JUSTICE FROM THE GROUND UP
If Black History generally sits in the back of the bus until February rolls around, then the chronicles of Black people in the environmental and food justice movements are often left at the bus stop. It’s no wonder today that most people don’t associate Black activism with environmentalism, even though it was the actions of a Black community that sparked the creation of the national environmental movement. I find this erasure devastating, as environmental justice opened the door for deeper exploration and understanding of all Black history for me. It has the power to do so for everyone, but not if we leave it in the past.
Environmental justice requires that we examine the relationship of people with the land. Any study of Black people’s connection with U.S. land will inevitably reveal a powerful history of organic resistance and resistors, incredible narratives of survival. Stories often left behind. The medicine people who treated my ancestors with native roots and herbs when no one certified as a doctor would. The unnamed cooks who slipped just enough of a powerful leaf into a meal, sedating the right person, aiding in escapes. The women in the 19th and 20th centuries who wrapped fish, cake, and bread in brown paper for those headed on the journey North. The cook, Georgia Gilmore, who organized a group brilliantly named The Club From Nowhere, secretly funding an alternative community transportation system which allowed the Montgomery Bus Boycott to become the longest citizen-organized economic sanction effort ever in the United States. Medicine, fuel, power, care, and a subversive network that created financial agency—all sourced from nature. How incredible is that? Few may have labeled them activists in their days but I can’t think of more powerful examples that illustrate what is possible with access to land and food than those that have used it to empower and free others.
Dori Sanders owns one of the oldest black-owned farms - a 250 acre farm that has been in the family for over a 100 years.
The lens of environmental justice also gives insight into the unique experiences of Black people forcefully migrated to lands across the globe. The groundbreaking studies of Robert Bullard, who is known as the Father of Environmental Justice, explore the correlation between pollution, environmental disasters, and government responses, and race. His early work paved the way for community-based solutions that also hold decision-makers responsible for the damage they cause to the earth and the people. Without his work, we’d most likely approach the tragedies of Hurricanes Katrina and Maria and the Flint Water Crisis only as natural disasters, not failures of leadership. Studying the relationship between Black people and the Earth also allows for the examination of both past and present relationships to land, labor, yield, and capital—work pioneered by people like Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor: food griot, anthropologist, journalist, and a Geechee-Gullah land-rights activist. Echoes of her influence can be seen in essential work happening across the nation today: the land rights efforts of groups like Soul Fire Farm, the evolutionary cooking of chefs and food historians Mashama Bailey and Michael W. Twitty, and the cultural archival and linguistic preservation work of the Geechee Experience. So much has been made possible by those whose names are often left behind. As this year’s Black History Month comes to an end, it’s my hope that you will be compelled to learn more about Black justice workers of the past and present. It’s my hope you’ll be inspired, as I have, by sharing these stories with you, to help carry those legacies into the future, long past February.
Ashley Yates, Media Director of Planting Justice