University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

Who cares for Detroit? Urban agriculture, Black self-determination, and struggles over urban space

(USC Thesis Other)

Who cares for Detroit? Urban agriculture, Black self-determination, and struggles over urban space

PDF

Download a page range

Download transcript

Copy asset link

Request this asset

Transcript (if available)

Content

WHO CARES FOR DETROIT? URBAN AGRICULTURE, BLACK SELF
DETERMINATION, AND STRUGGLES OVER URBAN SPACE

By
Jessi Quizar

A dissertation submitted to the faculty of
University of Southern California
in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

Department of American Studies and Ethnicity
University of Southern California
June 30, 2014

© 2014
Jessi Quizar
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Table of Contents

Abbreviations……………………………………………………………………………….iv

Abstract……………………………………………………………………………………..v

Acknowledgements................................................................................................................vi

Chapter 1:
Who Cares for Detroit?…………………………………………………………………….1

Chapter 2:
Self-Determination in Crisis: The Roots of Black-Led Urban Agriculture in Detroit……..34

Chapter 3:
Farming for Freedom: Food Security, Food Sovereignty, and Urban Agriculture in
Detroit ……………………………………………………………………………………..80

Chapter 4:
Farming, Survival, and Rethinking Work………………………………………………….115

Chapter 5:
Development and Care……………………………………………………………………..154

Appendix:
A City of Detroit Policy on Food Security: “Creating a Food Secure Detroit”……………166

Bibliography………………………………………………………………………………..182

i

Abbreviations

BPP Black Panther Party
BCFSN Detroit Black Community Food Security Network
CACC City-Wide Citizen Action Committee
DRUM Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement
FHA Federal Housing Administration
GOAL Group on Advanced Leadership
ICSC Inner-City Sub Center
LRBW League of Revolutionary Black Workers
NCCF National Committee to Combat Fascism
NOI Nation of Islam
OGD Operation Get-Down
PAOCC Pan African Orthodox Christian Church
RAM Revolutionary Action Movement
RNA Republic of New Africa
TULC Trade Union Leadership Council
UAW United Auto Workers
USDA United States Department of Agriculture
WHO World Health Organization

ii

Abstract

Drawing on interviews and ethnography, this dissertation examines development in Detroit
through the analyses of farmers who view urban agriculture as a strategy for Black freedom and
self-determination. Black-led urban agriculture projects in Detroit respond to local conditions—
few available jobs, a dire need for healthy food, and the availability of vacant land. Yet in
addition to focusing on survival, the projects draw on rich histories of Black organizing in the
city and use farming to develop community and relationships, a sense of spiritual and historical
connection, collective and individual self-improvement, and to build Black economic and
political power in the city. Black-led agriculture in the city centers the idea of care—how one
cares for people, for neighborhoods, for nature—as a primary measure of what is appropriate use
of urban space. The issue of care in this context is both a question of responsibility—attending
to, maintaining, and managing space—and affect—emotional and historical connection to place,
and the people that inhabit it. In framing legitimate use of land and space as hinging on how one
cares, for it, Black farmers in the city emphasize use-values of land over exchange-values and
prioritize affective relationality as the basis of their vision of urban development—building
strong, caring relationships between people and land, the city, their food, nature, and each other.

iii

Acknowledgements

Like all creative and intellectual endeavors, the project came about in community.
Ruthie Gilmore, thank you so much for your commitment to this project from the beginning, and
for preparing me well to write, now and always, towards the negation of the negation. Your
sense of moral purpose and conviction that our work is liberation work never fails to help ground
and center me. Laura Pulido, I am forever in your debt for your insight and suggestions about
drafts of this project, and for giving me a vision of how to maintain integrity, conviction, and
balance while working within academic institutions which often work against these values.
Leland Saito and Juan De Lara, thank you for working through various stages of this project, and
for your feedback and questions. John Carlos Rowe, thank you enormously for reading my work
so closely and seriously over the course of its development—from helping to guide me through
writing a prospectus, to line editing abstracts, to giving invaluable feedback on chapter drafts—
and for helping me to place my thinking in the longer trajectory of American Studies. Much
thanks also to the innumerable people who read drafts of this work in various incarnations,
including especially Helga Leitner, Ananya Roy, and my fellow fellows in the Provincializing
Global Urbanism Dissertation Proposal Development Workshop. Big ups and love to my
comrades, co-conspirators, confidants, and keepers of my grad school sanity—Treva Ellison,
David Stein, Jolie Chea, Analena Hassberg, Amee Chew, Kai Green, Sriya Shrestha, Ren-Yo
Hwang, and Sara Safransky. I can always rely on you all for insight, clarity, perspective, and
constant brilliance. I am so grateful that we are all in this together and that I am traveling this
road with you. Enormous thanks to my family, especially Robin Quizar and Timothy Corvidae
for helping me hold my heart and brain and spirit together while I wrote wrote wrote.

iv

And from the bottom and top and all around my heart, thank you to Myrtle Thompson-
Curtis, Wayne Curtis, Kezia Curtis, and all of the Detroit farmers and activists. You all help me
see that a better world is possible by constantly creating it.

1

Chapter 1
Who Cares for Detroit?

Introduction: Who Cares for Detroit?
“Do you think Dan Gilbert and those Quicken [Loans] people care about you and me?”
Myrtle Thompson-Curtis, a Detroit farmer asked me rhetorically one day, as we sat on her front
porch. Quicken had just purchased another building and had issued a statement about
revitalizing downtown. “Of course not! They care about one thing—their own damn pockets.”
This is one of the most common refrains I hear in Detroit—in my interviews, on the bus, waiting
in line to pay the electricity bill: Don’t fool yourself into thinking they care about us. They don’t
care about Detroit. They don’t care about us.
The “they” varies. Sometimes “they” is Dan Gilbert or the Illitch family, who together
own more than half of the commercial space in downtown and are often held up as potential
economic saviors (public issues in Detroit are frequently framed in terms of salvation and a
search for who could possibly save Detroit). The “they” is often, in this moment in 2013, the
emergency financial manager, Kevyn Orr, installed by the republican governor to control all of
the city’s fiscal matters, removing such power from locally elected officials. His first day in
office, in March 2013, he extended a “sincere olive branch” (Satyanarayana, Battaglia, &
Guillen, 2013) to all of the public officials who, with his instatement, had just been rendered
impotent to make public policy. Dave Bing, then mayor, evidently took this to heart, making a
friendly wager with Orr a week later about the outcome of the U of M—Syracuse game (Helms,
2013b). The stakes were dinner—whoever won, they would eat together. Bing is also, often, the

2

“they” who does not care. “They” is sometimes the auto manufacturers that gradually moved
production from the city in the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s and 80s in search of cheaper, more
compliant labor. “They” is increasingly new white residents who move into the gentrifying
Midtown area (formerly called The Cass Corridor, renamed in the interest of development), who
are accompanied by the opening of a yoga studio and a coffee shop whose cheapest coffee costs
four dollars.
The “us” is a little more inclusive. “Us” could be the long-time African-American
residents of Detroit, who survived the city’s long deindustrialization and still live here, even as
so many people have left. “Us” could be working people, people struggling to make do in a city
with an astronomical unemployment rate of 23% (Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2014) and a
household income of $26,955 almost half of the national average (United States Census Bureau,
2014). “Us” could be Black people, poor people.

A Bit about Detroit
Contemporary Detroit, both in academic and popular contexts, is often framed in dystopic
terms—abandonment, violence, poverty, a failed educational system. And indeed the city has
endured a depopulation of extraordinary scale. In 2010, the Detroit Residential Parcel Survey
reported that close to 40% of all land parcels in the city zoned for residential properties were
vacant—either unoccupied houses or open lots (Data Driven Detroit, 2010). On some
neighborhood blocks there may be only one or two occupied houses in the middle of large
swaths of vacant land. Detroit neighborhoods have a landscape of juxtaposition—it is not
uncommon to find tidy, well-kept houses with neatly trimmed lawns and cheery flowers directly
adjacent to vacant houses half burned and falling down. In well-organized neighborhoods,

3

neighbors will often board up such houses themselves, to reduce their hazardousness, and may
even paint or beautify them.
1

Detroit’s current population is about a third of what it was at its height. Detroit grew
rapidly in the first half of the 20
th
century, to a population of about 2 million, largely drawing
migrants who hoped to get jobs in manufacturing, particularly in the auto industries. Detroit was
a major destination of the great migration from 1910 through the 1940s, in which hundreds of
thousands of African Americans from the U.S. South moved north on the promise of
employment and to escape Jim Crow (Bates, 2012; Wilkerson, 2010).
Both Thomas Sugrue and Heather Ann Thompson write the history of Detroit as a series
of racial struggles over control of the city’s future. Sugrue’s influential book, The Origins of
Urban Crisis describes how, in the 1950s and 60s whites exerted enormous effort into
maintaining control over all-white neighborhoods through violence, intimidation, anti-Black
neighborhood associations, and legal maneuvering. Nevertheless, particularly middle class
Black residents persisted in desegregating the city’s all white neighborhoods, in part trying to
escape untenably crowded and poor conditions in the neighborhoods into which Blacks were
restricted. As they succeeded, white residents began to leave the city for the suburbs, aided by
the construction of a freeway system built as a part of urban renewal (Sugrue, 2005). Waves of
whites also left as Black residents succeeded in gaining increasing access to power in the city
through a series of struggles, especially, Thompson highlights, the 1973 election of Black mayor
Coleman Young (Thompson, 1999).

1
The Brightmoor district is a notable example of such neighborhood organizing. A neighborhood council which
meets monthly has boarded dozens of vacant houses and has painted many of them with large murals, quotes, and
in one case, a map of the neighborhood. One small house which stands next to four vacant lots has been
converted into an amphitheater with a roof, back stage area, and benches for audience seating.

