On Strike
Frank Cieciorkia
Mississippi Freedom Labor Union
Lithograph, Circa 1965
Mississippi, USA
138
Soul Fire Farm
Naima Penniman
Syracuse Cultural Workers
Offset, 2019
Syracuse, NY
78905
This week, the Biden administration gave over $2 billion in direct payments to Black and other minority farmers discriminated against by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). Payments went to over 40,000 farmers, most residing in Mississippi and Alabama. National Black Farmers Association Founder and President John Boyd Jr. called the payments a “bandage” over “open heart surgery.” The funds operate as acknowledgement rather than the reparations of justice needed to repair the damage the USDA’s discrimination has inflicted upon Black farmers. The amount of land lost by Black farmers between 1920 to 1997 would be worth over $326 billion today.
In 1910, Black farmers were 14% of the farming population; today they are just 1.4%. For over a century they have faced violence, physical and systemic. They have had less access to credit than white farmers, and loans, if given, were doled out much too late. Black farmers have been threatened with police action, called racial slurs, and spat on by federal employees. In 2022, 72% of white farmers’ loan applications were approved, while only 36% of Black farmers’ were.
CSPG’s posters of the week show the long history of activism amongst Black farmers in the U.S. The first poster was made in 1965 by the Mississippi Freedom Labor Union (MFLU). MFLU was formed by the Delta Ministry of the National Council of Churches, the Freedom Democratic Party, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and others from the Civil Rights Movement. Inspired by the success of striking farm workers in California, Black sharecroppers in Mississippi organized a strike on several plantations from 1965-1966, demanding higher wages. However, as a result of the strike, the workers were evicted, losing both their homes and their jobs. Tragically, the union did not survive the evictions and a growing trend towards mechanization in agriculture.
The second poster was created by the founder of Soul Fire Farm, an Afro-Indigenous-centered New York farm that uses organic and regenerative farming techniques to combat racism and injustice in the food system. When Africans were forcibly brought to the U.S. during the Transatlantic slave trade, they brought African agricultural heritage with them by braiding seeds and grains such as rice, okra, and peanuts into their hair as a means of taking home with them. Soul Fire Farm seeks to advocate for equity in access to land, to reverse industrial agriculture’s destructive and toxic pollution of land and people, and to remedy the health problems that lack of access to healthy food and nature is inflicting upon urban populations. Their dedication to modeling racial and environmental justice by remembering ancestral sustainable methods of agriculture underscores how important Black and Indigenous farmers are to the wellbeing of our world.
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