Private Story
Personal Grant
Farming While Black
Family, Faith, and The Land
The photographs that have been submitted are about the plight of the vanishing African-American farmer in America. The project was started in 2010 in Tillery, N.C., at the former Tillery Resettlement Farm. I photographed and interviewed farmers Gary Grant and Eddie Wise. In 2015 I went back to Tillery, as well as other parts of North Carolina. In 2016, I traveled to Washington, D.C., to photograph a group of African-American farmers who traveled from the South to protest in front of the U.S. Supreme Court to try to get their grievances heard.
Why is this story important? I want to make people aware of the loss, of a way of life, which was and still is, a vital part of the African-American experience. The numbers are staggering! In 1910, black farmers owned between 16-19 million acres of land, by 1997 they only owned 1.5 million acres. As of 2000 there were a little more than 18,000 black farmers, from a peak of 926,000 in 1920. And in Tillery’s home state of North Carolina, between 1982-1997, black-owned farms in the state went from 4,413 to 1,515, a loss of over 65%.
African-American farmers are vanishing for a couple of reasons. First, most of the farmers are in their late 60’s and older and physically can’t keep up the same workload. This leads to the second reason, when these farmers are no longer able to make a living working the land and the next generation doesn’t see farming as a viable avocation, it leaves the door open for outsiders, i.e., white farmers or Big Agri to come in and take the land.
I have talked with and met farmers in Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Kentucky, Georgia, Maryland and Oklahoma who have agreed to be subjects for my project. They range from a young man just starting, his farm life; to a family that has owned there farm for 100 years. My plan is to take a year sabbatical to do the project and once done take the images back into those communities, but I also want to take it into HCBUs and other predominately African-American communities, to highlight the black farmer plight.
The story I want to tell is two-fold. My primary goal is to bring to light the struggles of these black farmers in particular and minority farmers in general. In addition to the struggles, I want to show the love and compassion they have for their way of life and the concern they feel about it disappearing. My secondary goal is to open up the spectrum in which the African-American experience is viewed. For the most part, the African-American experience has always been shown through the eyes of those living in the inner city and the images of poverty, drugs and gangs that come with it. These are usually the only images shown; however, the African-American experience is not monolithic. Our history, our life, stems from the land!
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