4

As a manufacturing center and the birthplace of the United Auto Workers, unions and
workers movements have been central in the history of Detroit. Black workers were often
excluded from established labor organizations, and in response, formed their own groups to
advocate for Black workers, within established unions, in workplaces, and elsewhere.
Organizations like Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement, which formed in 1968, approached
labor organizing as deeply intertwined with ideas and tactics of Black power (Georgaskas &
Surkin, 1998; Geschwender, 1977; Hamlin, 2012). Black militancy grew in Detroit, and Black
labor organizers increasingly struggled not only with their employers and the city but with an
establishment labor model which sought to partner with management. It was in this context of
labor struggle that the factories that were at the heart of Detroit’s economy accelerated their
effort, already underway since the 1950s, to seek out cheaper, less demanding labor, moving
production to the suburbs and outside of Michigan altogether (Darden, Hill, Thomas, June, &
Thomas, 1987; Sugrue, 2005; Thompson, 2001).
Detroit’s depopulation and economic crisis has been written about widely as the premier
example of a “shrinking city,” a denotation commonly applied to cities which have lost
significant populations due to deindustrialization, suburbanization, and white and middle class
flight. Other U.S. cities that have been examined as shrinking cities include Youngstown,
Buffalo, Cleveland, Flint, Baltimore, and Philadelphia, and studies tend to focus on the problems
of infrastructure—that is, how to sustain the infrastructure of a city that was designed for many
more people than actually currently fund it (see for example Beckman, 2010; Haase, 2008;
Pallagst et al., 2009). This issue of an extremely large infrastructure in a city with a shrinking
tax base has been one of the city’s central struggles in recent years, leading to a budget deficit of
327 million in 2013 (Helms, 2013a). The combined effect of white flight, industrial flight, and

5

most recently of middle class Black flight is that the city is in a state of prolonged crisis which
has heavily marked its landscape. In just the last ten years, Detroit’s population declined more
than 25% (United States Census Bureau, 2014)—a net loss of just under 2000 people per month
throughout the decade. There are estimated to be between 44,000 (Colasanti & Hamm, 2010)
and 103,000 (Roberts, 2008) vacant parcels in the city.
Indeed, much of the city’s planning in the last decade has focused on the problem of what
to do with neighborhoods that have increasingly less population. The Detroit Future City’s plan
is the city government’s current iteration of this. Started under the Bing administration as
Detroit Works, and continuing through emergency management as Detroit Future City, the plan
categorizes neighborhoods according to their population density, and then translates this roughly
into designations for future planned uses. The plan emphasizes investment in neighborhoods
with the least abandonment, in order to maintain and nurture them, and the conversion of
neighborhoods with a great deal of abandonment to alternate uses like open space parks. Of
course there is much anxiety in the majority of areas not slated for investment over what is to
become of them, individually and as neighborhoods, under the Future City plan.
In 2013, Michigan Governor Rick Snyder declared the city to be in a state of “financial
emergency,” which gave him the power to appoint an emergency financial manager. The
emergency manager, Kevyn Orr, who represents the interests of the State of Michigan, has
power which supersedes that of the local elected government to reduce the city’s debt and pay
creditors. He has instituted a wave of neoliberal reforms, including the privatization of public
services like trash collection, and the sale of public assets like park land and art in the Detroit
Institute of Art. Throughout his tenure, the city council has met, made statements, many of them
in opposition to Orr’s program. But they no longer have the power to make policy. In Detroit

6

the elected city government has been rendered essentially impotent by the appointment of the
emergency manager. There are elected officials who may make statements, and Kevyn Orr,
appointed by the republican governor who received less than 6% of the Detroit vote in his last
election (City of Detroit, 2010), who can make policy.
Even before emergency management was officially declared in the city, a political
environment of austerity had already begun. The city’s debt service, at $74.5 million annually,
outstrips the city’s annual expenditure for the health department and parks and recreation
combined (City of Detroit, 2013b).

Landscape of Abandonment
One cannot be in Detroit and not see in the built environment the effects of abandonment
and the poverty and destruction that cycles of capital have wrought on the city. Even the areas
which are most touted as “developing”—downtown and midtown—have large and obvious
abandoned buildings. Their windows are often blown out so you can see inside them,
unobscured by glass, to the peeling paint, wires hanging from ceilings, holes in the walls where
someone came in and took the pipes for the copper.
In the neighborhoods, the visual impact of abandonment dominates the landscape of
almost all of the city’s major thoroughfares. Grand River and Michigan Avenue on the West
Side, Gratiot, Mack, and Jefferson on the East Side—these are the major streets that cut through
the city, and were at one time lined with businesses. Now, with the exception of parts of
Jefferson, which runs by the river and has received some interest from developers, the vast
portion of all of these streets are lined with boarded up buildings, or worse, structures with
storefronts gaping open, brick walls crumbling and caved in, or worse still, charred ruins.

7

When Myrtle describes the neighborhoods, and the transformation of the city in her
lifetime, the word she most uses is devastation. The neighborhoods have been devastated, the
buildings have been devastated, and, perhaps most importantly, it is devastating to see. She took
me to see the block where she grew up on Detroit’s East Side, an area that was mostly working
and middle class Black families in the 1960s. Her own father worked in the Chrysler plant. We
found that most of the block was now abandoned houses, paint peeling, windows jaggedly
broken, and porches slumping sideways. “This is hard for me, to be here and see this,” she told
me. “It wasn’t like this at all! It was all bright and sunny and nice looking. To look at a
devastated house like that and know who lived there and think—that person would have never let
this happen! We cannot let this happen!” (Thompson-Curtis, 2011).
Vacancy leaves the houses vulnerable to scrappers who take metal and other materials to
sell, a source of livelihood in Detroit’s depressed economy. The damage caused from these
thefts can, as Myrtle said, devastate a house—broken windows and doors, gaping holes in the
walls to take pipes. Sometimes scrappers take the metal supports that hold up the front porch,
leaving an awning roof hanging surreally off the front of the house without anything to support
it. Eventually, these front porch roofs collapse, creating a pile of rubble where the front stairs
once were.
Fire is another major cause of housing blight in the city—an average of 30,000 per year
or more than 80 per day (Detroit Fire Department, n.d.). These fires are often suspected to be
arson—to get insurance money that would surely be more than the owner could sell for, or, even,
simply thrill-seekers out to burn things down. Sometimes, also, in the winter these fires are from
people trying to keep warm with fires or gas or propane heaters, either homeless people living in

8

abandoned buildings or renters or homeowners who have had their utilities turned off. The
charred remains of these fires dot the city, in almost every neighborhood.
Much of the literature and more recent cultural production on Detroit is preoccupied with
its physical landscape of abandonment. However, there is much less focus in much of this work
on the emotional, financial, and physical impact that the city’s landscape has on the people who
still live there. Rather, much cultural production about the city, particularly from those who do
not live there, uses images of abandonment as a statement in and of itself—abandonment as a
form of beauty, or as a metaphor for societal degradation. This is particularly graphic in what has
been called “ruin porn,” (Miller, 2011) marked by a lack of context behind the shocking images
of abandoned buildings half fallen, a particular fascination with grand structures like factories,
theaters, and the Michigan Central Station that have been massively degraded, and often an utter
absence of the live people who still inhabit the city, particularly Black people. Works such as
French photographers’ Yves Marchand and Romaine Meffre’s “Ruins of Detroit,” a photo essay
published in part by Time Magazine, use the images of ruin in Detroit as a metaphor for the fall
of empire. They explain their fixation on the city: “Detroit presents all archetypal buildings of
an American city in a state of mummification. Its splendid decaying monuments are, no less than
the Pyramids of Egypt, the Coliseum of Rome, or the Acropolis in Athens, remnants of the
passing of a great Empire” (Marchand & Meffre, 2011). Photographer Camilo Vergara even
made the suggestion that Detroit’s downtown be turned officially into a “skyscraper ruins park”
shortly before he published his book of photographs of Detroit, called American Ruins (Vergara,
1999).
Narratives of “the fall” of Detroit abound in academic and cultural production about the
city. Folk narratives and popular culture portrayals often exhibit what Alesia Mongomery calls

9

“the sight of loss,” that is the longing for a Detroit of the past, which views the present city as
degraded both aesthetically and morally (Montgomery, 2011). While this narrative of “the fall”
is widespread, both with residents in the city and the suburbs, Black, white, and Latino, middle
and working class, what are viewed as its causes have wide variation depending on the
positionality of those telling the story. Interestingly, most of the narratives Montgomery
elaborates have little to do with the snowballing loss of jobs in the city. On one hand “the fall” is
often anecdotally attributed to the evacuation of middle class, and on the other hand she notes
that many people still living in the city, particularly African Americans, see “the fall” as in part
due to a rise in materialism and individualism, that is, attempting to take on dominant (arguably
middle class) consumer identities (Montgomery, 2011).
A.J. Jacobs has argued that much collective memory about U.S. cities has been shaped by
conservative elite ideology in what he calls a “mnemonic war,” waged through mass media,
political rhetoric, and think tank scholarship, which depict cities as “anti-utopias, penal colonies
for undesirables, and polar opposites of the suburbs, the hearth of the conservative power base”
(Jacobs, 2008, 25). Particularly for white former residents and their children who now live in the
suburbs, the story of “the fall” is mediated heavily by a media fixation on Black violence in the
city as well as a booming business of nostalgia literature about Detroit’s “golden age” of
Fordism (Steinmetz, 2010).
Fascination with Black urban dysfunction is not limited to popular media portrayals.
Katherine McKittrick critiques academic portrayals of Black neighborhoods that tend to
emphasize the dystopia of the Black experience. She notes that this kind of constant “linking
urbicide to a Black sense of place can foster a linear progression toward death, thus keeping
firmly in place our already existing knowledge system that calcifies the racial codes attached to

10

Black and poor and marginalized communities as spaces of absolute otherness” (McKittrick,
2011, 954). That is, that the portrayals of Black marginality, including in academic scholarship,
tend in fact to naturalize and freeze in place notions of Black people and urban Black
communities as perpetually exceptional, dystopic, and outside of “regular” modes of living.

Black Urban Agriculture
In contrast, Black-led farms in Detroit operate from the notion that Blackness—Black
history, Black resistance, Black culture—is a source of knowledge, vision, and strength. The
farms I examine in this project are led by longtime Detroit residents who have lived most, if not
all of their lives in the city. Many of the people involved in urban agriculture in Detroit began
their activist work in the Black power movements of the 1960s and 70s, including the Black
Panther Party and various strains of Black Nationalism, incorporating agriculture as a
progression of those struggles.
Feedom Freedom occupies seven lots next to Wayne Curtis and Myrtle Thompson-
Curtis’ two flat brick home in the Jefferson Chalmers District, on Detroit’s Far East Side. On
their porch are a small fleet of children’s bikes and toys, and folding chairs where I often sat with
Myrtle at the hottest periods of the day when it was unbearable to farm, drinking coffee, chatting
and greeting neighbors who walked down the street to get a snack or groceries at the gas station
on Jefferson. She says hello to everyone passing by. I conducted a number of my interviews
with her and other Feedom Freedom growers on that porch and the transcripts are periodically
punctuated with hellos to passersby, and hey, how’s your mother doing?
The garden itself is a mix of orderly rows, square raised beds, special areas dedicated to
specific perennials, and a medium sized hoop house. In July, at the height of season, stalks of

