Toward “Total Freedom”: Black Ecologies of Land, Labor, and Livelihoods in the Mississippi Delta

Abstract

We ground this article in the uneven geographies of the Mississippi Delta, a region constructed at the intersection of agro-environmental racism and plantation violence, nutrient-rich soil, and dynamic Black geographies. The processes of containment, dispossession, and commodification of life and land were essential to the construction of the region following a particular agricultural and racial development trajectory dominated by what Clyde Woods calls the Plantation Bloc. And yet, strategies and struggles to make life against and outside of these dynamics also took hold of the region. We reconceptualize the Mississippi Black Freedom Movement and the overlapping struggles for land, housing, healthcare, and new forms of work as movements against agro-environmental racism and the making of a place-based environmental justice rooted in Black ecologies. Drawing on Black and abolition ecologies we trace connections across rural Black organizing in cooperative, farm, and catfish processing communities in the Mississippi Delta. By organizing along modes of collective flourishing and against threats to daily life, these movements provide an alternative trajectory to agro-environmental racism and sought to create a place of stewardship and co-operation.

本文探讨了密西西比三角洲的不均衡地理环境。该地区汇集了农业环境种族主义、种植暴力、肥沃土壤和活跃的黑人地理。基于克莱德·伍兹的种植集团主导的农业和种族发展轨迹, 本文认为, 遏制、剥夺、生活和土地商品化等过程对密西西比三角洲地区的建设至关重要。然而, 该地区也采取了对抗和超越这些变化的策略和斗争。我们将密西西比州黑人自由运动（Mississippi Black Freedom Movement）和土地、住房、医保和新型工作的斗争, 重新定义为反对农业环境种族主义、建立扎根于黑人生态的地方环境正义的运动。根据黑人和废除生态, 我们追踪了密西西比三角洲的农村黑人合作社、农场和鲶鱼加工社区的组织联系。这些以集体繁荣、反对生活威胁为模式的运动, 为农业环境种族主义提供了另一途径, 并试图创造一个管理和合作的场所。

Basamos este ensayo en las geografías desiguales del Delta del Mississippi, una región construida en la intersección del racismo agroambiental y la violencia de la plantación, un suelo rico en nutrientes y la dinámica de las geografías negras. Los procesos de contención, desposesión y comodificación de la vida y de la tierra fueron esenciales para la construcción de la región, siguiendo una trayectoria particular de desarrollo agrícola y racial dominada por lo que Clyde Woods denomina el Bloque de la Plantación. No obstante, las estrategias y luchas para edificar vida en contra y fuera de estas dinámicas también se adueñaron de la región. Reconceptualizamos el Movimiento por la Libertad del Mississippi Negro y las luchas superpuestas por la tierra, la vivienda, la salubridad pública, y por las nuevas formas de trabajo, como movimientos en contra del racismo ambiental, y la creación de una justicia ambiental basada en lugar y arraigada en las ecologías negras. Apoyándonos en las ecologías negras y abolicionistas, trazamos las conexiones que ocurren a través de la organización de los negros rurales en comunidades cooperativas, de granjas y las procesadoras de bagre en el Delta del Mississippi. Al organizarse de acuerdo con los modos de florecimiento colectivo y contra las amenazas de la vida cotidiana, estos movimientos proveen una trayectoria alternativa al racismo agroambiental, y buscan crear un lugar de administración y cooperación.

Key Words:

• abolition ecologies
• agriculture
• Black geographies
• food
• land

关键词:

• 废除生态
• 农业
• 黑人地理
• 食物
• 土地。

Palabras clave:

• agricultura
• alimentos
• ecologías abolicionistas
• geografías negras
• tierra

Between the 1960s and the 1990s, Black organizers and communities confronted, and sought to transform, the social and environmental conditions of plantation exploitation in the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta. The Delta is a fertile alluvial valley in the state of Mississippi layered by millenia of nutrient-rich sediments deposited by the Yazoo and Mississippi Rivers. The region is frequently offered as emblematic of the Black Belt of the U.S. South: narrated in terms that draw connections between a plantation past and disinvested present and highlight contradictions between fertile soils and poverty. Yet, as Clyde Woods (1998/2017) shows, relations of racialized destruction were a willful development strategy in the Delta, one challenged and contested by visions and practices of sustainable and cooperative development manifested by Black Southerners. Black relational ecologies maintain the conditions for continued life in the region, orienting toward both abundance and resistance, and confronting the racialized systems of commodification and destruction so central to the plantation model of development.

