Freedom Farm Cooperative

In 1967, the Freedom Farm Cooperative (FFC) was established in this area as a way to build health, economic independence, and political power among Black families in Sunflower County, Mississippi. By 1970 the cooperative had purchased almost 700 acres adjacent to Ruleville and Drew. Freedom Farm realized the vision of Civil Rights leader Fannie Lou Townsend Hamer (1917-1977), who grew up nearby and knew first-hand the consequences of physical intimidation, political disenfranchisement, and exclusion from land ownership and education. In addition to producing food and commodity crops, the cooperative established other programs–including a collectively maintained swine herd, a preschool program, clothing production, and affordable housing–that aimed to help local people become self-sufficient and self-governing. The effort disbanded in 1976, and today Freedom Farm Road is one of the few obvious remnants of the farm on the landscape. But the cooperative remains a touchstone and inspiration for food sovereignty and racial justice movements today.

For nearly a decade, the Freedom Farm Cooperative (FFC) exemplified the intersection of food justice and racial justice. It built on a tradition of collective enterprise among African Americans as an alternative to oppressive systems. The FFC aimed to overcome farming’s associations with slavery, sharecropping, and other forms of exploitation and instead establish agriculture as a basis for resistance and self-determination. Access to productive, Black-owned land also offered locals the option to stay at home, in spaces that were safer than most fields in Mississippi, rather than migrating to the North or West. Over several years, and using funds contributed by the National Council of Negro Women (NCNW), the Wisconsin nonprofit Measure for Measure, supporters at Harvard University, performer Harry Belafonte, Heifer International, and other grants, donations, and revenue, FFC leaders purchased 680 acres of Delta farmland.

Freedom Farm Cooperative’s Members

Founder Fannie Lou Hamer explained that anyone poor, Black or White, could join the co-op. But in 1960, two-thirds of Sunflower County residents were of African descent, and more than 60% of them worked in land-based jobs, including as sharecroppers and tenant farmers. Of Black women in the county, 42% were domestics or day laborers, while 36% worked on farms. Their families, which often lived in substandard housing, suffered high rates of malnutrition, infant death, and diet-related illnesses such as diabetes and high blood pressure. 

People is not just walking up like they used to do in the past, walking out, you know, shooting a man down, or getting maybe 200 or 300 people carrying you out and lynching you, but it's . . . more subtle. . . . They can let you starve to death, not give you jobs. These are some of the things that's happening right now in Mississippi.^[1]

Denied job opportunities and access to public education, public assistance, and social services due to racist Jim Crow policies and voter suppression, African Americans in the county often relied on varied and inconsistent types of aid, such as the 30,000 pounds of food and clothing that Boston Friends of SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) sent their way in February 1964. Just a few dozen families could afford the $1 monthly FFC membership, but up to 1500 families were associated with the cooperative. Many of them had lost jobs due to factors like farm mechanization, voting-related retribution, and price-control subsidies for landowners, but they were able to offer their knowledge and skilled labor to the cooperative.

A Holistic Approach

“This is the first kind of program” that focused on “letting local people do their thing themselves.”^[2]

Hamer and her colleagues–including fellow Mississippian and SNCC field secretary Charles McLaurin–focused on access to the basics: food, housing, education, and employment. Members grew peas, butter beans, okra, turnips, squash, peanuts, sweet potatoes, collard greens, and other vegetables for their own consumption, along with catfish and cattle; 10% of harvested food was set aside for people unable to work the fields. Freedom Farm also operated a “pig bank” sustained by members who returned a percentage of new pigs to the common stock each year. By 1973, the 55 animals initially supplied by the NCNW had grown to a herd of more than 3000. FFC initiatives included start-up business loans, sewing cooperatives, a commercial kitchen for food preservation, a tool share, construction training, and disaster relief. A newly conceived Head Start program offered pre-school education, health and dental care, and nutritional aid. Forty families lived on 70 acres of land donated by Freedom Farm, whose staff also helped 13 more families avoid foreclosure and apply for federal loans. The cooperative sold soybeans, cotton, cucumbers, and wheat to pay for taxes and administrative costs and help support local schools as well as individual students. 

Working against the Odds

Founder Fannie Lou Hamer’s own life influenced her vision of the FFC as a holistic space that fostered autonomy and wellness. Born in the final years of World War I, Hamer was the youngest of twenty children born to sharecropping parents. She told crowds, “I know what the pain of hunger is about.”^[3] Hamer learned to read but left school at age 13 for full-time labor in cotton fields. This work took its toll on her health, alongside a bout of polio, forced sterilization, and physical trauma from beatings endured while imprisoned after Civil Rights actions. In 1962, she was fired and evicted--and her new lodgings shot at--because she had attempted to vote. But she continued to educate and organize. In 1964 she helped found the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party and gained nationwide attention as she lobbied for the party’s recognition at that year’s National Democratic Convention. Known for her powerful singing and oration skills, Hamer ran for political office multiple times in the 1960s and early 1970s. 

Hamer was concerned not only with legislative action, but with the ways that entrenched oppression affected the daily lives of her neighbors. Black Ruleville residents had already been working to establish self-sufficient enterprises, such as salvaging fabric scraps from factories and making them into quilts and hats. But they were working against long odds and intense physical oppression. Freedom Farm land was near the infamous Parchman State Penitentiary (a federally subsidized cotton farm that reanimated plantation-style enslavement) and bordered a bayou that sharecropper Joe Pullum had been literally burned out of, and then publicly mutilated and killed, in 1923 during a bloody standoff after a wage dispute. Young Emett Till was kidnapped and tortured near Drew in 1955, where one of his murderer’s brothers was a police officer. Mississippi’s all-white state legislature was dominated by devoted segregationists who belonged to White Citizens’ Councils, whose members terrorized Black voters and worked to thwart their social and economic power. In addition, physical and sexual violence was rampant on the area’s plantations, and Hamer’s sharecropping family–which had achieved increasing prosperity in the late 1920s–was menaced at home as well. Perhaps in response to her parents’ purchase of farming equipment, a car, three mules, and a milk cow, someone killed the family’s livestock using arsenic-laced insecticide. In her 1967 autobiography, Hamer noted how crucial those basic resources were to her family: “That poisoning knocked us right back down flat. We never did get back up again.”