11

kale and collards bush in orderly rows, while vine crops like cucumbers grow thick and leafy up
support structures made from sticks and bamboo. Eggplants dangle like earrings under their
fuzzy green leaves. Tomato vines reach their thick green arms up support strings to the top of
the hoop house, heavy with fruits of diverse colors and sizes—green striped, yellow, classic red.
Every Saturday in the summer, a group of young people, ages eleven to eighteen, meet to
work in the garden. Some of the older ones who have worked in the garden previously and who
have made a commitment for the summer, are paid a stipend through a grant--$200 a month.
The others come to learn how to grow, to get food for their families, to have something to do in
the neighborhood. The group tends to grow throughout the summer, as one young person brings
their best friend, who the next week brings their cousin, who the next week brings their neighbor.
Every summer I have worked with Feedom Freedom there comes a time in July when the group
reaches about twenty and things become unruly with new people not knowing how to put away a
rake, or a small argument happens between new and older youth, and Myrtle establishes a
moratorium on bringing new people. So far, demand always seems to outstrip capacity.
In addition to the gardening, Feedom Freedom always devotes an hour every Saturday to
some kind of intellectual engagement. Sometimes, especially at the beginning of the summer, it
is a discussion about conditions in the neighborhood, about food and food systems, or a small
lesson about Detroit history and present. Towards the end of the summer it is more likely to be
the youth themselves planning a roundtable discussion for the community about these same
topics. Youth will invite their families and friends, and often other youth groups in the city
come, as well as supportive adult activists. The lot closest to the house is actually devoted
entirely to this kind of discussion or activity, rather than to farming. The youth gather around a

12

large picnic table in the shade cast by the house. If the garden is hosting a large group, they pull
out a number of cut tree stumps and boards and make long benches.
Feedom Freedom consists mainly of one large extended family. It was founded by
Wayne Curtis and Myrtle Thompson shortly after their marriage in 2008, and remains largely a
family project with programs run by family members. Wayne and his adult daughter Kezia
Curtis are in charge of much of the programming for small children—art in the garden programs
and garden playdates. Myrtle, her daughter Monique, and the mother of the father of Monique’s
child, Jendayi run periodic cooking workshops. Wayne, Myrtle, and Kezia run the Saturday
workdays for teenagers. Myrtle’s son Tyson helps with the labor of the farm as well, and
maintains the lots around the farm and across the street—no small contribution as it is a space so
large that it takes four hours each week just to mow. And while everyone helps with the
maintenance of the crops themselves, Myrtle generally takes the lead on planting, watering, and
managing volunteers.
Feedom Freedom cares, in all, for about twelve city lots of land around their house. Seven of
these lots they farm on or use directly for farm activities. The others they simply tend to,
mowing the fast-growing Michigan grass weekly. Like many Detroiters, the Thompson-Curtises
care for a good deal more land than they have legal title to. Indeed, they are not the only ones
who care for the large field across from their house, made up of twelve vacant city lots between
the farm on Manistique and Philip, the next street over. The church on the north side of the field
mows the section which is closest to them. A family on Philip Street mow the lots on the Philip
side of the field. Feedom Freedom mows the rest, about five lots along Manistique. Together,
Feedom Freedom, the Church, and the neighbors tend to the grass on twelve vacant city owned
lots. This is in addition to the lots that Feedom Freedom farms. This kind of care for nearby

13

vacant properties is in fact quite common in Detroit, as residents are generally much more
invested in maintaining the places near them than are absentee private owners or the bankrupt
city that also owns much of the vacant land.
The Thompson-Curtises approach agriculture as a family endeavor, as a route towards
greater health and bodily well-being, greater economic stability, greater spiritual connection, and
to develop deeper connections and sense of possibility among neighbors and Detroiters. All of
these, they position as fundamentally political projects. Wayne Curtis often narrates his
motivations for beginning to farm through his history of involvement as a youth in the Black
Panther Party.
I will argue throughout much of this dissertation that Feedom Freedom, as well as other
Black-led farming in Detroit, approach urban agriculture through the sense that growing one’s
own food on land in the city is a strategy, in a variety of ways, toward Black survival in Detroit.
Moreover, I will argue, that the form of Black survival that Detroit farmers work towards is
about a maintenance of Black bodies, absolutely, but also about maintaining Black control over
the space of the city. This striving towards control, in Detroit, however, is not simply about
gaining greater Black access to financial resources. Rather, Detroit farmers position capitalism,
and particularly capitalism’s monopoly on the production and distribution of the things that
people need to maintain their lives—particularly food—as working counter to Black people’s
survival. Therefore, urban agriculture offers a way to gain greater control over one of the most
essential things which people need in order to sustain life—food. That goal is intertwined with a
variety of other central ideas about what is needed to maintain a good life—dignified and
interesting work, intellectual and creative engagement with the problems and questions in one’s

14

community, strong and long-term relationships with other people, and an economy in which
people’s humanity, relationships—to place, to each other, and to livelihood—is primary.
Agriculture and food has long been a part of the conversation in Black movements in
Detroit. The Black Panther Party in Detroit organized food giveaways as part of their survival
programs (Joseph, 2006; Rahman, 2008). Moreover, food has been a key issue in religious
Black Nationalism in the city. Detroit is the founding city of two of the most explicitly
Nationalist Black religious institutions in the U.S.—the Nation of Islam and the lesser known
Pan African Orthodox Christian Church (PAOCC)—both of which highlight Black agriculture as
essential to movements for Black liberation (McCrutcheon, 2011). These movements and
organizations have been foundational for the farms on which I focus in this project, both
materially and ideologically. For instance, before D-Town farm’s current location was
established, the Black Community Food Security Network farmed on land loaned to them by the
Shrine of the Black Madonna, the founding PAOCC church (Yakini, 2012).
Sociologist Monica White has conducted extensive research on D-Town Farm, the largest
farm in Detroit, and is perhaps the researcher who has focused most on specifically Black urban
agriculture in the city. Citing the UN Universal Declaration on Human Rights, she argues that
Detroit is in the midst of a human rights crisis because of widespread lack of access to healthy,
culturally appropriate food. White argues that D-Town Farmers, rather than relying on outsider
institutions, NGOs, or state entities, have taken on the responsibility of ensuring that those
human rights are provided to the community. She notes, “D-Town farmers not only demonstrate
skepticism about the government’s capacity to provide for them, but, in the process, they also
develop methods to deliver human rights that foster a sense of self-determination and self-
sufficiency” (White, 2010, 205). White also notes the ways that D-Town Farm acts as a kind of

15

de-facto community center and space to express political agency (White, 2011a), as well as the
ways that D-Town particularly gives power to women as agents of resistance (White, 2011b).
Using D-Town as a case study, White highlights how Black-led urban agriculture can be used as
a tool to empower, and to build a sense of control over one’s own community.
Black-led agriculture in Detroit takes on a variety of forms, from non-profit organizations
and farms connected with schools, to church farms, to family farms. Although ideas about self-
determination permeate all of these, their structures and emphases differ. Non-profit farms like
D-Town have paid employees and volunteers, and tend to emphasize educational programming
to empower others to farm, as well as growing food themselves. Many of the city’s elementary
and middle schools, particularly those with an Afro-centric focus, have gardens as well, which
are often operated in conjunction with other agricultural projects in the city. Family farms
operate as part or all of a particular family’s income and subsistence and distribute both the food
produced and the income privately. Church farms are one program of a larger church
community, and operate occasionally with paid staff, always with volunteers, and tend to
emphasize food security slightly more than food sovereignty in their own rhetoric about the
farms. However I include them here because their gardening programs tend to be incorporated
into larger programs of more radical social justice. Genesis Lutheran Church, on Detroit’s East
Side, for instance, in its programs for social justice, both operates a community garden and
works closely with Detroit Peace Zones which organizes for creating systems of community
accountability outside of racist policing, court, and prison regimes.
In this dissertation, I focus most closely on the work of two farms—Feedom Freedom
and D-Town Farm. Both farms emphasize collective self-sufficiency, Black history and identity,
intergenerational work and learning, and connection to nature and each other through work and

16

through food. I chose to center my inquiry on D-Town and Feedom Freedom in part because
they are two of the best publicized farming projects in the city. The farms and farmers affiliated
with them have appeared in documentaries, local, national, and international news, have spoken
at conferences and other large events, and have produced their own media. In other words, their
thinking and projects have had relatively wide reach and influence, in the city and elsewhere.
D-Town Farm, run by the Detroit Black Community Food Security Network (DBCFSN)
is the largest farm in the city, operating on seven acres of leased land in River Rouge Park.
Since the group began to occupy the site in 2008, they have established large fields in which they
grow a wide variety of vegetables, four large hoop houses (distinct from greenhouses in that they
are mobile) to extend the growing season, an herb garden, a large scale composting operation,
and beekeeping. DBCFSN operates as a non-profit, and has three employees which manage the
daily operation of the farm and educational programming, while a solid core of volunteers farms
and gets access to produce. In addition, DBCFSN operates a buying collective for food and
household items which are not produced on the farm, to reduce their cost. D-Town Farm
emphasizes that it is not only a project to ensure that Detroit’s black community is fed, but that
they themselves can and should build their own food systems through collective work (Detroit
Black Community Food Security Network, n.d.). The growing of food, for DBCFSN is an issue
of Black self-sufficiency and economic self-determination, as well as a response to food
insecurity.
Feedom Freedom, philosophically, is quite similar to DBCFSN in that their farming is
motivated by what they see as a growing need for self-sufficiency and to build a local economy
and local food system which increases Black and poor people’s autonomy in the city. However,
Feedom Freedom is largely a family operation, farming and managing eighteen vacant lots next

17

to and across the street from the family home, and is currently expanding to include other lots on
their street. Much more than D-Town, Feedom Freedom’s main growing site looks more like a
garden—with painted trellises, an arch with flowers growing up it, painted benches, and flower
beds at the entrance—than a farm. The fact that the growing site is in fact beautiful has been a
selling point for the neighbors, important because, unlike D-Town, Feedom Freedom is located
squarely within a neighborhood. Nevertheless, Feedom Freedom grows a wide variety of
produce, as much variety as D-Town in fact, but in smaller quantities, and also raises bees. They
recently erected their first small hoop house, and are in the process of negotiating a larger one
with neighbors. Feedom Freedom publishes a newsletter which is distributed to neighbors and
community organizations, combining news about the garden with political analysis, news about
the neighborhood, and recipes. They have recently been working with other small farmers to
organize a selling cooperative.
Both D-Town farm and Feedom Freedom use “food sovereignty” to describe their work,
a term developed by the peasant organization La Via Campesina, among others. The term food
sovereignty has generally been deployed by farmers and peasants in the global south to express
the idea that a peoples’ control over their own food systems—land, water, cultivation,
processing, distribution, and consumption—is critical to their self-determination and sovereignty.
It has been used especially by those struggling to retain traditional land rights and food systems
against encroachments by industrialization, neoliberalism, and industrial food production. One
tenant of food sovereignty in the global south is to maintain ways for peasants to remain as
independent as possible from the global economy—that is, to produce for themselves and local
economies so they can have more control as both consumers and producers, and to reduce the
need to rely on the fluctuations of an anonymous global market.