Through a reorientation to land and the earth, Black farm communities like Freedom Farms and the North Bolivar Farm Cooperative fought against oppressive plantation ecologies, while working for freedom from the constant threat of violence and hunger. This would enable a kind of freedom that did not seek inclusion into existing systems of domination, exploitation, and extraction, but moved toward relationships of abundance with each other and the land. It provided escape grounded in the soil and toward collective stewardship for Black agrarian futures. This framework, rooted in Black ecologies of the Mississippi Delta, continued to inform grassroots movements like the 1990 strike at Delta Pride and the “catfish project” that followed. These overlapping struggles for land, housing, healthcare, and workers’ rights, we argue, represented an abolitionist vision confronting conditions of agro-environmental racism, and working toward abundance and freedom.

Methodology

For this article we rely on oral histories, newspaper articles, books of poetry, and other first-hand accounts authored by working-class, Black Mississippians. We prioritize oral histories for what they reveal about peoples’ intimate and everyday relationships to ecological knowledge and a Black sense of place (McKittrick 2011), while recognizing that the public record is steeped in the systemic nature of plantation exploitation. We draw primarily on the ideas, words, and practices of L.C. Dorsey, Rose Turner, and Sarah C. White, Black women who drew from their upbringing and experiences in the cotton plantation south to transform the conditions of life and work in the Delta. Two of our section headings are drawn from poems from Dorsey’s (1982) book on Parchman Prison, Cold Steel. Her work has shaped our thinking, and her abolitionist vision confronted both the plantation and the prison, mobilizing “plantation futures” (McKittrick 2013). Dorsey, Turner, and White all went on to develop grassroots community and labor organizations rooted in a deep love for the land and people of the region.

Our analysis of the relationship between environment, place, and race in the Delta is guided by these theorizations and spatial practices oriented toward abundance and collective flourishing—what J.T. Roane (2020) has termed Black (Blues) ecologies. We first outline the irreducibly environmental dimensions of plantation racism in the Delta, emphasizing that the racist coercion of labor and life is central to, rather than a by-product of, the environmental destructiveness of plantations. We then turn to the ways that Black communities and individuals within cooperative, farm, and catfish processing regions have engaged with and beyond the destructiveness of plantations to envision and enact what Fannie Lou Hamer termed “total freedom.” This work entails the transformation of environmental relations to land and labor toward abolition ecologies.

Black and Abolition Ecologies

In 1970, sociologist and Black studies scholar Nathan Hare developed the concept “Black ecology” to respond to growing white environmentalist movements and use of ecology to understand people’s relationship to their environments. By placing environmental arguments on toxicity in relation to housing, health, work, and policing, Hare broadens environmental concerns through a critical lens of Black geographies in the United States. Scholars in Black ecologies extend Hare’s early critiques while “charting the meaningful cultural, spiritual, intellectual, and practical insights for an ecological otherwise born of maroon imaginaries” (Hosbey and Roane 2021, 72). Rather than depicting Black people as coconspirators in ecological domination, extraction, and violence or as victims of such environmental harms, Black ecologies theorizes from and with the Black Commons (Roane 2018), the garden plot (Davis et al. 2019), and maroon geographies (Wright 2020; Winston 2021). Such fleeting, unruly, and untamed spaces demand “alternative ways of thinking about land use, stewardship, accumulation, and the environment” (Hosbey and Roane 2021, 70). These knowledges and practices are rooted in plantation futures, or thinking “predicated on human life” (McKittrick 2013, 3) against, and beyond, dispossession. Black ecologies demonstrates the necessity of reconfiguring relationships to land, labor, housing, and health.

