The history of land, food, community care, and co-ops is intrinsic to progressive social movements and core marginalized communities. 

 

In the United States, before slavery, Indigenous people were always stewards of the land. After implementation of race based slavery, enslaved men, women and children were taken from West Africa and forced to clear land to build the sugar plantations in the Caribbean, the rice fields in the Carolinas and the cotton fields all over the South that fueled an economy that caused the Civil War. During Reconstruction, Black people were promised “40 acres and a mule”, a dream that devolved into oppressive sharecropping practices that kept land ownership, and with it the opportunity to build equity and generational wealth, further out of reach. 

 

The Civil Rights Movement utilized restaurants like Dooky Chase in New Orleans, Paschal’s Restaurant in Atlanta, and Ben’s Chili Bowl in D.C. as organizing spaces. Organizers also utilized options like “shoebox lunches”, which offered food security and safety for Black families traveling across the Jim Crow South who were turned away at many restaurants and rest stops. Women like Georgia Gilmore started groups like Club From Nowhere (CFN), a stealthy crew of Black women who sold food and raised money for the entire 381 days of the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Community events like the CFN fish fries were used to fund and maintain the Movement. Many were organized by Black founded co-ops like the Freedom Quilting Bee in Alerta, AL to the personal inspiration of this initiative, the Freedom Farm Co-op in Sunflower County, MS founded by one of the greatest community organizers, the activist and visionary, Mrs. Fannie Lou Hamer. 

Mrs. Hamer and the many Black women like her had a fearless and deep love for their communities. That love spurred Hamer to create the Freedom Farm Cooperative which fed, educated, housed, and sustained the residents of her home in Sunflower County, MS. My deep admiration for Mrs. Hamer, and my love for history, storytelling, and my community drove me to create the With Reverence Co-op (WRC).