18

The fact that both Feedom Freedom and D-Town describe their work as moving toward
food sovereignty is important and striking in an urban context in the global north. Their use of
the term highlights the contention that control over food and developing reliable and healthy
food systems is essential for Black people’s self-determination. In contrast to farmers in the
global south, Detroit farmers work in a context of deindustrialization, but with similar goals—to
reduce dependence on global economic structures which do not care for, and in many cases
actively work against, their well-being. Through the cultivation of vacant land in the city,
Detroit farmers recover and expand on local traditions by drawing off of histories of urban
backyard gardening, longstanding agricultural practices from the U.S. South, as well as learning
about and reclaiming farming traditions from Africa. Detroit farmers actively work to uncover
existing agricultural practices that had been devalued under industrial capitalism and adapt them
to the relatively new context of semi-rural, yet very urban-identified Detroit.
Their use of the word food sovereignty marks a distinction that farmers make between the
work of food justice movements in general in the United States and the goals of Detroit farmers.
Food justice may refer to a wide array of struggles around food—unequal access to food,
movements for and by food workers who labor in the industrial food system, and movements
against genetic modification of food, for instance, would all fall under the rubric of food justice.
Food sovereignty is both more specific and more expansive. It is more specific in that food
sovereignty highlights specifically the ways in which the operation of food systems, including
issues of food access, food labor, and genetic modification, limit or expand possibilities for
community self-determination. And it is more expansive in that the ultimate end of food
sovereignty is not just a more just food system—it is a more just city, a more just world. Food

19

sovereignty specifically links the ways in which food is central to the development of visions,
experimentations of grassroots forms of development—for how one might envision a just city.

Development and Care
I use the term development following the framework built by Clyde Woods. Woods uses
the word development as a way to describe questions of how one might envision a better future.
These visions may address place shaping, structures of power, resource distribution, ways of
relating between genders, cultures, and classes. Woods argues that Black people in the U.S. have
long engaged in these kinds of development discussions in highly democratic ways, particularly
through music. He describes what he calls the blues epistemology--“a self-referential
explanatory tradition in which development debates occur” (Woods, 1998, 25)—that is, an
epistemology with which to critique existing regimes of power and to imagine a liberatory
future.
I see the work of farmers in Detroit, while not explicitly engaging with the music that
Woods identified at the heart of the Blues epistemology, falling very much in line with its
tradition of creating spaces, language, and internal culture of an everyday theorization of
oppression, engagement in development debates, and planning for a just future. In these debates
are, fundamentally, competing notions of what the goals of development are, what shapes and
defines this good future, good city, and fundamentally, what it means to live a good life.
In the spring of 2012 I attended a planning meeting of the Feedom Freedom Growers, the goal of
which was to develop a mission statement that the group could use in publications and grant
applications. To help clarify their thoughts and priorities the farmers decided to transcribe the
meeting, trying to capture everything that was said, and then paste the transcription into the

20

internet tool Wordle.
2
From the text, the Wordle software generates a word cloud graphic,
highlighting and making larger the words that are most frequently used. Myrtle Thompson-
Curtis, one of Feedom Freedom’s founders, printed the graphic that was created from the
meeting and hung it up over her computer in her family home, so that the words “food,” “self-
reliance,” “community,” and “growing” would hang suspended over her head whenever she
worked at her desk.
When I was organizing the data for this dissertation, I decided to try the same thing,
dumping into Wordle all of my transcriptions of interviews and notes that included conversations
that I had had with Detroit farmers. Most of the highlighted words were predictable. I had asked
farmers about food and land and Detroit, and they had talked about food, land, and Detroit. But
the word “care” was larger than I expected. In fact, until then, I hadn’t thought much about the
word care at all. But as I looked back through the transcripts it became more and more
obviously omnipresent.
In the interviews the word “care” is generally used in one of two ways. It is used as a
critique of those who are viewed as not caring about Detroit or Detroiters, and was notably often
used in reference to very people who are generally posited as being in a position to develop
Detroit—“job creating” large corporations, politicians, new residents. Conversely it is used as a
descriptor of positive, responsible, behavior—caring for land, caring for children, caring for
plants, the city, the environment, each other. Indeed caring was used to express a myriad of
ways that farmers positioned themselves as working to create something different than the
development that they critiqued.

2
http://www.wordle.net/

21

The idea of care was so ubiquitous that I have built this dissertation using care as a
touchstone. Black farmers, I argue in this dissertation, through praxis, study, as well as tradition,
culture, and generational knowledge, are developing a grassroots vision and practice of
development, in the sense that Clyde Woods evokes the term. I view the notion of care as central
to their vision, as well as fundamental to efforts to build alternative food, land, and economic
structures in Detroit. Detroit farmers’ emphasis on care is both a question of responsibility—
attending to, maintaining, and managing space—and affect—emotional and historical connection
to the space, and the people that inhabit it. In framing legitimate use of land and space as
hinging on how one cares for it, I argue that Black farmers in the city emphasize use-values of
land over exchange-values and prioritize relationality as the basis of their vision of urban
development—building strong, caring relationships between people and the land they farm, the
city, food, nature, and each other. This, I view as part of a long radical Black tradition which
“cast doubt on the extent to which capitalism penetrated and re-formed social life” and which
continually pushed forward the “development of a collective consciousness informed by the
historical struggles for liberation and motivated by the shared sense of obligation to preserve the
collective being, the ontological totality” (Robinson, 2000, 170-171).
Framing of a critique of development as an issue of care works in a few ways. First, it is
a way to challenge the premise that the success of elites leads to overall positive outcomes for
residents. While this notion obviously is widely shared, in social movements and in popular and
academic contexts, it is worth restating. Moreover, framing this critique as an issue of whether
or not developers, “job creators,” and other purveyors of capitalist development care for Detroit
and Detroiters implies that the success of development, development itself, hinges on more than
capitalist economic outcomes. Rather, care positions such values as well-being, reciprocity,

22

emotional and historical connection, and stewardship of space, as central to questions of
development.
As the birthplace of Fordism, Detroit is arguably one of the places in which the idea that
the success of the company produces success for employees has historically had the most
traction. However it is also one of the places where its unreliability is most tangible. The
employers on whom Detroit most depended—auto manufacturers—have almost entirely moved
their operations out of the city, leaving behind a widespread sentiment that they never cared for
Detroiters, at least the Black Detroiters who remain. Auto manufacturer’s abandonment of
Detroit is an ever present backdrop, both in the visual specter of the landscape and in residents’
psyches. The massive abandoned Packard Plant, for instance, occupies a stretch that extends
nearly a mile along I-94, just off of Grand Boulevard. The ruin stands as evidence to the failure
of Fordism in Detroit. When they decided to leave the city, do you think they cared about us?
They cared about their bottom lines, their own damn pockets.
Black Detroiters have long expressed this critique as, even in Detroit’s supposed heyday,
Black workers never saw the level of prosperity that white Detroiters did. As Peter Eisinger
points out, narratives of “the good old days” in Detroit vary wildly, with Black residents in
particular tending to reject idealizations of the economic boom of Detroit past, which gave them
few of the benefits remembered by whites (Eisinger, 2003). Later, this skepticism about the
benefits of Fordism for Black workers in particular found expression in the Dodge Revolutionary
Union Movement in the 1960s and 70s whose organizing combined theories of Black power and
radical labor organizing. Black Detroiters have a long history of rejecting a dominant sense that
what is good for capital will necessarily be good for workers or residents of a city in general.

23

However, perhaps even more importantly, beyond rejecting a dominant development
ideology, in centering the issue of care, Detroit farmers imply an alternate vision for
development, and for what it means to be a “good city.” All development debates ultimately
revolve around this question—what constitutes a “good city?” What is central? What are we
trying to develop? What amounts to success? Is a good city one where people have deep roots
and relationships with each other? One where everyone has access to healthy food? Is a good city
a place with high property values? Is a good city a place where you can get a good latte? Who
and what is prioritized? Inevitably, conceptions of a good city stand on an even more
fundamental base of assumptions and ideas about what it means to live a good life.
Centering “care” expresses an alternate logic for legitimate development, such that how
much an entity “cares” for people and a place, its relationships, emotional ties, and the extent to
which it holds itself responsible for the wellbeing of a city and its people, is an appropriate
measure of its legitimacy. Does it support the ways that people care for each other, the space of
their neighborhoods, land, people’s bodies, relationships and families, history? Does it build
skills and respect Detroiters’ intellectual work and knowledge, facilitate individual and collective
growth? By this standard, small scale projects, run by long-time Detroiters who have deep
relationships in neighborhoods are arguably best positioned to develop a “good city.”
These kinds of critiques and visions for alternative development are not unique to Detroit
obviously. There have always been currents, waxing or waning in which poor people, people of
color, peasants, and others have resisted the totalizing force that capitalism has exerted on the
moral life of places, cities, nations. Indeed, many scholars have noted the upsurge in such
movements in the context of late capitalism—movements which do not tend to follow the
ideological party lines of leftist and Marxist politics of the mid 20
th
century, but blend in cultural

24

idioms, pragmatism, local cultural practices, and a blending of available technologies and
building of small scale alternatives to capitalist structures (Esteva & Prakash, 1998; Foran, 2009;
Gibson-Graham, 2006a; Hardt & Negri, 2009). Moreover Clyde Woods has shown that cultural
forms like the blues have long provided “an intellectual and social space in which [African
Americans] could discuss, plan, and organize [a] new world” (Woods, 1998, 39). These types of
critiques and visions for alternative systems and institutions are not new to Detroit. Indeed, it is
from the foundation of revolutionary Black movements in the city which called for “liberated
territory” (Tyner, 2006), and created alternative institutions of education, spirituality, and social
welfare that these current visions are developed.
It is significant that the critiques and alternate economic visions that I address throughout
this dissertation come out of a U.S. context, which is arguably the site where capitalism is most
deeply entrenched. As J.K. Gibson-Graham points out, however, even in the places like the
U.S., capitalism does not define or determine all economic relations much less all moral life.
Every community, city, nation, and economic system includes, and indeed relies on (as in the
case of much unpaid household work, for instance), a wide variety of labor and economic
activity which falls outside of formal capitalist exchange (Gibson-Graham, 2006b). Indeed, in a
city like Detroit, there are perhaps unusually wide fissures for the development of such non-
capitalist economic activity because of capitalist abandonment.
Ruth Wilson Gilmore contends that people in “forgotten places” like Detroit often
approach problems with creative responses shaped by crisis, working within the obvious
constraints of their circumstances, but also “open to the possibility for people to organize
themselves to novel resolutions” (Gilmore, 2008, 36). Indeed living in a place in a state of crisis
impels such creative solutions, as more mainstream routes for problem solving become

25

unreliable. So it is perhaps unsurprising that Detroit would be a place in which various forms of
alternate economy and alternate visions of development would flourish.
Ultimately, in this dissertation I argue that Detroit farmers, through their work to develop
a local food system, are generating a vision and practice of grassroots development which
centers on building possibilities for self-determination for Black and poor people in the city; they
do so through building ways to survive that reduce people’s dependence on capitalist systems,
for both employment and consumption. I argue that farmers base their sense of legitimate or
positive development on an interrogation of how actors will “care” for the neighborhood—what
their interests are (What do you really care about?), stewardship and responsibility (Will they
care for the space? Children and elders?), and relationality (do they really care about [or even
know] the people here?). This reading of legitimacy through care implicitly critiques most top-
down development projects in the city, as well as implies that the people best positioned to
envision and carry out development are the people who have the deepest relationships in the
city—long-time residents.