Rejecting the politics of domination that undergirds colonial-racist environments, while centering generative and innovative Black ecological engagements, Black ecologies, and parallel work in abolition ecologies, seek to restore, repair, and chart an agenda for freedom. Abolition ecologies draws attention to the everyday and oppressive environmental dimensions of colonialism, racial capitalism, and carcerality, while seeking to reconceptualize and repair relationships of people and land by building life affirming practices and institutions (Heynen and Ybarra 2021). Environmental restoration and the dismantling of systems of oppression, from this perspective, are fundamentally intertwined. Abolition ecologies offers a framework shaped by Black freedom movements and conceptualizations emerging from the U.S. South, while explicitly orienting toward the environmental imperatives of both abolition and decolonization (Du Bois 1935/1998; Heynen 2016; Daigle and Ramírez 2019; Ybarra 2021; Mei-Singh 2021).

Guided by this work, we seek to highlight the agro-environmental dimensions of the everyday and ongoing practices of freedom in the U.S. South. We also build on recent scholarship that distinguishes the role of agriculture and food in civil rights and Black freedom struggle organizing. Monica White (2018), for example, emphasizes that Black agrarianism represented a central strategy for cooperative development during the southern freedom movement, and a key basis for organizing. Bobby Smith’s (2019, 2020) work reveals the importance of food in building community and power, and sustaining Black freedom struggles in Mississippi.¹ M. M. White (2017, 2018), Smith (2019), and McCutcheon (2019) all draw inspiration and insight from Hamer and her Freedom Farms Cooperative. As McCutcheon (2019) argues, Hamer drew on her expert knowledge as a Black woman who grew up farming in rural Mississippi to directly address the food deprivation and violence that she experienced. In the process, she built a space of freedom and nourishment in the face of dispossession and oppression. Hamer stressed both the role of land monopolization in geographies of white supremacy, and the importance of land for community and individual development. Cooperative land ownership and cultivation was, in her words, indispensable to the “ultimate goal of total freedom” (Hamer 2011, 142).

These practices are most evident in the cooperative and farm communities we discuss in what follows, as a form of re-creating an agricultural commons, what Cornelia Walker Bailey envisions as a process of “re-Earthing” (Heynen 2021). Yet, to transform the impacts of plantation economies and ecologies of the cotton-producing South, white supremacist land and labor ethics must also be transformed. Abolition ecologies, drawing from Du Bois, frames the “general strike” as a collective action against slavery, the conditions of work, and for new instituions and forms of governance. This required a reconfiguration of property ownership, implementation of an “abolition democracy”, and the building of self-determined communities who own their own labor (Du Bois 1935/1998; Heynen 2021). Abolition ecologies, emphasizing environmental dimensions of abolition geographies, provides a theory of change to upend racial capitalism, drawing on Black and Indigenous ecologies.

Agro-Environmental Racism

Across the cotton-producing South, “the afterlife of slavery,” as historian Saidiya Hartman (1997) puts it, continues long after emancipation. The abolition of slavery brought formal freedom, but this freedom was constrained and refashioned as perpetual indebtedness through the control former enslavers maintained over means of survival (Hartman 1997, 126–131). Plantation owners intentionally deployed a racialized system of environmental enclosure as a means of both criminalizing Black freedom and mobility, and the relations of survival and sustenance that enabled a life beyond the plantation (Hahn 1982; Williams and Freshour 2022). As Abdullah Mohammed (2006), an agricultural researcher at Alcorn State Demonstration Farm, put it:

I mean, look, let’s face it…here in the South, people were brought here in the bottom of their ships to do this back-breaking work…in particular the Delta. The Delta got a hell of a history. I mean, not even allowing you to grow trees…Why? Because if I plant pine trees…I don’t have to go work that plantation, chop that cotton, pick that cotton. I can hunt. I can cut wood… I can sell wood… I can survive. They made sure that you were attached to that land, made sure that you were a sharecropper, and then made sure that you never, no matter what your crop was, you were always a little short and never got out of debt.

