Black History in Farming: Roots, Reclamation, and Why It Matters

American farming is built on Black knowledge, Black labor, and Black land — much of it taken, much of it lost, and a growing share being reclaimed. This is a short orientation to a long history, and to why an urban farm in Indianapolis chooses to plant itself in that lineage.

Knowledge that crossed an ocean

Many of the crops and techniques that defined the early American South arrived with enslaved Africans, not their captors. Rice, okra, sorghum, black-eyed peas (cowpeas), watermelon, sesame (benne), yams, and certain varieties of greens trace their U.S. cultivation to West and Central African origins.

The success of the Carolina rice industry in the 1700s, for example, rested on agricultural expertise that enslaved people from rice-growing regions of West Africa brought with them — irrigation, tidal flooding, threshing, and seed selection. The crop made fortunes. The knowledge was never credited.

Building a foundation, then losing the ground

After Emancipation, Black Americans built farming into one of the most significant paths to self-determination available. By 1920, Black farmers operated roughly 925,000 farms — about one in seven U.S. farms — and held between 16 and 19 million acres of land.

A century later, that number had collapsed to under 50,000 farms and fewer than 5 million acres. The losses were not accidental. They came from:

• Discriminatory USDA lending — credit and disaster aid systematically denied to Black applicants, documented in the Pigford v. Glickman class actions.
• Heirs' property loopholes that allowed land passed down without formal wills to be force-sold by a single distant relative.
• Racial violence and threat that pushed families off productive land.
• Highway and "urban renewal" routes that bulldozed Black-owned farmland and neighborhoods.

This is the missing context behind every conversation about the "decline of the family farm."

Teachers worth knowing

A few names worth carrying forward:

• George Washington Carver — the Tuskegee scientist whose research on crop rotation, soil regeneration, and uses for peanuts, sweet potatoes, and pecans laid much of the groundwork for sustainable Southern agriculture.
• Booker T. Whatley — Alabama horticulturist who, in the 1960s and 70s, designed what he called the "Small Farm Plan" — a blueprint for profitable 10-acre farms based on year-round harvest, direct-to-consumer sales, and what he called "clientele membership clubs." It is, in everything but name, modern CSA.
• Fannie Lou Hamer — civil rights organizer who founded the Freedom Farm Cooperative in Mississippi in 1969 to give Black families land, food, and political ground to stand on.
• Karen Washington — Bronx farmer and co-founder of Black Urban Growers (BUGS), who coined the term food apartheid to replace the more passive "food desert."
• Leah Penniman — co-founder of Soul Fire Farm in upstate New York and author of Farming While Black, a working manual for Black and Brown farmers reclaiming ancestral land practices.
• Ron Finley — the "Gangsta Gardener" of South Central LA, who turned parkway strips into food and made urban gardening a civil-rights act.

Why this matters for an urban farm in Indianapolis

Rooted Legacy sits on the east side of Indianapolis, a city shaped by the same forces that shaped Black farming nationally — redlining, displacement, the hollowing out of grocery access, and a quiet inheritance of agricultural skill in the families that stayed. A few of the reasons that history is load-bearing for us:

• Food sovereignty. Growing food where people live is a direct answer to food apartheid. It is not charity; it is reclaiming the means of feeding ourselves.
• Health. The diet-related conditions concentrated in our zip codes — diabetes, hypertension, cardiovascular disease — track closely with the systematic removal of fresh food from Black neighborhoods. Working soil and eating from it is preventive medicine.
• Heritage. Many of the plants and techniques we use have a passport. Naming them honors the people who carried them.
• Economic ground. A farm is a small business, a classroom, an employer, and a place to build skills that travel.
• Climate resilience. The regenerative practices that Black agronomists pioneered — cover cropping, agroforestry, no-till, intercropping — are exactly the practices the climate crisis is forcing the rest of agriculture to (re)learn.

What you can do

• Buy from Black-owned farms and food businesses when you can. Locally and nationally.
• Support land-return and land-trust work — organizations like the Black Family Land Trust, the Federation of Southern Cooperatives, and Soul Fire Farm's Reparations Map.
• Come to a class. Skills are how this knowledge keeps moving.
• Tell the story right. When you talk about American food, talk about who grew it.

This is a short note on a deep subject. There will be more — profiles of local growers, deeper dives on specific crops and techniques, and stories from the land at 865 N German Church Rd. Watch this space.

Further reading

• Farming While Black — Leah Penniman
• Freedom Farmers — Monica White
• The Cooking Gene — Michael W. Twitty
• Dispossession: Discrimination Against African American Farmers in the Age of Civil Rights — Pete Daniel