Economics
Throughout this dissertation, I make a distinction between capitalist economics and
economics in general. The term economics and especially “the economy” is often used as
synonymous with capitalist economics—market systems, wage employment, etc. However I use
the term economics and economy much more broadly, to denote any activity having to do with
systems of production, distribution, and consumption. For this I draw heavily on the work of
feminist political economists J.K. Gibson-Graham (Gibson-Graham, 2006b), and Maria Mies and
Veronika Bennholdt-Thomsen (Bennholdt-Thomsen & Mies, 1999; Mies, 1983), who call us to

26

see the economic in everyday relationships, collectivity, reciprocity, and community. Through
this lens, the economic encompasses much more than capitalist economic activity, even as
people continue to live, earn, and produce under capitalist systems. To de-naturalize the
economy as being necessarily only that which is consistent with capitalism, when I refer to
economic activity which takes place as part of the capitalist system, I call it capitalist economics
or the capitalist economy. While the capitalist economy impacts and is deeply intertwined with
other kinds of economic systems and relationships, it in no way encompasses the totality of the
economic in everyday life.

Methods
For this dissertation, I draw mostly on ethnographic work, from working on farms in
Detroit, sitting in meetings, and attending public hearings about land use in the city. From 2010
to the present, 2014, I have spent every summer, the bulk of the growing season, in the city. In
2012 I spent a full calendar year in Detroit and was able to follow the trajectory of an entire
growing season, from the winter planning stages, to the spring tilling and planting, summer
maintenance, and autumn harvest. In this time I volunteered weekly for both Feedom Freedom
and D-Town farm doing whatever work needed to be done. Often this was farm work like
tilling, weeding, turning compost, and planting starts. Just as often it was daily living kinds of
things—making sure that little kids didn’t run through the beds while they played and making
sandwiches for neighborhood teenagers who were learning to farm. This work often evolved
into conversations on the front porch, or around a bonfire (Feedom Freedom has a fire pit).
Some of the best conversations that I had with farmers were while weeding a bed together or
plucking suckers off tomatoes.

27

Starting in 2011, I worked weekly with Feedom Freedom’s three more formal
programs—the youth mentor program for teenagers, cook fresh cooking workshops for adults,
and art in the garden programs for small children. I continue to work closely with Feedom
Freedom’s program for teenagers, learning with them, and helping them learn how to farm, how
to engage in critical discussion and analysis, and how to facilitate discussions and meetings.
I supplemented field work (work that often literally took place in fields) with interviews
conducted with farmers and other affiliated land rights and environmental justice activists in the
city, from January to December 2012. I conducted these interviews for the most part at Feedom
Freedom and D-Town farms, or at the Cass Commons, a community center with deep ties to
urban agriculture in the city. The interviews were semi-structured—that is, I went into them
with so me key questions on food, development, work, and self-determination, but they were not
rigidly formulated. This meant that the interviews became more like guided conversations,
rather than question and answer sessions.
My previous interviews and fieldwork informed my later ones. After each interview, I
would compare the major themes and concerns with previous ones and adjust my focus for the
next interviews accordingly. For instance I did not begin my research with a focus on work, and
my earlier interviews reflects this. But with each conversation, it seemed increasingly obvious
that the importance of (and definitions for) a satisfying work life were of crucial concern to many
of the farmers. So I began to experimentally ask more explicit questions about the connections
between urban agriculture and people’s work lives. The responses I got to these questions were
so generative and energetic, that I began to make this one of my central questions.
I developed the closest relationship with Feedom Freedom, and continue to work with them,
helping out with their youth program every summer as I have for the last three years. I write

28

then, as both an outsider to Detroit and a researcher, but also as someone with deep personal and
political commitments to the urban agriculture movement in Detroit in general, as well as to
Feedom Freedom in particular.
It was important to me that I approach my field work with a strong emphasis on building
reciprocal, personal relationships with Detroit farmers. I do not always agree with their views,
but I am extremely conscious of their long-standing theorizing and praxis, and view their ideas
and experience as authoritative. I have intentionally conducted this research slowly, beginning
to spend all of my summers in Detroit in 2010, while I was still taking classes, to give time for
relationships to develop. This slow approach that relies on building consistent, long term,
trusting relationships has been especially crucial to me because I enter this project as an
outsider—non-Black, a non-Detroiter, a researcher—in a city that is routinely critiqued and
planned from the outside.
I began this project with a sense of food sovereignty as crucial to struggles for liberation
and community self-determination, a conviction which I developed through my peripheral
participation in the struggle over South Central Farm in Los Angeles in 2006. In June of that year
the farm, a fourteen acre site in the middle of the warehouse district in South Central Los
Angeles, was raided by police after a three year struggle to keep it from being razed by developer
Ralph Horowitz. The farm had been collectively operated by three hundred mostly Central
American families, and the farmers had organized an extraordinary resistance to the sale of the
land from under them. Their eventual occupation of the land after the eviction notice had been
served drew hundreds of community members like myself, since the more people at the site at
any given time, the safer it was. The South Central Farmers organized all night concerts to

29

protect the farm from being raided in the late night hours, and workshops and classes in the day,
many of which I attended.
The South Central Farmers drew strong connections between their struggle in Los
Angeles and land struggles taking place in southern Mexico, led by the Zapatistas. I began to see
stronger and more crucial connections between food and land sovereignty in Los Angeles,
Chiapas, and the experiences of my own family, living through the Guatemalan civil war, a
conflict which centered largely on rights to land and on the ability of poor people to grow their
own food and for sovereignty. I began to view food and food production as central to struggles
for self-determination.
In the summer of 2007, I visited Detroit, and met with Detroit farmers for the first time.
The way that they talked about land and food felt resonant to my family’s experience in rural
Guatemala. Yet the fact that they were grounded in the U.S. urban experience felt familiar as
well, which, having been born here, in many ways feels more comfortable to me. As I continued
to be drawn to Detroit, I became increasingly convinced that the work of farmers in the city offer
models that have resonance far beyond Detroit—critiques and visions of development, of work
structures, of place-shaping for one’s own community, what Devon Peña calls “autotopography,”
(Peña, 2006), and of thinking about what it means to live a “good life.” And the extent to which
they are able to be successful in their endeavors, Detroit farmers open an important fissure in the
hegemonic power of dominant urban development regimes in general, which tend to be
subsumed in the logic of capital. On one hand Black Detroit farmers offer an alternate model to
urban development. And on the other hand they offer a concrete sense that other, radically
different models are possible, even in the belly of the beast, the U.S. city.

30

One of the razor’s edge of research, as many critics like Linda Tuhiwai Smith (Smith,
1999) have pointed out, is that research which presumes to tell the stories of people of color,
poor people, indigenous people often has the effect of silencing them/us, and twisting frames to
conform to the researcher’s own world view. In writing this, I have tried to remain vigilant
about paying heed to the advice of scholars of indigenous research methods, such as Smith and
Shawn Wilson (Wilson, 2009). Wilson, in particular, challenges me towards a research ethic
which centers on accountability to the relationships that one builds in the process of research,
reciprocity in learning and sharing, as well as in reciprocity through the sharing of concrete
resources, and ongoing responsibility to those relationships.
In this dissertation, I am attempting to write in solidarity, with a sense that the strength
and well-being of Black-led urban agriculture projects in Detroit is intertwined with the work of
my own various communities. I feel strongly that to the extent that their work grows, develops,
and interchanges with other movements, helps us all to be more effective, more critical, and
ultimately expand our own possibilities as well. The agriculture projects in Detroit and the
thinking behind them grows out of a long history of struggle. The farmers that I interviewed for
this project are engaged in a deep, researched, long-term project of theorizing their city,
processes of struggle, and ideas about oppression, capitalism, liberation, and self-determination. I
have tried to reflect this authority with my citation practices, using my interviewee’s names
wherever they have given me permission to do so, to give them credit for their ideas, as I would
any theorist. This deviates somewhat from conventions of sociological interviews which usually
prioritize anonymity in interviews. However, I felt naming and citation was one way that I could
clearly acknowledge and pay respect to the genealogy of ideas that are developing in Detroit, as
well as recognize the theorizing and work of the individuals I spoke with.

31

I also must be clear about the fact that, even as I work to be faithful to the words and
ideas of the Detroiters that I interview, and honor their vision and analysis, the framework is
mine. This feels very much like an experiment and an attempt at something that I think it is
essential that we make attempts at, but is also something that I expect to be wrestling with for a
long time to come.

Summary of Chapters
I begin this dissertation in Chapter Two with a description of three Detroit histories. The
first is a political economic history, a description of the industrial development of Detroit, and
then its deindustrialization, told primarily around its implications for Black residents and Black
workers.
The second is a description of Black power movements in the city, particularly focusing
on the period directly after the 1967 Detroit Rebellion. The organizations doing work in the city
in this period have been profoundly influential in the development of Detroit farmers’ analyses
of sovereignty and urban agriculture. And third, I develop a history of Black-led urban in Detroit
in general, and a history and genealogy of both Feedom Freedom and D-Town.
Chapter Three describes in greater detail contemporary Black urban farming in the city,
with particular focus on two agricultural projects—D-Town Farm, a five acre farm operated by
the Detroit Black Community Food Security Network, and Feedom Freedom, a family operation
that farms eight previously vacant lots on the East Side. In this chapter I explore the ways
farmers use the ideas of food security and food sovereignty to describe food’s importance—both
its production and its consumption—in building great Black self-determination and self-reliance.

32

In Chapter Four I focus on the links that farmers make between farming, work, and
building an alternative economy. I emphasize the importance of relationality and reciprocity to
black urban agriculture projects in Detroit. Both D-Town and Feedom Freedom emphasize the
production of food and health, but in ways which also stress that central to food security and
health are one’s relationships—how well one supports others and is supported, how well one
cares for land and nature and knows how to generate things from it. Embedded in this framing is
an assumption that self-determination is a collective process, and that it relies on significant
commitment to learning and growth from individuals, as well as responsibility to care for one’s
own well-being and the well-being of others. In this, food is alternately central—in that it is
materially necessary in order to have a healthy life and to be able to move toward economic self-
determination—and incidental—in that growing of food is one way of many in which to build
community, skills, trust, and new ways of thinking which are necessary to engage in the process
of envisioning and moving toward a just city.
Chapter Five centers on the ways that Detroit farmers rethink planning and development.
Detroit farmers, through the gardens and other caretaking, offer an alternate development model
which prioritizes relationships—between neighbors, within families and communities, between
people and neighbors, between people and their histories, and between people and nature and the
space of the city. Furthermore, the development visions and models generated by Feedom
Freedom and D-Town position Blackness as a source of power from which to move toward an
alternate vision of a livable, vibrant city. Detroit farmers, through the cultivation of food,
operationalize the idea of development based on care—care for land, care for each other, care for
self. Rather than simply shuffling poverty around, which is the inevitable result of most
capitalist urban development models which focus on improving the conditions of a particular

33

space which often results in displacement, Detroit farmers offer a model which prioritizes long-
time residents’ various bodily, mental, and spiritual capacities and needs.

