Freedom Farm Cooperative

During the Jim Crow era, the United States Department of Agriculture imposed a variety of policies that discriminated against Black farmers. The policies, which systematically rejected Black farmers from obtaining loans and subsidies available to White farmers, forced Black farm owners to lose their land and prevented them from buying new land. In the Mississippi Delta where Hamer founded her project, African American farmers lost approximately 12 million acres of land– six million of which was between 1950 and 1964, shortly before Hamer began the farm. This (among other federal government policies that disadvantaged Black people) forced many into sharecropping, low-wage agricultural work, or northern migration.^[2]

Under sharecropping and industrial agricultural work, Black farmers remained subject to the control of White landowners. They remained under continued oppression and were not free to exercise their political rights. Black agricultural workers were evicted and fired from their jobs for registering to vote.^[3][1]

Hamer, born in 1917 in Mississippi, grew up in the midst of these conditions. The 20th and youngest child of sharecroppers, Hamer joined them in the plantation fields picking cotton at age six.^[4] She attended school until age 12 when she left to work full time. After she married in 1944, she and her husband worked on a Mississippi plantation. In 1962, Hamer joined the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and participated in an action to register to vote. The couple moved to Ruleville, Mississippi (in rural Sunflower County) with almost nothing.^[5] Hamer continued to organize and made notable advances in the political arena; her speech at the 1964 Democratic National Convention helped lead to the Voting Rights Act of 1965.^[6]

Despite the national scale of civil right’s work, Hamer recognized the pressing need to address economic and food insecurity within her home community. Sunflower county, which was 67% Black, struggled with food insecurity and held some of the country’s highest rates of malnutrition, diabetes, and hypertension. The state of Mississippi intentionally created these conditions of starvation. While federal lawmakers witnessed the hunger and wanted to improve the situation, Mississippi congressman Jamie Whitten prevented action to assist the predominantly Black community.^[1]

Hamer saw the need for Black economic self-sufficiency as a means resistance that could foster political power. For Black people to achieve political freedom and rights, they had to rely on themselves alone.

As an economic response to widespread poverty and as a political project to empower Black families, Hamer began planning the Freedom Farm Cooperative. She founded the farm in 1967 on 40 acres of land. Hamer’s national connections to nonprofits and wealthy activists such as Measure for Measure and Harry Belafonte enabled the original investments.^[7] The immediate goals of the Freedom Food Cooperative (FFC) were threefold: to improve nutrition, affordable housing, and entrepreneurship opportunities for the Black community in the Delta.^[1]

The cooperative greatly expanded in 1972, acquiring 600 acres of land. They used the additional space to cultivate cash-crops, which included 300 acres of cotton, 200 acres of soybeans, 80 acres of wheat, and 10 acres of cucumber.^[1] They also raised cattle and catfish.^[2] The sale of cash-crops helped fund the food provisioning and community support programs as well as pay the mortgage on the land.^[1]

The farm, which fed over 1,500 families,^[7] consisted of a vegetable operation and pig bank.

Within two years of founding, the vegetable fields produced thousands of pounds of culturally appropriate vegetables such as collard greens, kale, rape, turnips, peas, corn, sweet potatoes, butter beans, okra, tomatoes, and string beans.^[3][8] Farming initiatives were particularly important to Black women, who have historically had a fundamental role in food production and whose bodies have been threatened in White agricultural spaces.^[9]

The pig bank, which started after a donation of 55 pigs (5 male and 50 female)^[8] from the National Council of Negro Women in 1967, yielded 2,000 pigs after three years.^[3] The pigs were held within fences and pens built by women and were loaned out to families who would harvest the pigs after producing piglets. The pig farm had international connections to Heifer International, which provided animal husbandry aid.^[8] Hamer felt owning a pig was a bulwark against starvation.^[2]

The farm was meant to be accessible to anyone in need of assistance. While the cooperative did have a monthly $1 membership due, it was not required and only 30 families could afford to pay.^[7] Instead, the cooperative allowed families to trade work hours for a bushel of the farm's produce.^[2] 10% of food provisions were dedicated to families within the community that were unable to participate on any level. While Sunflower County’s Black community was the primary focus of the cooperative, White families in need were included and excess produce was shipped to Black communities in Chicago.^[8]

The food provisioning programs addressed the high food security in Sunflower County and allowed Black families to be independent and self-reliant. Challenging existing power structures, FFC freed Black farmers from the oppression of sharecropping and the agriculture industry. With Black and local leadership that governed itself, made its own decisions, and grew its own food, survival was a means of resistance on its own. “Down where we are, food is used as a political weapon. But if you have a pig in your backyard, if you have some vegetables in your garden, you can feed yourself and your family, and nobody can push you around” said founder and activist Hamer.^[1] The aid from the farm cooperative and pig bank meant that Black farmers no longer had to risk starvation to vote.^[8]