Throughout high school, I drove by farms to and from high school and the one I remember to this day, took up all of the area leading up to my housing development and I always remembered thinking how hard farm life must be. Through the years when I traveled back home, I always knew I was home when I saw THAT farm; yet, I was also surprised because developers had hit the surrounding area hard, but this farm was always there. Also, one of my high school classmates came from a family of farmers and I saw first-hand the toll of living that life. It also got me thinking about the farm life for African-Americans.
The plight of African-American farmers has always been a subject I have wanted to document. Farmers, in general, have been battered in recent years and many are struggling to stay afloat. For African-American farmers, the struggle is even greater due to many factors, which include racism. The farmers that I have been photographing for this project live on or near Tillery, N.C. A little history about Tillery:
The Tillery Resettlement Farm was one of 113 such projects created by the U.S. government during the 1930s and '40s as part of Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal programs. The Tillery Farms Project was one of the largest resettlement projects in the country; it was also unusual because it had both an African American section (Tillery) and a white section (Roanoke Farms), according to the Black Farmers and Agriculturalists Association website. Even with this gesture, the government still shortchanged the black farmers by giving them land in a floodplain. It's been an uphill battle ever since for farmers to get loans from the USDA and keep their land.
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. 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%.
Mr. Eddie Wise is the anchor of my project. I got to spend a 3-4 days with him when I first started the project and went back again two years ago and did a sit down interview with him. When I first met Mr. Wise, he was awaiting a loan from the North Carolina Farm Agency, which was ordered by the head of the agency. The local agents refused to follow through so Mr. Wise stopped paying on his original loan,after losing over 500 hogs. At a 25% per month rate of interest, his original loan $212,000 was now over half a million dollars. The reason he never got the loan was racism.
About a month after I saw him in 2015, fourteen armed federal agents and sheriff's deputies removed Mr. Wise and his wife from their farm with only the clothes on their backs. I saw Mr. Wise two weeks ago for his wife's funeral.
Me finishing this project and getting it seen is what I need to do to honor Mrs. Wise's memory, as well as, other African-American farmers who have died fighting to keep their land. The African-American farmer is a dying breed, literally and figuretively, and my goal and passion is to bring their plight to light.