Booker T. Washington and Culinary Self-Sufficiency Part 3
Black Farmer's Conference, Lawrenceville, Virginia, 1911. Courtesy of The New York Public Library
Booker T. Washington’s farm extension program also emphasized black culinary self-reliance. However, the problem had been the US caste system; the majority of the black farmers in the program had been in debt peonage as tenant farmers and sharecroppers. As such, their economic condition dictated they raise a monoculture-producing cash crop in order to pay back loans to white property owners set on exploiting them. In short, debt and black farmer agency had been in opposition to Tuskegee’s teaching on diversifying crops and thereby obtaining culinary self-sufficiency. A great suggested reading on the topic of black farmers is Natalie Baszile’s book We Are Each Other’s Harvest: Celebrating African-American Farmers, Land and Legacy.
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