-
Views
-
Cite
Cite
Russell Rickford, “We Can't Grow Food on All This Concrete”: The Land Question, Agrarianism, and Black Nationalist Thought in the Late 1960s and 1970s, Journal of American History, Volume 103, Issue 4, March 2017, Pages 956–980, https://doi.org/10.1093/jahist/jaw506
Close - Share Icon Share
Extract
For a colonized people, the most essential value, because the most concrete, is first and foremost the land: the land which will bring them bread and, above all else, dignity.
—Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth
The “land question” was a major concern for African American theorists and activists in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Attempts to identify a territorial base for the construction of an autonomous black community or nation reflected one of the period's defining political developments: the rebirth of black nationalism and pan-Africanism. By 1970 much of the new “pan-African nationalist” intelligentsia—from the former Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) leader Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture) and the Malcolm X Liberation University director Owusu Sadaukai to the artist-activist Amiri Baraka and the Black Panther officer Eldridge Cleaver to lesser-known figures such as the writer Ann F. Cook and the economist Robert S. Browne—linked the major questions of freedom and self-determination to the issue of land tenure. As Wilson Jeremiah Moses has noted, the 1850s through the 1920s represented the “classical” period of black nationalist land pursuits. In the 1960s, however, black political preoccupation with land was pervasive. Reenergized by Malcolm X's teachings and by Third World struggles for independence and postcolonial development, the land question offered African American polemicists a potent tool for critiquing liberal reformism. Liberation was worthless, these thinkers argued, unless it delivered meaningful black sovereignty—a goal that required control of the critical social space, natural resources, and means of production that land embodied.1