34

Chapter 2

Self-Determination in Crisis: The Roots of Black-Led Urban Agriculture
in Detroit

The seeds of rebellion and resistance are deep in this city, generation after generation.
--Michael Hamlin, A Black Revolutionary’s Life in Labor

Detroit is often talked about in terms of extremes. The landscape lends itself to this view.
It is impossible to drive through Detroit without noting the marks of crisis and abandonment.
Almost every neighborhood has at least a few buildings or houses that have been burned or
otherwise massively degraded, and in some areas these structures dominate the landscape. In a
number of neighborhoods, there are more vacant lots than houses, and more vacant structures
than occupied. But in contrast to many portrayals of Detroit as a city completely emptied, all
neighborhoods in the city are still occupied, albeit with much more open space than in the mid-
twentieth century. Detroit currently has about 700,000 residents (United States Census Bureau,
2014), more than Washington D.C. or Boston. And in virtually all neighborhoods in the city,
vacant land is punctuated by urban gardens. In this chapter my aim is to explain how Detroit’s
landscape came to be this way, to tell a story of racial capitalism as it played out in what was
once the heart of U.S. industrial production. I also, in this chapter trace the genealogy of radical
Black-led farms in the city through some of the city’s most militant Black power movements of
the 1960s and 70s.
I tell this history in three parts. The first is an overview of economic tides in Detroit in
general in the twentieth century. My main goal in this is to provide a context in which to
understand the kinds of organizing which emerged from the city, both historically and in terms of

35

the contemporary Black urban agriculture movement. Much of the work of the rest of this
dissertation revolves around Detroit farmers’ analysis of development, labor, and economics. I
include this history in order to elucidate the context in which they make their analysis.
My accounting of Detroit’s history in the twentieth and twenty-first century in this
chapter is centered on two defining themes. One of these themes is race and racial struggle.
Detroit has been and continues to be one of the most racially segregated cities in the United
States. It is also one of the cities in which Black people have waged some of the most vigorous
and determined struggles against racism. I begin this discussion with an exploration of the
conditions that Black people in the city faced and struggled against, in particular, around issues
of labor, housing, and governance.
I also focus on industrial production in this first section on economic history. Detroit’s
economy and arguably its identity have revolved in many ways around auto manufacturing.
Indeed, the word Detroit in national media is as likely to refer to the auto industry as it is to the
city itself. Workers came to Detroit drawn by manufacturing jobs. They organized to build
power at those jobs. And they ultimately were abandoned by those employers, who left the city
in search of cheaper, less demanding labor. Detroit’s contemporary context is deeply intertwined
with this abandonment, and with manufacturers’ current and past relationships with the city and
with workers.
The second section is an overview of radical Black social movements in the city in the
years after what has come to be called in the city the 1967 Detroit Rebellion, a massive five-day
uprising of mostly Black youth against police occupation of their neighborhoods. This period
from 1967 to 1974 saw an incredible upsurge in radical organizing and thought around questions
of Black sovereignty, Black self-reliance, Black labor, and the need to build alternative Black

36

institutions and economic systems. The analytical work of these movements is very much
evident in Detroit farmers’ theorizing. I profile some of the most influential radical Black
movements in the city in this period, and highlight some of the ideas and projects that they
developed that could be considered precursors to the work of contemporary Black-urban
agriculture in the city.
The third section of this chapter is a history of the farms themselves. In this section I will
outline how D-Town Farm and Feedom Freedom were established. Both farms have members
who were involved in these earlier movements and both draw on these histories to explain their
own ideas and positions, even as they continue to critique and refine their theorizing. In this last
section, I trace the farms’ links with earlier movements in the city.

Detroit: Race and Labor
Black workers
Black workers came to Detroit from the Southern states in waves in what is known as the
Great Migration, which took place roughly from 1910 to the mid-1950s. Particularly in the
beginning years of the Great Migration, migrants were members of the first generation of Black
Americans born out of slavery and were drawn North with ambitions to escape Jim Crow
violence and limited employment and life possibilities in the South (Bates, 2012; Wilkerson,
2010). Changes in the Southern agrarian economy, including greater automation of the cotton
industry, also pushed Southern Black workers northward in search of factory jobs (Thompson,
2001).

37

Black migrants were largely confined to a few areas of the city, mainly centered around
an area known as Paradise Valley and Black Bottom.
3
Black Detroiters were shut out of the
home-buying market through racial covenants, systematic discrimination by real estate agents,
and federal lending policies which marked Black and racially mixed neighborhoods as poor
lending risks, an white violence and harassment (Freund, 2007; Sugrue, 2005). The rental
market for housing open to Blacks was small and competitive, and as a result, Black residents
paid higher rents for much lower quality housing than their white counterparts (Sugrue, 2005).
The situation was compounded by the fact that Black workers tended to have lower incomes
because of employment discrimination and also had much higher rates of unemployment (Bates,
2012; Sugrue, 2005).
Jobs in Detroit’s manufacturing sector were much more difficult to attain for Black
workers than for whites. Before World War II there had developed what Darden, Hill, Thomas,
and Thomas called a “dual labor market” (Darden, Hill, Thomas, June, & Thomas, 1987, 68), in
which most Black workers were restricted to the lowest paid echelons of the manufacturing
industry, the most physically difficult, dangerous, and dirtiest jobs, and to jobs with the least
possibility of advancement. Other than Ford’s Rouge Plant, Black auto workers were only hired
where there were shortages of white workers, and generally only in the jobs that white workers
wanted least (Geschwender, 1977).
Ford was one of the only firms that hired Black workers in significant numbers. Ford
was in fact able to use the discrimination in other plants to his advantage, as Black workers were
more likely to work longer, harder, and for lower wages, knowing that no other factories would

3
The Black Bottom neighborhood, while occupied for most of its history by Black Detroiters, was not named in
reference to the race of its residents. Rather it was named for the color of its soil which was a deep, rich, black,
nourished by the silt of the former Savoyard River, which was buried as the area was developed (Martelle, 2012).

38

hire them. Ford plants hired Black workers mainly on the recommendation of particular Black
ministers—those who were willing to publically espouse anti-union sentiment. Therefore, one
could mainly get hired if one attended an explicitly anti-union church. As a result, the
congregations of these churches grew because of a reputation of being able to connect their
members with employment, and their bank accounts flourished from their members’ stable
wages (Bates, 2012; Geschwender, 1977). Ford also garnered some anti-union support from
Black workers because “it was no secret that white unions had rarely been friends of black labor”
(Bates, 2012, 53). Moreover, Ford explicitly only hired married Black men, ensuring that they
would feel the pressure of needing to earn for their families (Lewis-Coleman, 2008). In 1940,
more than half of the Black men employed in Detroit worked for Ford (Maloney & Whatley,
1995).
Other employers did not hire Black workers at all, or hired very few, and in limited
positions. Employers in Detroit and elsewhere in the North routinely specifically requested
white workers from public sector job programs like the U.S. Employment Service (Thompson,
2001) and the Michigan State Employment Service (Sugrue, 2005). Racial antagonisms were
exacerbated by the fact that Black workers were routinely hired as strike breakers when the
plants were in conflict with the United Auto Workers (UAW) (Geschwender, 1977).
Job segregation in the plants was challenged during World War II, as Black workers were
hired for positions which had previously been thought of as “white” because of shortages of
working age white men. Black workers in Detroit “often wisecracked that Tojo and Hitler had
done more for the emancipation of Black labor than Lincoln and Roosevelt” (Georgaskas &
Surkin, 1998, 28).

39

White workers in many plants responded with outrage, organizing hate strikes throughout
the war to protest the inclusion of Black workers in higher ranked jobs (Darden et al., 1987).
Indeed, white protest may have largely emanated from the same Jim Crow ideology which many
Black workers had moved northward to escape. Many of Detroit’s white auto workers had
migrated to the city from the South as well, and brought with them racial ideologies including,
for instance, widespread membership in the Ku Klux Klan and the Black Legion (Geschwender,
1977).
Detroit organized labor had historically been quite militantly leftist. However, post-
World War II, more radical factions in labor began to encounter significant internal resistance
from white union members who were especially alarmed by the growing Black presence in the
city and in labor unions. In 1947, in the context of growing racial conflict over housing and
increasing white alarm at a growing Black population, right-leaning Walter Reuther took the
helm of the powerful UAW (Thompson, 2001).
Under the Reuther administration, the Detroit workforce essentially resegregated. By
1948, a majority of all jobs in the city included explicit racial stipulations in their postings
(Darden et al., 1987). Moreover, if Black workers did get hired, their conditions were more
likely to be unstable and/ or abusive. From the 1950s on there were numerous documented
egregious instances of Black workers who were subject to abuse by foreman (Thompson, 2001).
The UAW rarely intervened on behalf of Black workers who had experienced mistreatment.
In response to discrimination in the factories the UAW’s failure to support Black
workers, the Trade Union Leadership Council (TULC), formed in 1957. TULC was a formal
committee of the UAW to support civil rights in the city and was what Georgakas and Surkin
called “the strongest organized attack on racism within the auto industry” up until that point

40

(Georgaskas & Surkin, 1998, 34). The TULC proposed relatively moderate reforms, such as
organized efforts to win jobs for Black apprentices. However, many in the white leadership of
the UAW viewed the committee with alarm (Georgaskas & Surkin, 1998). Nevertheless, even
with the work of the TULC, there remained widespread feeling among Black workers that the
unions themselves discriminated against Black union members, particularly when their numbers
were not needed for a union campaign.
Plants began to leave the city as early as the 1940s, seeking out more space and,
increasingly, less militant labor. The reduction in numbers of factories in the city, area,
automation, and overtime effectively weakened the unions by dramatically reducing the number
of jobs in Detroit and therefore reducing their memberships (Sugrue, 2005). It also significantly
increased the number of unemployed workers in Detroit, beginning in the 1950s, as new
residents, particularly new Black migrants from the South continued to move to the city seeking
jobs in the plants. Seniority policies disproportionately benefitted white workers, and Black
workers, in turn, disproportionately filled the ranks of the unemployed (Sugrue, 2005).
By the 1960s, Black workers felt increasingly that unions did not represent their interests,
both because of their ineffectiveness in dealing with discrimination and abuse in the plants, and
because of anti-Black discrimination within unions themselves (Thompson, 2001). Moreover, as
factory worker and activist James Boggs pointed out, the unions had never much addressed the
problem of unemployment, which became an increasingly pressing issue for the Detroit Black
community (J. Boggs, 2009).
Historian James Geschwender describes the attitude of many Black workers:

41

The dilemma faced by the black worker was clear. He could see that management
was cynically using him and exploiting racial antipathy in order to destroy the union
movement. He could see that white workers were antagonistic to blacks and that
they had restricted black opportunities in the past. White workers appeared to be
every bit as cynical as management in laying aside racial bigotry when it was in
their self-interest to do so—when blacks were needed for successful union
organizing drives. Thus it was easy for black workers to say “the hell with
everybody,” and pursue what they perceived as being in their own self-interest
(Geschwender, 1977, 29).
It was with this dilemma that Black workers began to organize in the 1960s.