Alongside the criminalization of Black mobility through vagrancy laws and statutes, and the legal and extralegal racial violence deployed in service of white supremacy and the profitability of cotton, racial indebtedness was a central dimension of socio-environmental control. Dorsey, who grew up sharecropping and became a civil rights and cooperative development leader in Bolivar County, recounted how she came to an acute awareness of the injustice of this system when she determined the balance for her father at the end of the year. Having carefully calculated the balance between the charges and the cotton they had raised, she was certain that they would receive over $2,000, but they only broke even. This was a critical moment for her: she told interviewers, “At that point, I decided that there was no fairness in the system, and that somehow people had to escape the system” (Dorsey 1992).

The pesticide intensification of Delta agriculture was built on (and extended) this regime of legal disenfranchisement, indebtedness, racial violence and environmental enclosure. As a consequence, by the mid-twentieth century, the Mississippi Delta led the United States in pesticide use (Williams 2018). These chemicals were both directly toxic to workers, and to the gardens, fish, and environments that they relied upon for sustenance amidst an inedible expanse of monocultural cotton. Racialized enclosure underwrote pesticide intensification, but also represented a would-be foreclosure of alternatives to the plantation model of development—of the “blues tradition of equitable and sustainable community development” (Woods 1998/2017) that was created by Black Deltans in spite of, and in response to, the exploitative and oppressive conditions of plantation agriculture.

Debt was both the product of environmental dispossession, and a key path through which landowners could require landless farmers to not only use chemicals but to charge them for these chemicals (Giesen 2011, Williams and Freshour 2022). If sharecroppers stood to profit, the plantation owner would often charge arbitrary fees for interest and supervision to ensure that they did not break even. Consequently, during a period in which many Black workers lived in the middle of fields they cultivated, they were charged for the poison that was sprayed on and around their homes. Although the Mississippi Freedom Movement did not directly challenge pesticides, through the extension of relations of reciprocity, and an ethic connecting land to nourishment and community well-being, Hamer, Dorsey and others in the movement confronted the violence and hunger sustaining the toxic political ecology of cotton. In doing so, they drew on relations of care and sustenance cultivated despite the hostile environment of plantations to envision and work toward “freedom as a place” (Gilmore 2017) of abundance and collective flourishing.

“The SEED is Strength to Fight”²: Cooperative and Farm Communities

In the 1960s, as the civil rights movement challenged the foundations of plantation white supremacy, people who joined or supported these mobilizations confronted a geography of induced hunger. As Smith (2020) emphasizes, white politicians and elites intentionally wielded control over food as a tool of repression and retaliation against Black Mississippians. By denying access to food aid from anyone who registered to vote or challenged plantation power, plantation owners and politicians attempted to stabilize what they saw as a crisis of racial and economic control (Smith 2020). This denial of food was particularly acute at a moment when cotton was being rapidly mechanized, and many residents were being evicted from plantation, housing, and jobs. Yet for Black Deltans, this represented only the most immediate manifestation of a crisis of the plantation system built upon the containment and destruction of life and freedom. Movement organizers could therefore draw on practices and ethics of reciprocity and care that sustained communities amidst the hostile environments of plantations.

Dorsey, who became involved with the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party in the 1960s, spoke of the many ways that Black people made a living amidst challenging conditions:

And then they hustled, you know. If there was some cotton left in the field, you picked that on dry days and cold days and sold it. Or you picked wild greens, or they had turnip patches that the good boss people planted for folk, and you hunted rabbits. And you picked up here in Bolivar County and other places, you picked up pecans from the levy and sold them. (Dorsey 1992)

As Dorsey put it, through involvement in the movement, “people were freed for the first time from a system that really controlled you through the threat of starvation” (Dorsey 1992). This work of freedom aimed to build cooperative alternatives to plantation agriculture, while fostering and drawing on people’s agricultural skills to cultivate nourishment and health. In the all-Black town of Mound Bayou, Jack Geiger, a white physician who adopted a model of community health from the Pholela Health Center in South Africa, opened the Tufts-Delta Health Center in 1965 (Dittmer 2017; Neely 2021). John Hatch, a Black community organizer and social worker who grew up in Kentucky and the Arkansas Delta, soon joined the health center as its associate director. Hatch spent several months working on plantations and meeting people in the Mississippi Delta to better understand living and working conditions, and to learn directly from people about their needs (Hatch 1992).

