New Communities was a

land trust Land trusts are nonprofit organizations which own and manage land, and sometimes waters. There are three common types of land trust, distinguished from one another by the ways in which they are legally structured and by the purposes for which th ...

and farm collective owned and operated by approximately a dozen black farm farmers from 1969 to 1985. Once one of the largest-acreage African American-owned properties in the United States, it was situated in Southwest Georgia.

Model for U.S. community land trusts

Instrumental in the forming of the partnership was Slater King (1927–1969), a community leader and Civil Rights activist from Albany. Working with such collective farm activists as Robert Swann and Shimon Gottschalk, several black leaders in Albany, Georgia, patterned the form of the organization after legal documents used by the Jewish National Fund in Israel. Group members traveled to Israel to study how the J.N.F. leases land for various uses. They chose to include leases for homesteads and cooperative farms. The group bought the farmland and leased it to members. The documents evolved to a degree after the 1960s and, , there were hundreds of

community land trust A community land trust (CLT) is a nonprofit corporation that holds land on behalf of a place-based community, while serving as the long-term steward for affordable housing, community gardens, civic buildings, commercial spaces and other community ...

s in the United States with more being planned. Swann later wrote (along with co-author Susan Witt, in their scholarly essay "Land: Challenge and Opportunity"): "The perseverance and foresight of that team in Georgia, motivated by the right of African-American farmers to farm land securely and affordably, initiated the CLT movement in this country

he U.S. He or HE may refer to: Language * He (pronoun), an English pronoun * He (kana), the romanization of the Japanese kana へ * He (letter), the fifth letter of many Semitic alphabets * He (Cyrillic), a letter of the Cyrillic script called ''He'' i ...

Collective's production, financial woes and civil suit settlement with USDA

The group used roadside stands to sell crops, built a roadside smokehouse for the hogs they slaughtered, and a roadside sugarcane mill, to attract customers. They pioneered the raising of

Muscadine ''Vitis rotundifolia'', or muscadine, is a grapevine species native to the southeastern and south-central United States. The growth range extends from Florida to New Jersey coast, and west to eastern Texas and Oklahoma. It has been extensive ...

grapes, putting in of the crop – now commonly grown in Southwest Georgia. On devoted to row crops, they raised area staples: corn, peanuts and soybeans. Yet in 1981 the region where the farms were located experienced severe drought. According to the findings of federal arbitrators in 2009, unlike similar requests from area farmers that were white, New Communities' application for an emergency loan from the

United States Department of Agriculture The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) is the federal executive department responsible for developing and executing federal laws related to farming, forestry, rural economic development, and food. It aims to meet the needs of com ...

for an irrigation system was denied with no clear explanation. In 1982, the drought continued and the operation sold lumber for $50,000 to remain viable. The USDA demanded its receipt of these funds as a condition for a loan. In 1983 the agency requested and received the deed to the holdings and provided nothing in return. In the aftermath of the ''

Pigford v. Glickman ''Pigford v. Glickman'' (1999) was a class action lawsuit against the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), alleging that it had racially discriminated against African-American farmers in its allocation of farm loans and assistance fro ...

class-action A class action, also known as a class-action lawsuit, class suit, or representative action, is a type of lawsuit where one of the parties is a group of people who are represented collectively by a member or members of that group. The class action ...

discrimination lawsuit, in 2009 New Communities received the largest of thousands of compensation awards from the USDA. It was chief arbitrator Michael Lewis's opinion that the USDA's demand for New Communities' timber proceeds "smack dof nothing more than a feudal baron demanding additional crops from his serfs." Lewis found the department's actions discriminatory, awarding the former land holders $12.8 million, of about $1 billion paid out to more than 13,300 black farmers ). Two of these land holders, Charles and

Shirley Sherrod Shirley Sherrod (born 1948) is a former Georgia State Director of Rural Development for the United States Department of Agriculture. On July 19, 2010, she became a subject of controversy when parts of a speech she gave were publicized by Breitba ...

, received, in addition to their share of the above, $330,000 compensation for mental anguish.

References

External links

*{{cite web , title=5 Decades Later, New Communities Land Trust Still Helps Black Farmers , website=NPR.org , date=2019-10-03 , url=https://www.npr.org/2019/10/03/766706906/5-decades-later-communities-land-trust-still-helps-black-farmers , ref={{sfnref , NPR.org , 2019 , access-date=2019-10-04 1969 establishments in the United States African-American history of Georgia (U.S. state) Agricultural cooperatives in the United States Agricultural economics Intentional communities in the United States Lawsuits Neighborhood associations Organizations based in Georgia (U.S. state)

Model for U.S. community land trusts

Collective's production, financial woes and civil suit settlement with USDA

See also

References

External links