“They Took 6,000 Acres From Us And God Gave Us A Plantation”

Nathan Connolly: Major funding for BackStory is provided by an anonymous donor, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation.

Joanne Freeman: From Virginia Humanities, this is BackStory.

Joanne Freeman: Welcome to BackStory, the show that explains the history behind today’s headlines. I’m Joanne Freeman.

Nathan Connolly: I’m Nathan Connolly.

Ed Ayers: And I’m Ed Ayers.

Joanne Freeman: If you’re new to the podcast, we’re all historians, along with our colleague Brian Balogh, and each week we explore a different topic in American history.

Nathan Connolly: Today, we’ll talk about plantations and how these spaces engage with the past. We’re going to start in Southwest Georgia where Shirley Sherrod has worked for fifty years to create a sustainable community for African-American farmers.

Shirley Sherrod: I’ve been telling farmers for years: you can’t make it out there on your farm by yourself anymore. You’ve got to work with your brothers and sisters in the area.

Nathan Connolly: Sherrod’s the co-founder of an organization called New Communities in Albany, Georgia. She helped assemble the collective of black farmers back in the late 1960s. At the time, she was organizing for the civil rights movement, and she started to notice a pattern.

Shirley Sherrod: What we realized as we were encouraging people to register to vote, many of those individuals who were living on land owned by white people would be asked to leave. There were so many individuals who were at the mercy of the farmers who employed them. We could have a mass meeting and have a family show up saying they’ve been asked to leave the farm, and we would have to work to try to find places for them to go. That’s what prompted the whole idea of trying to create a community.

Nathan Connolly: Once New Communities got rolling, there was some immediate intense pushback from white landowners in the area.

Shirley Sherrod: Those early meetings, sometimes shots would be fired at the building; sometimes with some of us in them.

Nathan Connolly: Despite this hostility, Sherrod and New Communities thrived in the 1970s. They grew peanuts, corn, soy beans, and sold cured meats like ham and sausage.

Shirley Sherrod: We had a major operation there where we could sell product while we were also growing peanuts and other crops, but we experienced droughts in the later part of the ’70s. We tried to apply for an emergency loan like all farmers were doing, and when we went to the local office, the guy said, “You’ll get a loan here over my dead body.”

Nathan Connolly: The group eventually faced foreclosure and lost their land in 1985. Years went by, and Sherrod worked for other agricultural groups in the region, but in the late 1990s, she received word of a class action lawsuit against the USDA. It was called Pigford v. Glickman. The plaintiffs were black farmers who were denied loans from the USDA because of racial discrimination.

Shirley Sherrod: And they used the years 1981 to 1996, and that was because when Reagan became the President, he abolished the Office of Civil Rights at USDA. So when our farmers complained, when we complained about the treatment at New Communities that we were getting, those complaints didn’t have anywhere to go because Reagan had abolished that part of the agency.

Shirley Sherrod: In our case, we had to be compared to plantations in the area, and it was just shocking to find that these plantations around here that were owned by rich people were actually getting the loans we were denied. We tried to apply for irrigation. Actually, had a contract to grow a large acreage of vegetables to be shipped to stores in the Northeast, and we were denied. But those plantations with rich owners were getting irrigation, you know? They were getting all of the services that were denied to us.

Nathan Connolly: Sherrod says they waited ten years for the case to be reviewed, but finally, in 2009, she got a call from her lawyer.

Shirley Sherrod: She asked if we had heard, and I said, “No.” She said, “We won.”

Shirley Sherrod: Now, the way things usually happen, I thought, “Okay, we won. They’re going to give us a dollar.” She asked me, “Do you want to guess how much?” I said, “Rose, is it at least a million dollars?” She said, “No, it’s twelve.”

Shirley Sherrod: It was unbelievable. I think both my husband and I started crying that night.

Nathan Connolly: Two years later, New Communities was reestablished on 1,600 acres of land right outside of Albany. And this time, instead of battling the plantation, they owned it.

Shirley Sherrod: When we purchased the land, we didn’t know it was a former slave plantation. We just knew it was a prime piece of property. We were actually looking at two different tracts of land. I can tell you that the previous owner invented the system for paying for fuel at the pump, so he had lots of money.

Shirley Sherrod: There’s an Antebellum house on there. There are other structures, but he put three million dollars just into restoring that house. There’s an 85 acre lake, there are cabins down by the lake, as well as up near that main house.

Shirley Sherrod: Now, we started looking at the history of that land, and that’s when we found that it had been once owned by the largest slave owner and the wealthiest man in the state, Hartwell Hill Tarver. He owned about nine plantations and kept the largest number of slaves on that property. We also learned that when Jefferson Davis was running from the Union Army, he actually spent some days and nights there on that property.

Nathan Connolly: So you’re on what was the largest plantation in the state of Georgia, a place where Jefferson Davis literally laid his head during the age of the Civil War, and I have to imagine that that history shapes or at least adds a very profound context to the kind of work that you all are doing there now.

Shirley Sherrod: Definitely. We had what we call Blessing of the Land ceremonies. The Lower Creek Indians were the first inhabitants of this property, this area, so we decided to try to bring as much of a mix of people as we could to this property to do the blessings in their cultures. It was so educational for our people because we feel it had a bad beginning in slavery, but we ought to be able to come together to do some healing and promote a better way, let’s say, here in Southwest Georgia on that property.

Shirley Sherrod: You can teach our children black history when you’ve got the slave plantation. We have a copy of an ad where 150 slaves were sold from that plantation on December 29, 1859.

Nathan Connolly: Incredible.

Shirley Sherrod: One of the things we’ve vowed to do is try to find descendants from those slaves. We know who bought them and we just need to be able to do the research to find descendants. When we start teaching our people their history, you couldn’t find a better place to do that I think.

Nathan Connolly: And that relationship between the history and the memory of slavery, and the cotemporary struggle to protect, really, agriculture health for the entire country, but also specifically for the very small number of African-American farmers, why is that so connected in your mind and in your efforts there?

Shirley Sherrod: Well, I grew up on a farm, and I grew up in a family that believed in farmland ownership and education. That was drilled in mean. And then we were surrounded by plantations. There was Ichauway Plantation that had joined some of our property. Ichauway was owned by Robert Woodruff, who’s the Chair of Coca-Cola, a 33,000-acre plantation.

Nathan Connolly: Wow.

Shirley Sherrod: See, these plantations are still intact now. I’m surrounded by big plantations, but then where I lived, my family, I don’t know how they ended up there, but I found them in the 1870’s census. They were there sharecropping to buy land. That’s been drilled in me through the years to work hard, to get an education.

Shirley Sherrod: Now, I didn’t like it. You know? That work was hard. I can tell you I wanted to get as far away from it as I could. In fact, if my father had not been murdered, I wouldn’t be living in the south. I made the commitment to stay on the night of his death and work for change, but it was not my plan because I picked cotton; I picked cucumbers, and all of the other backbreaking work that we had to do, but now I look back, and I got it. I got what my grandparents and great-grandparents were trying to do. They educated my father and my uncles and cousins and so forth from that land. I got what land ownership could do for you.

Shirley Sherrod: And what I normally say is they took 6,000 acres from us, and God gave us a plantation intact.