The Delta Health Center directly engaged with the environmental dimensions of racialized health inequalities. Through his conversations and experiences with Delta residents, Hatch understood the contamination of drinking water within the broader infrastructural context of plantation disinvestment. The failure (or refusal) of plantation owners to provide adequate wells or running water for tenants intensified peoples’ exposure to the many pesticides that were being applied widely. Many families had to obtain drinking water from creeks, and others even resorted to using pesticide barrels to store water (Hatch, interview with Brian Williams, 11 November 2016).

Hatch and the Delta Health Center also organized a cooperative on land donated by two Black farmers in Mound Bayou. In Hatch’s words, the North Bolivar Farmers Co-op “grew out of the fact that here were people, sitting on top of the richest land in the nation, who were malnourished and had limited access to food, but who knew how to raise it” (Hatch 1992). Dorsey soon joined the project, managing the farm. As Dorsey emphasized, the cooperative farm “wasn’t a plantation named Tufts that you were working for…this was your land” (Dorsey 1992). Through the health center and the cooperative farm, Dorsey, Hatch and others helped build freedom by enacting visions of cooperative development, providing food, work, and shelter at a time when many were being forced from their homes by the mechanization of cotton and in retaliation for civil rights organizing. An official publication of the cooperative offered a vision of well-being centered on new relations of work and land:

…[B]y working together we have strength. By working together we can own our land, build our own houses, and provide jobs for our people. Land, houses and jobs mean that we can support ourselves…By keeping black people in debt, the white man has controlled how we live, how we think, and how we vote. When black people have a steady job, we don’t need to worry about what the white folks are thinking. We can vote for whom we want without having to fear anybody. (North Bolivar Farmers Co-op Booklet n.d.)

Rather than being a key dimension of exploitation, work could be central to building new relations on and with the land, which had been a site of oppression, but also a place of freedom and belonging. Mobilizations around land and labor directly confronted the toxic foundations of plantation power by emphasizing and nourishing relations of care and freedom and valorizing devalued work in service of freedom. Cooperative farms such as the North Bolivar Farmers’ Co-op, and Hamer’s Freedom Farms Cooperative (M. M. White 2018; McCutcheon 2019) were born of an understanding of the roots of exploitation and dispossession, a commitment to Black belonging, and the pursuit of life-affirming and life-sustaining possibilities of cooperative work.

In building “food power” (Smith 2019), organizers drew on existing skills and ethics of care, while providing a necessary foundation for confronting environmental dispossession both on plantations and through direct challenges to the state and national politics that underpinned land monopolization and monocultural landscapes of toxicity and hunger. Unita Blackwell, another prominent organizer with the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, would later reflect on the importance of land to her: “We didn't own the land but, but we worked the land and so everything was tied around this land. And I feel that that's the reason why I love Mississippi. Is, it's ours” (Blackside, Inc. 1986). This feeling of belonging to and of a place that develops from a redistributive and collective land ethics mapped a pathway to “total freedom” away from the control of white landowners. This work continued well beyond the narrowly defined civil rights movement of the 1960s and remained central to organizing throughout the Delta’s catfish processing plants. Black workers along different nodes of the region’s catfish industry, often having come directly from “chopping cotton” in the fields, joined with civil rights activists and community organizers like Dorsey and Bob Moses to extend the cooperative farm community organizing of prior decades.

Catfish in the Land of Cotton

As the cotton industry faced declining profits due to growing global competition, many Delta cotton farmers turned to catfish. This literally meant digging out and flooding acres of land, where buckshot soil previously covered with cotton proved ideal for catfish ponds. In 1978, a group of 117 white plantation owners formed the Delta Pride Catfish Cooperative. They built a processing plant three years later in Indianola, while barring entry to the few Black farmers who were able to transition to catfish farming (Rankin 2018). Delta Pride modeled the poultry industry’s scientifically managed approach to vertical integration, controlling every step of the process: pond-raised aquaculture, further processing, packaging, and marketing (Senaga 2020). Even the feed mills were cooperatively owned by Delta Pride so that 100 percent of the corn, soy, and fish meal ingredients for the hundreds of thousands of tons of feed produced each year came from Mississippi farmers. By 1990, the $2 billion industry beat out King Cotton, employing 6,000 workers (one in six people in Sunflower County) and flooding 90,000 acres. Nationally, farm-raised catfish consumption, virtually non-existent in 1965, grew to 400 million pounds in 1990 (Schweid 1991). Much as chemicals sustained monocultural geographies of political and ecological control, the catfish industry submerged land and possibilities in service of a regimented industry built on the exploitation of Black workers.