Housing
Detroit has for almost its entire history been residentially racially segregated. For the
first half of the twentieth century, Black residents were confined almost exclusively to a few
enclaves—the area directly east of Woodward Avenue known as Paradise Valley, a small pocket
on the West Side, an area just south of the intersection of Eight Mile and Wyoming, and a middle
class neighborhood called Conant Gardens which housed mainly Black professionals (Sugrue,
2005, 35). As the Black population grew throughout the period of the Great Migration, these
areas became increasingly crowded, more expensive, and with poorer conditions (Bates, 2012;
Sugrue, 2005).
New housing, particularly in the suburban developments that proliferated after World
War II, often included restrictive covenants, which prohibited any person of color from
purchasing the home. These covenants were sold as efforts to ensure the safety of residents and

42

to protect their property values (Freund, 2007). Even neighborhoods which did not have
restrictive covenants written into their deeds kept neighborhoods white through intimidation,
often aided by support from city officials (Thomas, 2013).
Compounding this problem was the fact that it was virtually impossible for any Black
person to apply for mortgages insured by the Federal Housing Administration through the 1960s.
The National Housing Act, passed in 1934, codified discriminatory lending policies in a
document known as the Underwriting Manual which designated neighborhoods with even a
small number of Black residents as poor lending risks. African American GIs returning from
World War II were unable to take advantage of the mortgage benefits of the GI bill because they
were subject to the regulations set out in the Underwriting Manual (Freund, 2007). Suburban
development flourished after World War II, spurred on by FHA secured loans, but Black
homebuyers were almost universally excluded from these opportunities.
The housing crunch in Detroit for African American families was exacerbated by the
urban renewal programs of the 1940s and 1950s. The policy of urban renewal, encouraged by
the federal government, deeply undermined the stability of African American communities in
Detroit and other U.S. cities. “Blight elimination” programs began in 1945 in Detroit, and
accelerated with the passage of the Federal Housing Act of 1949, which offered federal funding
for “blight” clearance and “urban renewal” (Thomas, 2013). Urban renewal projects in Detroit
almost entirely targeted Black neighborhoods for “redevelopment.” Detroit highway planners
essentially “viewed inner-city highway construction in Detroit as in other major American cities,
North and South, as a handy device for razing slums” (Sugrue, 2005, 47)Some of the city’s most
well established Black neighborhoods were razed in urban renewal projects in the 1950s,

43

replaced by the I-75 freeway, the Lodge freeway, the I-94 freeway, the Detroit Medical Center,
and “University City” around Wayne State University (Thomas, 2013).
Researchers at Wayne State found that the mass displacement from urban renewal had a
devastating impact on Black communities in the city. In addition to financial hardship, from
which many families never fully recovered, the study found that relocation was profoundly
traumatic. Urban renewal seriously undermined the social and economic networks of the Detroit
Black community, including informal support networks of child and elder care, community
networks of support for needy families, for nurturing and caring for youth, and for public safety
(Thomas, 2013). Moreover, urban renewal compounded the problem of an already seriously
overcrowded rental market for Black Detroiters. As tens of thousands of residents were
displaced from neighborhoods, families were forced to double and sometimes triple up in units in
the remaining Black neighborhoods (Thomas, 2013).
In 1948, Black Detroiters celebrated U.S. Supreme Court rulings against racial housing
covenants (Shelley v. Kraemer, 1948), and “it inspired Blacks in Detroit to move forth more
boldly, looking for housing in predominantly white neighborhoods beyond the city’s racial
frontier” (Sugrue, 2005, 182). However discrimination in lending was still enshrined in the
FHA’s Underwriting Manuel, and continued to make it all but impossible for Black residents to
buy outside of the city. The practice of “blockbusting,” made it somewhat more feasible for
Black families to buy a home in the city than in the suburbs (Thomas, 2013).
The Code of Ethics of the Detroit Real Estate Board, the official trade organization for
Detroit’s real estate industry, explicitly forbid any practices which could “change the racial
character of neighborhoods” (Sugrue, 2005, 195). The Code dictated that real estate agents must
“never be instrumental in introducing into a neighborhood a character of property or occupancy,

44

members of any race or nationality, or any industry whose presence will be clearly detrimental to
real estate values” (quoted in Sugrue, 2005, 46). This code essentially banned real estate agents
from selling homes to homebuyers of color in white neighborhoods. Additionally, the Detroit
Real Estate Board banned Jewish or Black real estate agents from becoming members. Many of
these unaffiliated real estate agents became specialists in (and heavily profited from) what
became known as “blockbusting”—selling properties to Black homebuyers in neighborhoods
“considered to be on the brink of black ‘invasion’” (Sugrue, 2005, 195).
Blockbusting agents would begin by creating the impression of a Black presence in the
neighborhood, sometimes by actually showing or selling a house to a Black family, but often
simply by hiring a Black woman to walk a baby carriage down the block. This was often enough
to begin a rumor mill which would result in a mass sell-off of properties in the area, as whites
attempted to leave. Whites, often spurred by blockbusting agents highlighting the risks of
lowered property values, crime, and disorder that whites already associated with Black
neighborhoods, often sold their houses at below market value rates in a rush to leave. The agents
would then advertise the houses at a substantial mark-up to Black homebuyers who were looking
to buy a house in a mixed neighborhood. They also frequently became lending agents, filling in
the gap left because most banks would not loan to clients seeking to buy in “transitional”
neighborhoods. These alternative loans came with steep down payments and inflated interest
rates (Sugrue, 2005; Thomas, 2013).
Some white residents responded by vigorously, often violently, resisting Black
neighborhood integration. Sugrue notes, “All but the most liberal whites who lived along the
city’s racial frontier believed that they had only two options. They could flee, as vast numbers of
urbanites did, or they could hold their ground and fight” (Sugrue, 2005, 233). As in earlier eras,

45

white resistance to Black integration often took the form of verbal intimidation, threats, picketing
new neighbors, effigy burning, harassment, arson, and physical violence. They often acted
through neighborhood groups that they called “civic associations,” “protective associations,”
“improvement associations,” and “homeowners’ associations” (Sugrue, 2005, 211) and they
espoused a mix of explicit racism and arguments about defending their property rights and
protecting their investments (Freund, 2007; Sugrue, 2005, 239). As late as 1967, there were
dramatic and violent demonstrations by white residents to expel new Black neighbors from their
homes (Geschwender, 1977). By the 1960s, “Detroit was a city in which white ethnic enclaves
and burgeoning black neighborhoods engaged in open conflict with one another” (Joseph, 2006,
54).

The Rebellion
It was in this economic, housing, and labor context that police, who already had a tense
relationship with Black communities, became an increasingly repressive force in Black
neighborhoods. Black Detroiters in the 1960s expressed increasingly negative views about the
police, citing widespread harassment, violence, and verbal abuse. As Rebellion historian Sydney
Fine noted, “Blacks hated and feared the [police] cruisers” which “had a gestapo-like image” in
the Black community (Fine, 2007, 100-101).
On July 23, 1967 this tension erupted as police raided a “blind pig,” an after-hour
drinking establishment at 12
th
St. and Clairmount, a working-class Black neighborhood on
Detroit’s Near West Side. By all accounts it was a brutal, chaotic raid. A crowd gathered in the
street and according to testimony, two Black youth shouted to the crowd, “Black Power! Don’t
let them take our people away!…Let’s get the bricks and bottles going!” Some in the crowd

46

apparently took them up on this call, and people began to throw bottles, bricks, and cans at the
police officers (Fine, 2007, 160).
By the next day, the crowd had grown into the thousands, outnumbering the police and
pelting them with rocks and bricks. The Rebellion lasted for five days, and in that period 43
people were killed, more than 7,200 arrested, and more than 2,000 buildings were destroyed
(National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, 1968). In the end, the Rebellion was only
stopped after Michigan governor Romney deployed 2,700 National Guard troops, military tanks,
and armored personnel carriers equipped with M-60 machine guns (Fine, 2007; National
Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, 1968).
In the aftermath of the Rebellion, numerous studies were conducted to try to explain
Detroit’s and other uprisings that had taken place around the country. These included a report by
the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders that was so widely read that it was
distributed as a mass market paperback. These studies mostly concluded that a combination of
poverty, discrimination, overcrowded housing, and police brutality had created the conditions for
the Rebellion. Burton Levy, head of the Community Relations Division of the Michigan Civil
Rights Commission declared in 1968 after a two year study, that the “police system recruits a
significant number of bigots, reinforces the bigotry through the department’s system and
socialization with older officers and puts them on duty in the ghetto, where the opportunity to act
out prejudice is always available” (Fine, 2007, 95). A survey conducted by the Detroit Free
Press in the aftermath of the Rebellion surveyed Black residents as to what they viewed as its
causes and found that residents cited, in order of importance, 1) police brutality, 2) poor housing,
3) poverty, 4) lack of jobs, and 5) overcrowded living conditions (Thomas, 2013).

47

James Geschwender has argued that the 1967 Rebellion could not be called a race riot.
“There was no fighting between blacks and whites other than that involving the police or other
symbols of constituted authority” (Geschwender, 1977, 72). Moreover, Ahmad Rahman notes
that rather than attacking white civilians, in fact “black rebels directed their wrath almost
exclusively against the most visible signs of capitalism and racism: first, property, and second,
the firefighters and policemen who protected it” (Rahman, 2008, 184).
The Rebellion was one of the most pivotal turning points in the city, with many residents
and historians alike marking Detroit history from before and after July 1967. White flight out of
the city, while already underway through the mass development of the suburbs and the
construction of the freeway system, accelerated after the Rebellion (Darden & Thomas, 2013;
Thomas, 2013). It also marked a crucial shift in Black organizing in the city. While Detroit had
long been a center for Black activism, the Rebellion radicalized many Black youth and
contributed tremendously to the enormous surge in Black Power politics in Detroit in the 1960s
and 70s.

