In her essay “Black Land Matters,” Black farmer and food justice activist Leah Penniman tells how the ancestral grandmothers in the Dahomey region of West Africa braided seeds of okra, molokhia, and Levant cotton into their hair before being forced to board transatlantic slave ships. As expert agriculturalists, the seeds and the ecosystemic and cultural knowledge they represented were their most precious legacy. The ships brought them to a country with a food system based on the stolen land of Indigenous people and the stolen labor of African people. Penniman says by stashing these seeds in their tresses, the ancestral grandmothers believed in their Black descendants and in a future of tilling and reaping the earth. By honoring the gift of the seed, their descendants do not let the colonizers rob them of their right to belong to the land and to claim agency in the food system.

Leah Penniman (all pronouns) is a Black Kreyol farmer, mother, soil nerd, author, and food justice activist from Soul Fire Farm in Grafton, NY. She co-founded Soul Fire Farm in 2010 with the mission to end racism in the food system and reclaim our ancestral connection to land. As Co-ED and Farm Director, Penniman is part of a team that facilitates powerful food sovereignty programs — including farmer training for Black & Brown people, a subsidized farm food distribution program for communities living under food apartheid, and domestic and international organizing toward equity in the food system.

Penniman’s essay (below) was excerpted from “Portraits of Earth Justice: Americans Who Tell the Truth,” (New Village Press, 2022) a book series by Robert Shetterly. “Portraits of Earth Justice,” the second volume in the series, includes five essays and 50 portraits and profiles of American environmental activists. Shetterly is a Maine-based visual artist, social activist, and writer. He has painted portraits of people who address issues of social, environmental, and economic fairness for the “Americans Who Tell the Truth” series for the past 20 years. 

Our 12,000-year history of noble, autonomous, and dignified relationship to land far surpasses the 246 years of enslavement and 75 years of sharecropping in the United States. As Black farmer Chris Bolden-Newsome explains, “The Land was the scene of the crime.” I would add, “She was never the criminal.”

Our ancestral grandmothers in the Dahomey region of West Africa braided seeds of okra, molokhia, and Levant cotton into their hair before being forced to board transatlantic slave ships. They hid sesame, black-eyed peas, rice, and melon seed in their locks. They stashed away amara, kale, gourd, sorrel, basil, tamarind, and kola seed in their tresses. The seed was their most precious legacy, and they believed against odds in a future of tilling and reaping the earth. They believed that we, their Black descendants, would exist and that we would receive and honor the gift of the seed.

With the seed, our grandmothers also braided their ecosystemic and cultural knowledge. African people, expert agriculturalists, created soil-testing systems that used taste to determine pH and touch to determine texture. Cleopatra developed the first vermicomposting systems, warning citizens that they would face harsh punishment for harming any worm. Ghanaian women created “African Dark Earths,” a compost mixture of bone char, kitchen scraps, and ash that built up over generations, capturing carbon and fertilizing crops. African farmers developed dozens of complex agroforestry systems, integrating trees with herbs, annuals, and livestock. They built terraces to prevent erosion and invented the most versatile and widely used farming tool—the hoe. Our people invented the world’s initial irrigation systems five thousand years ago and watered the Sahel with foggaras (underground water conduits) that are still in use today. They domesticated the first livestock and established rotational grazing, which created fertile ground for grain crops.

Our ancestors created sophisticated communal labor systems, cooperative credit organizations, and land-honoring ceremonies. On Turtle Island, Black agriculturalists like Whatley, Carver, Hamer, and Tubman brought us CSA (community-supported agriculture), organic/regenerative farming, cooperative farms, land trusts, and herbalism. Even as the colonizers pillaged the soil of 50 percent of its carbon in their first generation of settling, we used ancestral techniques like mounding, deep mulching, plant-based toxin extraction, and cover cropping to welcome life back into the soil. Our ancestral grandmothers braided all this wisdom and more into their hair and brought it across the Middle Passage. It is our heritage.

Of course, the project of the empire is to make us forget, to confuse us and colonize our hearts, to make us name the land “enemy” and relinquish all claims of belonging. The DNA of the food system in the United States is the stolen land of Indigenous people and the stolen labor of African people. This DNA remains intact and unrectified. Even after emancipation, the Black Codes, convict leasing, and sharecropping kept Black farmers in a state of neoslavery. When our folks fled the racial terror, the more than 4,500 lynchings and house burnings in the South, as part of the Great Migration, that labor force was replaced with “guest workers” born outside the borders, who were subject to unfair labor conditions. The Black farmers who remained in the South, attempting to hold on to their land, were subject to discrimination by the federal government and denied access to the USDA programs to which they were entitled. In the North, Black folks attempting to access land met other forms of discrimination—redlining, denial of mortgages through the GI Bill, and the persistent 16:1 white/ Black wealth gap that originated with our enslaved forebears’ ten trillion dollars of unpaid labor.

We further faced food apartheid, that system of segregation that denied access to fresh, culturally appropriate foods in our neighborhoods, and the resultant epidemic of diabetes, obesity, and heart disease. The empire is pleased when we turn our backs on the earth, allowing white people to control 98 percent of the farmland in this country, consenting to their ownership of the soil, the groundwater, the minerals, and the food supply.

Yet in every generation there were Black people who remembered the gift of the seed and the legacy of belonging to the land. We pay homage to one such rememberer, Fannie Lou Hamer, who said, “When you have 400 quarts of greens and gumbo soup canned for the winter, no one can push you around or tell you what to say or do.” In 1969, Hamer founded the Freedom Farm Cooperative on forty acres of prime Delta land. Her goal was to empower poor Black farmers and sharecroppers, who had suffered at the mercy of white landowners. She said, “The time has come now when we are going to have to get what we need ourselves. We may get a little help, here and there, but in the main we’re going to have to do it ourselves.” The co-op consisted of fifteen hundred families who planted cash crops, like soybeans and cotton, as well as mixed vegetables. They purchased another 640 acres and started a “pig bank,” which distributed livestock to Black farmers. The farm grew into a multifaceted self-help organization, providing scholarships, home-building assistance, a commercial kitchen, a garment factory, a tool bank, agricultural training, and burial fees to its members. Thank you, Mama Hamer, for keeping the seed alive.

The seed is passed to us, Black children of Black gold. If we do not figure out how to continue the legacy of our agricultural traditions, this art of living on land in a sacred manner will go extinct for our people. Then the KKK, the White Citizens’ Council, and Monsanto will be rubbing their hands together in glee, saying, “We convinced them to hate the earth, and now it’s all ours.” We will not let the colonizers rob us of our right to belong to the earth and to claim agency in the food system. We are Black gold—our melanin-rich skin the mirror of the sacred soil in all her hues. We belong here, bare feet planted firmly on the land, hands calloused with the work of sustaining and nourishing our community.

This excerpt has been reprinted with permission from “Portraits of Earth Justice: Americans Who Tell the Truth,” by Robert Shetterly, published by New Village Press, 2022.