Yet, before Delta Pride produced 40 percent of the country’s catfish, Black Deltans used trotlines and seines along riverbeds and lakes to trap the fish as a form of sustenance and leisure³ (Senaga 2016, 85). As the significance of the fish moved from a life-affirming activity, important for Southern Black ecologies, to a scientifically managed industry, Black people’s relationship to the fish also changed. Black Deltans worked as seining crews, late-night oxygen checkers, and skinners in the plants. They carried the dangers of exploitative work with the living animal, bearing the risk of getting “spiked” by the large dorsal spine, bitten by water moccasins that line the ponds, and swarmed by mosquitos and midges (Schweid 1991). As the fish entered plants for further processing, Black workers, mostly women, bore the weight of the industry in carpal tunnel syndrome and machinery malfunctions (Bates 1991a). While farmers celebrated the industry’s success, Black workers critiqued the “plantation mentality” that continued from the cotton fields to the processing plants.

In the early hours of 13 September 1990, 900 Black women went on strike against Delta Pride Catfish, the largest Black-led strike in Mississippi history (Bates 1991c; Woods 1998/2017). Sarah C. White, a skinner and plant steward for United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) Local 1529 recalled the excitement of the first day of the strike:

At midnight I went out there with my picket sign, and there was 100 people there. When the shift started at eight o’ clock that morning, cars went to pulling over everywhere, all the way from the plant back down to Highway 49. Everyone came out of the plant. All the workers refused to accept the contract. You talking about proud, you talking about filled with joy–to see for once that we could stand together and fight this company. I stood at the front of the entrance and people came by and shook my hand and said, ‘Sarah, I’m not crossing, I’m with you.’ (Bates 1991b, 32).

Workers at the Delta Pride Plant voted 410 to 5 in support of the strike after contract renegotiations went sour (Dine 1990). For striking workers the union paid a $60 per week strike allowance, helped with bills, set up a food bank, and provided turkey and ham for the holidays (Bates 1991b).

Despite national and local support of the three-month strike, the plantation bloc (Woods 1998/2017) of ruling white farmers, landowners, and politicians, often one in the same, quickly mobilized. Police violence and threat of arrest aimed to control the picket line and intimidate workers. Thirty-two year old Mary Green, arrested on 18 September, testified before the Black Congressional Caucus:

I bent over to pick up my son, and as I was raising back up, policemen came toward me and started pulling on me and telling me I was under arrest. I asked him why, but he didn't answer. Instead he hit me in my stomach and called me a “n***** b****.”… But I'm going to keep fighting for better working conditions and a better way of life for my son, who is sick, and myself… (“Statement of Mary Green…” 1990)

Along with Green, the Indianola police arrested sixteen other workers. Plant management notoriously used the threat of arrest to prevent worker testimonies and grievances (Bates 1991a, 29). Woods (1998/2017) interprets this everyday violence against workers and communities as a revanchist reassertion of plantation politics, enclosing the opportunities opened by civil rights-era organizing. This persecution of Black Deltans continued through the agricultural crisis and restructuring of the 1980s.

Catfish farmers held power over the local businesses and other political institutions. One local bank called workers to ask how they would make payments if they went out on strike in order to dissuade workers (Dine 1990). The mayor of Indianola, Tommy McWilliams, also served on Delta Pride’s litigation team, quitting during the strike to “avoid the appearance of impropriety” (Dine 1990, 21). The largest catfish farmer at the time, Dillard Bearden, served as Humphreys county supervisor, and feed mill operator Lester Myers served on the Delta Council (Schweid 1991), the development organization representing the interests of the “plantation bloc” (Woods 1998/2017). Catfish continued the political dominance once held by cotton.

