A Path to Independence: Shirley Sherrod on Racial Justice and the Value of Land - Seite 2

Culbertson recently spoke with Shirley Sherrod about the power and potential of the community land trust movement. Here are excerpts from their conversation.

Devon Culbertson: New Communities Inc. - the organization you founded in 1969 - is the starting place for the community land trust movement. What made you feel this was the right work to focus on?

Shirley Sherrod: Our work started with the Civil Rights Movement and organizing here in rural southwest Georgia. As we were helping people to exercise their rights, they would get kicked off the land owned by white people. "Our goal was to try to acquire land so that we would never lose it. And that's why we chose the community land trust model so that we would all own it together. No one person could mortgage anything so that we could lose it."

We were really trying to look at how to get this land and hold it forever, for everyone's use.

DC: What has kept you focused on this movement over the years, given the headwinds you have faced? What has kept you there on a personal level?

SS: I did not intend to live my life on the farm, and I didn't intend to live my life in the South. Everything changed in one night - the night my father was murdered by a white farmer, who was not prosecuted, even though there were witnesses. I'm the oldest of six children and I was 17 and a senior in high school on that night. My mother was pregnant with my brother.

As the oldest, I needed to come up with a plan. I had no idea what I would do then - it unfolded through the years; initially, it was trying to integrate schools. Then it was trying to get the right to vote.

At a certain point, we were also looking at how the local county committee would target Black landowners. If they were trying to borrow money or get access to programs through USDA, they would be denied. The land was targeted, and Black landowners would end up losing it. Around 1910, Black farmers owned over 15 million acres and we're down to less than 2 million acres now.

Through the years, marrying Charles Sherrod and getting deeply involved in the civil rights work and working with farmers, we realized that the only way to hold on to land was to own it together.

DC: Land meant so many things then and it means different things now - stability for families, source of political agency, the ability to vote, and economic opportunity. What did land mean to you and why did holding that land become so powerful?

SS: Land was a path to independence - as much as we could, as Black people, have independence in the Jim Crow era. Land meant having a path to getting an education. We have doctors and lawyers and so forth, because that base of land was purchased. And many of them didn't stay on the farm - I didn't intend to stay there either.

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