discussions of the Jim Crow South with an analysis of the brilliance and tenacity of Black farmers, thinkers, and visionaries, and the inevitable roadblocks and setbacks that exist upon the path to liberation.”–Review of Agricultural, Food, and Environmental Studies

“This book will fill the gaps in your knowledge of Black US agricultural history, with a mix of narrative and evaluation. . . . Freedom Farmers provides an uplifting perspective, showing agriculture was not only a site of oppression and exploitation of Black people, but also one of proactive political resistance and cooperative effort.”—Virginia Association for Biological Farming

“A timely work that convincingly demonstrates the power of agricultural resistance for African American communities.”—Journal of African American History

“Freedom Farmers: Agricultural Resistance and the Black Freedom Movement stands literally as a landmark, ushering in a new era of community-based scholarship with and for agrarian justice. From here on out, scholars, activists, practitioners have a lodestar from which to research, practice, and advocate for food, farm, and racial justice: Dr. White’s framework of 'collective agency and community resilience' (CACR).”—Journal of Agriculture, Food Systems, and Community Development

“White brings forward the activity and thinking of women organizers. . . . Freedom Farmers traces a through-line of Black self-determination through economic empowerment—not through a narrowly meritocratic or exclusivist notion of progress and advancement but through democratic access to, and control over, land and life, and the central role of women therein.”—Agrarian South: Journal of Political Economy

“Freedom Farmers is an excellent model of using the past to inform the present.”—H-Environment

“Meticulously researched, trenchantly analyzed, and engagingly written, this book brings to life the culture, the theorists, the scientists, the farmers, and the organizers that have kept agriculture at the center of African American emancipation, civil rights, and present-day movements for human rights and self-determination. From a rising activist-scholar, a visionary book of remembrance and hope.” — Eric Holt-Giménez, executive director of Food First