“She’s Sojourner, Harriet, and Fannie Lou All in One”⁴: More than a Union

The campaign leading to the strike began years before in 1986, in the quiet, everyday work of organizing the initial union vote. After meeting UFCW organizer Bob Moses Sarah C. White and Mary Turner began going door-to-door, recruiting fellow workers at Wal-Mart and Piggly Wiggly to sign up for the union (S. C. White 1997; Zook 2003). Both women became influential as “local folks” (Steele 2010) who worked in the plants and lived in the community. Young and White drew attention to the disparities between the white catfish farmers and the mostly Black women working on the line. Young recalls plant managers telling workers, “you can go back to the cotton field if you don’t want to do what I say” (Alexander 1986, 34). On 10 October 1986 workers at Delta Pride voted 489 to 346 to join UFCW Local 1529, reaching their first contract in 1987 (Bates 1991b).

White and Young were soon joined by union organizer and former healthcare worker Rose Turner. They worked with Delta-area grassroots organizers like Arnett Lewis from the Rural Organizing and Cultural Center (ROCC). Lewis addressed a crowd of union members, faith-based leaders, Black farmers, healthcare professionals, educators, and politicians stating, “We must find a way to hold the industry accountable to the community. It’s not going to happen just by organizing the plant and the workers; it must extend to the family and the community” (Bates 1991c, 34). Dorsey likened the “catfish project” as it came to be called to “the second civil rights movement” (Bates 1991c, 36). As executive director of the Delta Health Center, Dorsey personally met with catfish workers on a regular basis. She emphasized that the project must start from “the people who feel the pain” (Bates 1991c, 36). The project was twofold. The grassroots movement aimed to: (1) fight to improve wages and working conditions, and (2) build true economic development that benefits the community. Working with established organizations like ROCC conjoined intersectional politics against police brutality and for clean drinking water, cultural preservation, and worker organizing for a regional development built upon a collectively self-determined relationship to land and labor as an extension of cooperative ideals.

The catfish project, and worker organizing that preceded it, expands the timeline of the civil rights movement, and distinguishes the importance of the rural Delta for the southern Black freedom struggle. Rank-and-file workers fought for more than a union to stake out claims within existing racial capitalist dynamics. Instead, building on the cooperative farm movement work of Hamer and working alongside the likes of Dorsey, the movement in Mississippi fought the stronghold white farmer cooperatives held over Delta land and people. Sarah C. White in particular sought to transform the labor-land relationship as it stood in the Delta. She called this “democracy” mirroring Du Bois’s abolition democracy (1935/1998). “It’s about democracy–the most purest form of democracy you can have. It’s a way to make that company respect you, give you the dignity you deserve, so you can profit from your sweat and hard labor” (Bates 1991b, 33). Workers like White sought to transform the exclusionary union, which, according to Bill Fletcher Jr. (2020, 24), “took for granted the nature of the settler state” working under the assumptions of the United States as a bearer of democracy and rights.

A Black sense of belonging to place and people remained central to organizing efforts with concerns that extended beyond the plant walls and into broader communities and kinship networks. Kinship practices regarding one’s “plant family” and generations well into the future refuses valuation that prioritizes the short term profit calculus of Delta Pride, and instead draws on networks and knowledges coming from a place.⁵ This framing developed out of women’s intimate knowledge of plantation ecologies and economies, as most workers came from “cotton chopping” livelihoods before entering the plants. It developed from worker organizers like White, Turner, and Young who chose to stay put, recognizing deep connections to the Delta, despite ongoing violence, extraction, and environmental enclosures. When offered a union job in Atlanta, White refused saying, “But this is my home. This is where I want to be” (Bates 1991b, 31). Similarly, Turner remained committed to her “family” of workers in the Delta. Eddie Steele, an organizer mentored by Turner, commented on her relationships, “She know all these people about hard… The other day, she was talking about a particular person, and she knew a phone number off the top of her head, she knew ‘em–I mean these are her people” (Steele 2010). As “local folks” committed to the Delta, to its rural Black people, these women worked to create a world where their communities were set free from the “plantation mentality” associated with the white land and labor ethics of the region. This vision reached beyond unionization alone and meant work that did not break down bodies, landscapes and waterways no longer polluted by feed mills and processing plants, and the time and space for Black life and belonging for all of one’s “family,” this generation and the next.

