US Black Farming Experiences
Black farmer exhibiting at a Country Fair, 1910, Courtesy of The New York Public Library
Alvenia Fulton’s parents owned and operated a successful 156 and half-acre family farm in Pulaski in Giles County, Tennessee. In The Souls of Black Folk, WEB Du Bois shared his observations on the average black farmer and the southern food system. A food system is how a society and or community produces, processes, distributes, prepares, consumes food, and disposes of food waste. The southern food system of sharecropping, tenant farming, the credit-lien system, and systematic racism in agricultural programs worked to keep most black farmers from building wealth. Historian Bobby L. Lovett says that in 1900 only 25% of black farmers in Tennessee owned the land they worked. Better off black farmers like the Fultons had more diversified sources of income that came from year-round work and the sale of products to local markets and customers.
Recently US President Joe Biden’s mammoth New Deal like COVID relief bill includes unprecedented steps to address decades of US Agricultural Department policies that underdeveloped black farmers across the South.