The Enduring Impact of Freedom Farm Cooperative

By the mid-1970s, Freedom Farm had produced thousands of pounds of food, supplemented member income, increased educational access, trained people for new jobs, and constructed 200 homes with electricity and indoor plumbing. But by 1976, in the midst of a national economic downturn, the organization had to sell its land to pay overdue taxes. Wary of how local agencies distributed federal funds, Freedom Farm leaders had relied instead on Hamer’s proceeds from speaking engagements, as well as private donations that required much time to manage. As the nation’s bicentennial approached, the health of several key FFC staff members declined, and back-to-back tornadoes, drought, and flooding reduced harvests, revenue, and thus the ability to hire new staff and seasonal field workers. After Hamer died from cancer in 1977, the FFC transformed into the Fannie Lou Hamer Foundation, which maintained the cooperative’s emergency and medical programs and funded student scholarships. Today, houses associated with the cooperative persist in Ruleville, where Fannie Lou Hamer is buried, and where a statue in the Fannie Lou Hamer Memorial Park and Gardens and a museum in a community center commemorate her accomplishments. The original Head Start preschool in Ruleville is now known as Fannie Lou Hamer Day Care Center.

Freedom Farm’s experiment attempted to affirm both individual property ownership–a basis for political rights–and cooperative effort. It established a precedent for obtaining food and other goods independent of plantation commissaries. FFC members called out structural inequities and pushed back against state interference with federal racial justice policies and programs. In the longer term, improving the material conditions of everyday life through collective action paved the way for broader-based community organizing and political engagement. Although poverty and food apartheid remain problems in Mississippi today, Freedom Farm continues to inspire grassroots efforts such as the Southern Rural Black Women’s Initiative, the National Black Food & Justice Alliance, and the Federation of Southern Cooperatives, as well as individual farms (e.g., Soul Fire Farm, Black Earth Farms, Cooperation Jackson, and the Fannie Lou Hamer–Sundiata Acoli Farm) and urban food sovereignty movements across the country, including Soil Generation (Philadelphia) and Backyard Gardeners Network (New Orleans).

Cunningham, Ann Marie. “Inside Jackson City Limits, Farmers Combat Their Neighbors’ Lack of Fresh Produce.” Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting, April 5, 2022. https://www.mississippicir.org/perspective/inside-jackson-city-limits-farmers-combat-their-neighbors-lack-of-fresh-produce.

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Daniel, Peter. Dispossession: Discrimination against African American Farmers in the Age of Civil Rights. Chapel Hill, NC. University of North Carolina Press, 2013.

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^[1] Fannie Lou Hamer, Fannie Lou Hamer’s America, documentary by Monica Land, 2022. https://www.pbslearningmedia.org/resource/arf22flha-soc-freedomfarm/freedom-farm-cooperative-fannie-lou-hamers-america/

^[2] Fannie Lou Hamer founds Freedom Farm Cooperative, SNCC Digital Gateway. Accessed November 30, 2022. https://snccdigital.org/events/fannie-lou-hamer-founds-freedom-farm-cooperative/.

Fannie Lou Hamer: Stand Up, Mississippi Public Broadcasting, 2017. Film, 26:46 min. https://www.pbs.org/show/fannie-lou-hamer-stand/

Hamer, Fannie Lou. To Praise our Bridges: An Autobiography of Mrs. Fanny Lou Hamer. KIPCO, 1967. https://snccdigital.org/wp-content/themes/sncc/flipbooks/mev_hamer_updated_2018/

^[3]_____. "Until I Am Free, You Are Not Free Either”: Speech Delivered at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, Wisconsin, January 1971. In Maegan Parker Brooks and Davis W. Houck, eds., The Speeches of Fannie Lou Hamer: To Tell It Like It Is . Jackson, University Press of Mississippi, 2010.

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Sen, Mayukh. "The Civil Rights Icon Who Saw Freedom in Farming," Atlas Obscura. June 15, 2021. Accessed November 27, 2022. http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/fannie-lou-hamer-freedom-farm-cooperative

Smith, Nia-Raquelle. “Fannie Lou Hamer’s Pioneering Food Activism Is a Model for Today.” Food & Wine, September 15, 2020. Accessed November 30, 2022. https://www.foodandwine.com/news/fannie-lou-hamer-food-activism-pioneer

Tuuri, Rebecca. “Building the Collective ‘Voice of Negro Women in Mississippi’: The National Council of Negro Women in Mississippi in the 1960s and 1970s,” Mississippi History Now. June 1, 2020. Accessed November 29, 2022. https://mshistorynow.mdah.ms.gov/issue/building-the-collective-%E2%80%9Cvoice-of-negro-women-in-Mississippi%22-the-national-council-of-negro-women-in-mississippi-in-the-1960s-and-1970s

White, Monica M. “‘A Pig and a Garden’: Fannie Lou Hamer and the Freedom Farms Cooperative," Food and Foodways, vol. 25, no. 1:20 - 39. 2017.

_____. Freedom Farmers: Agricultural Resistance and the Black Freedom Movement. Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 2020.