Labor and Land Additional Readings
Timeline
Significant Dates on Black Land Loss and Land Acquisition
By Federation of Southern Cooperatives Land Assistance Fund with additions from Teaching for Change
A timeline of significant dates.
Reading
The Unknown Origins of the March on Washington: Civil Rights Politics and the Black Working Class
By William P. Jones
“The very decade which has witnessed the decline of legal Jim Crow has also seen the rise of de facto segregation in our most fundamental socioeconomic institutions,” veteran civil rights activist Bayard Rustin wrote in 1965. The March on Washington addressed the economic crisis facing working-class African Americans more effectively than any other mobilization since the Second World War.
READING
A Brief History of Black cooperatives in the United States
Interview Dr. Jessica Gordon Nembhard By Mira Luna
For as long as there have been Africans in America, there have been examples of Black social, cultural and economic solidarity. Often formed in response to systemic exclusion and economic stagnation, examples range from mutual aid networks, to freedom farms and grocery cooperatives.
READING
The Great Land Robbery: The shameful story of how 1 million black families have been ripped from their farms
By Vann R. Newkirk II
A war waged by deed of title has dispossessed 98 percent of black agricultural landowners in America. Through a variety of means—sometimes legal, often coercive, in many cases legal and coercive, occasionally violent—farmland owned by black people came into the hands of white people. It was aggregated into larger holdings, then aggregated again, eventually attracting the interest of Wall Street.
Reading
César Chávez on How It Began
Interview with César Chávez by Luis Torres
In an interview just before his death in 1993, César Chávez related the story of how the fledgling National Farm Worker Association (NFWA) union became involved with Filipino workers belonging to the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee and the strike against major grape growers.
READING
Murals: Redefining Culture, Reclaiming Identity
By Eva Sperling Cockcroft and Holly Barnet-Sanchez
A powerful essay on the connections among art, identity, and activism. Excerpted from the introduction to Signs from the Heart: California Chicano Murals, we recommend the full book which includes four essays by leading artists and scholars and 36 color images of California murals.
READING
African Americans Have Lost Untold Acres of Land Over the Last Century
By Leah Douglas
In the 45 years following the Civil War, formerly enslaved people and their descendants accumulated roughly 15 million acres of land across the United States, most of it in the South. By 1920, there were 925,000 black-owned farms, representing about 14 percent of all farms in the United States. Over the course of the 20th century, millions of farmers of all races were pushed off their land. Today, African Americans compose less than 2 percent of the nation’s farmers and 1 percent of rural landowners.