state. Agriculture is the largest private industry in Virginia, providing the economy with $70bn (£57bn)
annually and employing more than 300,000 people across 44,000 farms. Here, fertile soil yields crops of
tobacco, corn, grapes and peanuts, and sustains livestock for small family farms as well as sprawling
industrial ones.
Melinda Hyman and William Palmer III remember visiting their great-great-grandfather’s small farm here
when they were children. “He had orchards of pear and apple trees and some cattle,” Palmer recalls.
Emmanuel Freeman purchased the 1,000 acres of land after the Civil War, building a modest life out of the
few liberties the country afforded black people at the time. Freeman married Elsie Barksdale, had 10
children and built a small, two-story house. Like many black families in Virginia at the time, the Freemans
lived off their land and hoped to pass it down to their children and their children’s children, a sanctuary of
hope and belonging for generations to come.
But while Freeman could nurture the ecosystem on his acreage, he could not control the forces that
governed the country during Reconstruction. According to Palmer and Hyman, while running an errand on
Main Street in Halifax one day, one of Freeman’s grandsons, Johnny, didn’t move off the sidewalk for a
white woman, drawing the ire of shop owners and the local authorities. Johnny ran to the safest place he
could think of, his grandfather’s land. A mob followed, and Freeman exchanged gunfire with local
authorities before the family’s house and possessions were set ablaze. Elsie and other family members
relocated to a small cabin on the property and hid until morning.
Aubrey Terry looks over some of the cattle that
graze on the farm he and his siblings ownIt’s a story that Hyman and Palmer keep in their minds as evidence of the challenges black farmers have
long faced in their fight for land retention. “I feel like it’s my fight now to stand my ground and keep this
land,” Hyman says, even though it is no longer actively used for farming. They and other descendants of
Freeman and Barksdale have been fighting a decades-long legal battle to preserve their ownership, a fight
that is all too familiar to many black farming families.
Land ownership in America, a precarious notion for both the colonists and the enslaved, took on new
meaning during Reconstruction. With hope and the promise of 40 acres of Confederate land, abandoned
rice fields stretching across islands from Charleston to Florida in an order written by General William
T Sherman, black families settled in the South. But the promise never came to fruition, and former slave
owners were given back their lands, forcing black families into sharecropping. Some were able to save
enough money to purchase their own land but others ended up owing money to their former owners. By
1910, black farmers operated 212,972 farms in America, but, like Freeman, they found land ownership didn’t
negate being black in the Jim Crow South.
“There was a severe backlash to that land acquisition,” says Leah Penniman, author of Farming While Black: