Part 1: Black Farming, Land, and the Legacy of Incarceration

This two-part series was written by Jubilee Staff member Beguey Ndiaye, who manages and creates content for the Jubilee Farms social media page. Beguey is currently a student at Towson University and works part time enhancing the visual aesthetics of Jubilee Farms.

Please stay tuned for Part 2 - Rooted Again: How Black Communities are Reclaiming the Land.

Farming, for many, evokes images of open land, fresh air, and nourishment passed down through generations.

But for Black Americans, the soil carries a different weight, one soaked in forced labor, broken promises, and a systematic theft of wealth that still echoes today.  

To understand where we are, we must go back. Far back.   

American agriculture was constructed on the knowledge and labor of enslaved African people. This is not a footnote; it is the foundation. Enslaved Africans arrived not as blank slates, but as experts. They brought with them sophisticated techniques in rice cultivation, irrigation, soil management, and crop rotation that were entirely foreign to European settlers.  

The Carolina rice economy? Built on West African expertise. The cotton kingdom that funded American industrialization? Harvested by enslaved hands from dawn to dark. Their agricultural genius enriched a nation that refused to call them citizens, let alone farmers.  

They built an empire in the fields. They just were not allowed to own any of them.  

When slavery ended in 1865, a window of possibility opened. The phrase "40 acres and a mule" became a symbol of what freedom could look like: land, autonomy, the ability to build something of your own. For a brief, electric moment, it seemed possible.  

It was not. The redistribution orders were reversed. The land went back to former enslavers. And yet, against enormous odds, Black farmers did not give up. By the early 20th century, Black Americans owned over 16 million acres of farmland across the United States. They built communities, fed families, and created generational wealth from the ground up. Then came the systematic dismantling of everything they had built.  

You do not need violence to take land, though there was plenty of that too. You just need to control access to money, markets, and institutions.  

Sharecropping

After Reconstruction, sharecropping became the dominant trap. Black farmers worked white-owned land in exchange for a share of the crop, an arrangement that sounded fair yet almost never was. Inflated debts for seeds and tools, manipulated ledgers, and no legal recourse left families locked in cycles of dependency that were nearly impossible to escape. 

Then came the federal government's role. The USDA, supposed to support all American farmers, systematically denied Black farmers access to loans, subsidies, and the technical assistance that white farmers received as a matter of course. A 1999 class-action lawsuit, Pigford v. Glickman, confirmed what Black farmers had known for decades: discrimination was policy, not exception.  

Add racial violence that drove families off their land, tax sales exploited by predatory buyers, and inheritance laws that fragmented ownership across generations until no single heir could hold on. Each mechanism, on its own, might seem minor. Together, they amounted to one of the largest transfers of wealth in American history, moving from Black families into white ones.  

At their peak, Black farmers owned 16 million acres. Today, that number has fallen by over 90%.  Land dispossession was not the only tool. As Reconstruction ended, a new legal architecture emerged to recapture Black labor: the Black Codes. 

The Black Codes

These laws criminalized the everyday lives of Black men, unemployment, "loitering," lacking a signed labor contract. They made it simple and legal to arrest Black individuals for simply existing in public and funnel them into the criminal system. What came next was convict leasing which incarcerated people, overwhelmingly Black, rented them to plantations, mines, and railroads for brutal labor under conditions that mirrored slavery almost exactly.  

Convict leasing was eventually abolished, but its logic never died. The prison-as-labor-source model evolved, not ended. The legal mechanism changed. The structure remained. Black farmers now make up less than 2% of all farmers in the United States. They own a fraction of the land their grandparents and great-grandparents cultivated. The United States currently incarcerates over 1.9 million people, the highest rate in the world, and Black Americans are imprisoned at nearly five times the rate of white Americans.  

Within prisons, agricultural labor persists. Incarcerated workers tend crops, raise livestock, and process food, often for pennies an hour, or nothing at all. The system frames this as rehabilitation. Critics call it what it is: coerced labor by those with no meaningful ability to refuse. 

These two stories, land loss and mass incarceration, are not parallel. They are the same story, told across two centuries, using different instruments to achieve the same ends—the extraction of Black labor and the suppression of Black wealth.