The Black Commons
A Vision for Black Reparations Through Land Gifting
By Brittany Ebeling // Images courtesy of the Schumacher Center
New Communities Inc., a 5,700-acre farm in Albany, Georgia, is regarded as the first Community Land Trust and was secured to enable Black farmers to access farmland in the rural south.
New Communities Inc. had a powerful vision in 1969: its members would collectively access and self-sufficiently cultivate farmland as a means of achieving economic equity for Black farmers in the rural South. A bastion of civil rights leaders (including Shirley and Slater King, Charles Sherrod, and Robert Swann) assembled to form what is widely regarded as the first Community Land Trust (CLT) to achieve this goal. One of these pioneers, Swann, would later establish the Schumacher Center for New Economics in the Berkshires with his partner Susan Witt, bringing together a collection of archival materials on localism and peace economics with his experience working to operationalize these economic concepts in the form of CLTs, alternative currencies, and support for local economies.
Today, there exist hundreds of CLTs across the globe—they function by taking land off of the speculative market and placing it in a community’s democratic control, making it perpetually affordable. The community organization owns the land, and individuals may lease the land and own improvements to it such as buildings or farm infrastructure, as is the case with the Berkshire Community Land Trust. Land trusts are incredibly versatile forms, because conditions can be stipulated for their use—they have been used to provide affordable housing, combat gentrification-induced displacement, and preserve agroecological farming (which reflects ecological processes through sustainable cultivation). The Schumacher Center is working to promote a lesser-utilized application of the CLT model: as a form of reparations enacted through land gifting into a “Black Commons.”
Slater King, Bob Swann, Marion King, and Fay Bennett.
In light of George Floyd’s murder and the Black Lives Matter movement nationwide, the movement lists reparations to African Americans as one of its primary policy goals. There is extensive historical precedent for distributing reparations (for example, by the United States to Japanese Americans following internment during World War II and by Germany to victims of the Holocaust), and in lieu of present political action on a federal scale, communities may use this moment to evaluate their place in a broader reckoning with this national trauma. The Brookings Institution estimates that an average white family’s net worth exceeds a Black family’s by nearly ten times, and the Urban Institute states that the gap between rates of homeownership between Black and white populations is at its highest recorded rate in 50 years. Census Bureau estimates indicate that the number of Black farmers in America decreased by 98 percent between 1920 and 1997, while the proportion of white land ownership has increased over time, a trend that has been bolstered by discriminatory federal farm policies and other forms of systemic racism.
There is already clear energy in the Berkshires to mobilize efforts and resources into reparations. Gwendolyn VanSant, CEO of Multicultural BRIDGE, points to burgeoning support for her organization’s reparations fund, as well as an emerging partnership with Willow Investments to create a portfolio in support of diverse leadership and minority-run organizations in the region. African Americans in the Berkshires experience inordinate rates of under-employment and low rates of home and land ownership, thereby limiting their economic prosperity, says VanSant. The county, with a demographic that is overwhelmingly white, experienced an exodus of thousands of black community members when General Electric closed its doors in the 1970s.
Charles Sherrod and Swann at a planning meeting.
“In a place where Elizabeth Freeman bought her freedom, Black folks still don’t have economic freedom,” says John Lewis, a Pittsfield resident who chairs the Berkshire Black Economic Council Steering Committee and is the Economic Development and Justice Chair of the Berkshire NAACP.
Land ownership is foundational to relative wealth or disenfranchisement of a population. While income disparities constitute a portion of wealth inequalities, financial institutions, inheritance laws, and land speculation have fundamentally reshaped the nature of prosperity in America. Increasingly, according to economist Thomas Piketty, wealth accrues through land ownership and “wealth generating more wealth,” ensuring that historically marginalized populations are perpetually kept at bay from financial resources. For this reason, many activists, scholars, and political minds (including Henry George, Mahatma Gandhi, Elinor Ostrom, and E.F. Schumacher, after whom the Schumacher Center is named) have pointed to land access reform as a means of achieving the kind of economic justice Martin Luther King Jr. envisaged for his beloved community in which disavowing racism and cultivating equitable economies are understood as two sides of the same coin.
In practice, Black communities are already working to preserve ownership and to build community wealth. That is visible in crowd-funding campaigns to save historically Black-owned farms as well as efforts to form and grow CLTs that preserve historically Black farmland, like the Black Family Land Trust in North Carolina, and urban areas where Black populations have been displaced on the heels of gentrification, like Hogan’s Alley Trust in Vancouver. Yet these initiatives once again place the onus on Black communities themselves to garner resources or land from an already-diminished source of collective wealth, owing to a legacy of discriminatory and racist policies and practices. To work toward an equitable future for all, given that a state-driven solution appears politically improbable in the present moment, land-owning (white) populations can move resources meaningfully into the hands of people and communities which have repeatedly been stripped of rightful access.
A member of New Communities with livestock.
Though Berkshire County is not visibly the backdrop against which the Black Lives Movement is playing out as it is in America’s urban centers, this region is no less implicated in the country’s fabric of ownership and wealth distribution inequalities which mark the landscape of American racism today. In the Berkshires, where many residents (and part-time residents) are second-, third-, and fourth-homeowners, the question of property and land ownership is particularly salient.
Discrimination is complex and insidious in the way it affects Black people’s access to economic re - sources; likewise, there is no “silver bullet” in the form of reparations. Yet one action that stands to contribute meaningfully to the fabric of reparations is land gifting, a practice the Schumacher Center is working to advance. Conservation land abounds, and gifting land into conservation trusts is commonplace. Similarly, land gifting into agricultural CLTs is a growing practice. What is less understood but holds profoundly transformational potential is gifting working lands into a “Black Commons.” Upon these lands, Black community members could grow businesses, build residential spaces, construct multicultural centers, or use the space in any number of ways to build thriving, local economies which bolster Black residents’ wealth and are led and managed as Black community members see fit. Lewis imagines a thriving Black arts and culture scene in the Berkshires in which Black residents themselves reap the economic rewards of their contribution to the region.
“If you don’t own land, what does that actually mean? That means Black arts and culture here is being sharecropped; it’s not owned by Black folks,” says Lewis. “Berkshire County has done a great job in terms of diversifying its programming, but yet, Black folks are not participating in the essential commerce of it, so we don’t own it.”
The Schumacher Center is working to assemble a “how-to toolkit” for land gifting into working lands to inform individuals and com - munities about how they may go about land gifting not only in agricultural or conservation capacities, but also in support of small businesses, homes, and community spaces, among others. This could feasibly become a mechanism for building and sustaining resources for indigenous communities, people of color, or other minority groups. Berkshires residents with access to land are particularly well-positioned to consider the transformative potential of the future use and designation of their lands upon retirement or in their estate planning. In this vein, the 40th annual Schumacher Lecture on October 25 will explore, through presentations by Kali Akuno and George Monbiot, the subject of “Land as Commons: Building the New Economy.” Berkshires residents have the tools and the resources to engage in this task: we needn’t wait for a particular political moment or economic opportunity. We can start now.
Brittany Ebeling is the Schumacher Center’s community land trust associate. Her work is focused on community land trusts and commons-based economies.