Soul Fire Farm’s Practical Guide to Liberation on the Land and founder of Soul Fire Farm in Upstate New
York. “There was burning of homes, lynchings ... People were literally driven off of the land.”
Unravelling agricultural law also uncovers harsh histories. ‘I’ve worked with clients where the deed for their
land was in the family’s slave holder’s name’
Many of those farmers’ descendants are now scrambling to prove and retain ownership, a complicated task
thanks to a legal loophole that allows distant relatives and developers to obtain rights to lands that have
been in families for generations.
According to the 2017 US Agricultural Census, the number of black farmers has increased to 45,508, a
fraction of the 3.2 million white farmers in the same report. Yet black farmers are losing land at a higher rate
than their white counterparts. Since 2012, about 3 per cent of black-owned farmland has been lost,
compared to 0.3 per cent of white-owned farmland.
The loss has been particularly severe in the South, where paperwork on black families is thin and wills
infrequent due to generational distrust of the legal system. Jillian Hishaw, an agricultural lawyer and
founder of Family Agriculture Resource Management Services, works with minority farmers in the
southeast to help protect their lands, connecting families with lawyers and helping them navigate real estate
law, raise funds for legal fees and discover tax breaks. “Oftentimes, these cases are long and obtuse and
require a lot of time,” she says.
Unravelling complex agricultural law also uncovers harsh histories. “I’ve worked with clients where the
deed for their land was in the family’s slave holder’s name,” Hishaw says. She and the family had to contact
the slave owner’s descendants and ask them to sign the deed over to the black family that had lived there for
generations. Making it even trickier to prove ownership is the fact that many black families’ documents use
nicknames instead of legal names – or sometimes no names at all.
Buildings on farmland in Nathalie, VirginiaHyman found out firsthand how discrepancies in court documents can leave land owners vulnerable. In a
wire shopping cart, she transports historical records, deeds and letters sent to county and state treasurers as
well as congress and the Obama administration. The cart also contains records of the property taxes she has
paid, but those payments are missing from court documents. She says she learned that Freeman remarried
after Elsie Barksdale died and had 10 more children with his new wife. He died in 1925 without a will. When
his second wife died, ownership was transferred to the 20 children and then to the grandchildren. Calls to
county and state officials to prove ownership have led nowhere, and in 2018, 30 acres of their original 99