Conclusion

Beginning this article, we brought readers to the Mississippi Delta, a region considered by many outside of it as a place long abandoned by capitalist development and economic growth. Yet, we hope, following Celeste Winston’s (2021) recent work, to have shown “what else takes place there,” to pay attention to “the ciphers of freedom” (2188) created across cooperative, farm, and catfish processing communities. Although cotton and catfish plantations rely on oppressive environmental dimensions of agro-environmental racism, we document how “local folks” like Dorsey and White fostered movements for cooperative and community control over land and labor, enacting an abolition ecologies born out of longstanding relationships to people and place.

In 1982, Dorsey published a book of writings, poems, correspondences, and photographs analyzing the impact of Parchman prison on communities inside and out. This book represented, as she put it, a “brief collection of words about people inside who know they are not free, to be read, hopefully, by people outside who think they are free” (Dorsey 1982, v, emphasis in original). Dorsey’s life and work–as a freedom movement activist, cooperative farm manager, community organizer, and advocate for justice for incarcerated people–demonstrate the interconnected imperatives of abolition. Her work, alongside that of White and others within the “catfish project” places labor movement organizing within a broader set of economic and ecological concerns. Such movement legacies are maintained into the present through efforts like Cooperation Jackson’s bottom-up “just transition” which draws directly on the Freedom Farms model and the New Orleans organization Stand with Dignity, which connects Black labor geographies to struggles against mass incarceration and environmental injustice (Sustainable Communities Initiative n.d.; Keegan 2021). These, and myriad other mobilizations throughout the South, confront contemporary ways plantation legacies continue to constrain lives and ecologies, while nurturing Black ecologies rooted in place and developing out of deep kinship practices to envision and provide for “futures outside of destruction” (Roane and Hosbey 2019).

Acknowledgment

We are grateful for the editorial guidance of Dr. Katie Meehan and three anonymous reviewers for thoughtful feedback that has generously improved our article. We would also like to thank Karen Senaga, Lawrence Jenkins, Sheri Davis, Jayson Porter, Taylor Patterson, Field Brown, and Willie Wright for conversations that have shaped our thinking and writing. Finally, we’re grateful to Ashanté M. Reese and Nik Heynen for organizing the “Experimental Black Ecologies” sessions at the American Association of Geographers annual meeting, where we first presented this piece and received invaluable commentary.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Carrie Freshour

CARRIE FRESHOUR is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography, University of Washington, Seattle, Seattle, WA 98105. E-mail: [email protected]. Her work analyzes the political economy and ecology of industrial food and agriculture through a focus on Black geographies, labor and environmental justice, and abolitionist futures in and of the U.S. South.

Brian Williams

BRIAN WILLIAMS is an Assistant Professor of Geography in the Department of Geosciences, Mississippi State University, Mississippi State, MS 39762. E-mail: [email protected]. His interests include political ecology, Black geographies, environmental racism and environmental justice, and historical and contemporary geographies of agriculture, land, and foodways in the U.S. South.

Notes

1 We use this term to emphasize the continuity of civil rights organizing with the longer work of freedom that preceded and extended beyond the narrowly-defined Civil Rights Era (see Payne 1995).

2 This phrase is taken from Dorsey (1982, 28).

3 The mudcat was seen as a food primarily for poor and Black southerners. These associations are evident in the industry’s focused PR attempts to “clean” and “whiten” the catfish’s image and taste (Senaga 2020).

4 This phrase is taken from Dorsey (1982, 28).

5 We loosely connect ideas of Black feminist kinship practices to Jennifer Morgan’s (2021) work on kinship created by enslaved Black women which presented deliberate acts of refusal against racial capitalism’s calculus and dominant ideas about value through commodification.