Putting black land loss in its proper context

I just posted the following to the gofundme.com site. I think it is important enough to repost here.

Thanks to the authors for allowing this.

The following excerpt from the pens of Drs. Spencer Wood and Cheryl Ragar and their article, "Grass Tops Democracy: Institutional Discrimination in the Civil Rights Violations of Black Farmers" (2012), captures the importance of land for the Black community.

The Grant place has its own conflicted history. Stepping out of Gary’s front door and looking east, you see, with a little imagination, a once-thriving agricultural enterprise surrounding Matthew and Florenza’s (deceased 2001) house. The house, now occupied by Evangeline, Gary’s sister and eldest daughter of the family, is a “project house” built around 1935, during the New Deal Resettlement Administration’s experiment in land reform and active involvement in the area. The machinery, in sheds filled with the trappings of farm life, sits unattended as do the out buildings and garden. A glance northwest toward the timeless Roanoke reveals an innocuous brushy wood lying in the middle of a farm field, unkempt and untilled. The indentations scattered throughout the wood are the sunken graves of the former enslaved who once worked the plantation that has since been partitioned to yield part of the Grant farm.

The cemetery of the enslaved stands as a poignant reminder of the area’s slave-holding past, connecting the struggles of the Grant family to a much larger and more inimical tradition of racism and racial inequality. The Grant family farm stands, listing for the time being, in staunch defiance of the persistent mechanisms used to maintain racial inequality. It represents emancipation, equality, and opportunity. Sharing physical and cultural space along a continuum from bondage to freedom the farm and cemetery symbolically encapsulate the colonial origins of global racism and nearly five hundred years of struggle.