Flight after the Rebellion
In the late 1960s and 1970s, whites continued to leave the city for the suburbs. The 1969
elections revealed that white anxieties over the likelihood of an eventual Black majority
population was one of the biggest issues in city politics. The Detroit Free Press reported that
white voters’ main concerns were welfare, crime, and “the colored taking over” (quoted in
Darden & Thomas, 2013, 97). Indeed, the idea of Black Detroiters taking over power in the city
was on everyone’s minds, both Black and white. As whites left, Black Detroiters were indeed
becoming an increasing proportion of the population, and an increasing proportion of voters.

48

The previously unthinkable possibility of Black political control began to seem suddenly within
reach.
White anxiety translated into an even more intense racial divide in the city. There were
record numbers of gun purchases in the Detroit area immediately after the Rebellion. Images of
white housewives learning to shoot to protect themselves were shown on TV (Geschwender,
1977; Widick, 1972). A militia organization called Breakthrough organized immediately after
the Rebellion, “advised whites to establish a ‘block by block home defense system’ for
protection against ‘bands of armed terrorists’ invading from the inner city to ‘murder the men
and rape the women’ (Fine, 2007, 384).
If anyone had doubts as to whether Detroit was entering a new political era, they were
erased with the election of Coleman Young as mayor in 1973. Coleman Young was viewed by
many as a brash radical when he took office. He had been involved with many of the city’s
Black and labor movements for years and was unabashed about his stance that Black people in
the city should wield greater political power. Young wrote of his election, “My fortune was a
direct result of my city’s misfortune—of the same fear and loathing that had caused all of my
problems and Detroit’s problems in the first place. I was taking over the administration of
Detroit because the white people didn’t want the damn thing anymore. They were getting the
hell out, more than happy to turn over their troubles to some sucker like me” (Young & Wheeler,
1994).
The Detroit Free Press quoted white residents directly after the election again fretting
about Blacks “taking over the city” and how they now planned to move out (Darden & Thomas,
2013, 103). While the Rebellion is often cited as the turning point of irretrievable white flight
out of the city, historian Heather Ann Thompson actually locates whites’ major anxieties in the

49

election of Coleman Young and the specter of Black political power taking hold in the city
(Thompson, 1999).

Deindustrialization
Young inherited a city already in dramatic recession, bleeding both people and the
manufacturing jobs which had always been the base of the city’s economy. While the 1950s
often is popularly represented as Detroit’s heyday, Detroit had begun the decades long process of
deindustrialization as early as the late 1940s, as small recessions caused major fluctuations in
consumer demand for automobiles. Historian Thomas Sugrue notes that between 1947 and 1963
the city lost more than 100,000 jobs even as its population of working age people continued to
increase (Sugrue, 2005).
Sugrue attributes the exodus of manufacturing jobs in the city to three major shifts in
plant operations in this period. First, there was a broad trend towards shifts in capital mobility,
for U.S. companies in general and in Detroit in particular. Manufacturers began to decentralize
their operations, opening plants throughout the country, a move made possible by advances in
transportation technology (Sugrue, 2005). The practice of decentralization began in earnest
during World War II, as the Federal government encouraged factory growth on the edges of
cities, to minimize the risk of attack (Darden et al., 1987). After the war, manufacturers
increasingly wanted more space than was feasible in the central city (Thomas, 2013). Spreading
operations out had the added benefit for manufacturers of also effectively isolating labor
organizing in each plant, thereby making it less coordinated and less effective (Sugrue, 2005).
Second, mid-century saw a wave of increasing automation in factories, reducing the need
for labor and offering increased production. Automation provided more leverage for companies

50

against union organizing first through generating greater competition for fewer jobs and second
by further tying workers to an automated pace of the line, eliminating worker slowdowns and
other on the job labor resistance strategies (Sugrue, 2005), a process which James Boggs called
“man-o-mation” (Boggs, 2009, 24). Many Black workers in the 1960s and 70s called
automation “n*gg*rmation,” denoting the fact that many of the most dramatic speedups
happened in majority African American factories (Georgaskas & Surkin, 1998, 85).
Third, plants also began to make increasing use of compulsory overtime. By the 1960s
virtually all auto workers were regularly forced to work up to four hours past the end of their
eight hour shifts, and often on weekends as well (Georgaskas & Surkin, 1998). This lowered the
cost of hiring and training new workers and further reduced the number of employees.
Through the 1960s and 70s, chronic unemployment became an increasingly prominent
issue. Struggles to find work in Detroit became common, particularly for young African
Americans. In 1971, African Americans under 25 had an unemployment rate of between 30 and
40 percent (Widick, 1972). Detroit auto worker, activist, and philosopher James Boggs devoted
much of his writing in this period to the problem of Black working age people increasingly
occupying the status of what he called “the outsiders” (J. Boggs, 2009)—that is, the creation of a
permanently unemployed Black urban underclass through deindustrialization.
The trend of fewer jobs in manufacturing in the city was compounded in the 1980s and
1990s by global economic currents. First, starting in the late 1970s there was increasing
competition from Japanese car manufacturers. Japanese cars began to occupy a greater share of
the car market both globally and in the United States (Darden et al., 1987). U.S. auto
manufacturers spiraled into crisis. In 1980, the Big Three (GM, Ford, and Chrysler) lost $3.5
billion. Chrysler shut down its Dodge Main plant in January of 1980, a factory which had once

51

employed 35,000 workers (Thomas, 2013). Overall, in just that one year 700,000 U.S. workers
lost their jobs in the auto industry and industries which supplied the auto industry (Darden et al.,
1987). Black men particularly bore the brunt of this “restructuring,” with hours worked going
down more than any other demographic (Farley, Danzinger, & Holtzer, 2000). Darden, Hill,
Thomas, and Thomas attributed The Big Three’s dramatic economic slide to generalized
economic recession, and to rising energy prices which encouraged U.S. car consumers to
purchase more fuel efficient Japanese vehicles rather than gas guzzling U.S. made cars (Darden
et al., 1987).
The impact of the decline of the Big Three as well as the flight of other industries out of
the city was dramatic. From 1970 to 1992 about three out of four production jobs disappeared
(Farley et al., 2000). Residential and industrial flight was accompanied by retail flight. The
1983 closure of the Hudson department store and twenty-five story, two million square-foot store
and office space in downtown Detroit epitomized the movement of retail spaces out of the city
(Darden et al., 1987). Store fronts that are empty, burned out, or otherwise ruined lining most
major thoroughfares in the city’s East and West sides continue to be one of the most visually
obvious marks of Detroit’s long economic crisis.
As property values shrunk, many families found themselves unable to sell their homes at a
substantial enough price to allow them to buy a house anywhere else. Many that remained in the
city were those who had few other options. As Darden, Hill, Thomas, and Thomas put it, “Those
who remained [through the 1970s and into the 1980s] were the poorest of the poor” (Darden et
al., 1987).
Mayor Young tried in vain to retain and attract new businesses, particularly large
corporations, to open operations in the city. In the twenty years that Young served as mayor, he

52

spearheaded a number of very large scale projects to attempt to revitalize the city’s economy,
each bringing the city deeper into debt. These included borrowing $38 million from the Carter
administration for the construction Joe Louis Arena to house the Detroit Red Wings, spending
$180 million for the expansion of Cobo Hall Convention Center, and $202 million to construct
the People Mover, a train that made a loop around downtown Detroit (Thomas, 2013).
Nevertheless, manufacturing continued to move out of the city. Young increasingly spent
more and more money, at greater and greater cost to Detroit residents, to retain relatively small
numbers of jobs. The Poletown project was perhaps the greatest example of this. In 1982,
Young struck a deal with GM that they would build a new plant if the city would pay to clear the
land and develop the site. The city spent over $200 million for the razing of land, and for
relocation of Poletown residents, and $60 million in tax abetments for GM to create a promised
6000 jobs. In the end, the plant only employed 3000 at its height (Thomas, 2013). Young
organized a similar development project in 1985 for the Chrysler’s Jefferson plant, clearing land
and proving tax abatements for a promised 15,000 jobs. In the end the new plant employed only
2,500 workers (Thomas, 2013).
While Mayor Young continued to be a symbol of rising Black power for many Detroiters,
others viewed his economic strategy for the city as a kind of betrayal, as he funneled an
increasing proportion of city funds toward business subsidies. Heather Ann Thompson does not
mince words in her critique of Young’s handling of Detroit’s economic slide: “When faced with
the exodus of capital from his city, Mayor Young did not actively question the power that capital
wielded over the well-being of Detroit’s citizenry. Rather, he tried to woo industry leaders back
to the Motor City with many corporate welfare enticements that cost Detroiters dearly”
(Thompson, 2001, p. 208). While Young had focused enormous resources on downtown Detroit,

53

the Riverfront, and on attempting to retain manufacturing employers, he had devoted very few to
the city’s neighborhoods, which continued to suffer from abandonment (Thomas, 2013). In a
1987 speech critiquing development in the city, Boggs commented bitterly, “One day we will
have to deal with Coleman Young. Don’t be fooled by the black face because race isn’t good
enough. You need something else besides skin color” (Boggs, 2011, 334).

Detroit Now
Detroit in 2014 is a hard city. It is hard in the sense that it is difficult, a hard place to
live, in many ways. Many neighborhoods do not have streetlights. City services are frequently
erratic. And of course, it is a hard place to make a living. The crisis in Detroit has been a long,
fifty year slide. Most Detroiters alive today only know their city in crisis. And it is hard in the
sense that it is hardened--tough. A popular T-shirt and bumper sticker announces that “Detroit
hustles harder,” and indeed this seems to be true, both by character and by necessity. One must
“hustle hard” and be resourceful in order to make do in the city.
The statistics are grim. Currently, 46% of Detroit households make less than $25,000 per year
(New Detroit, 2014). The per capita income of Black city residents is $15,213 compared with a
more than double average income of $38,939 for white residents in adjacent suburban Oakland
County (New Detroit, 2014). Perhaps unsurprisingly, as of the 2010 Census, Detroit was the
most racially segregated large city in the United States (Logan & Stults, 2011).
Throughout the second half of the 20
th
century, Black unemployment rates were
consistently two and one-half to three times that of whites in the Detroit Metro Area (Farley et
al., 2000). In 2014 Detroit’s unemployment rate was highest out of the fifty largest cities in the
United States at 23.1% (Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2014), and this statistic does not include

54

those who are no longer looking for work. Even the jobs that do exist in the city are more likely
to be occupied by white suburbanites than by Black Detroiters. While the city was is 82.7%
Black and only 10.6% white in 2012 (United States Census Bureau, 2014), 55.8% of those
employed in the city are white (New Detroit, 2014). The racial duel labor market in Detroit
persists, with white suburbanites much more likely to commute into the city to relatively higher
wage jobs in the medical fields and in government, and Black Detroiters much more likely to
commute out of the city to relatively low wage jobs in the suburbs. This situation is
compounded by the fact that in 2008, 22.1% of Black households in the city had no vehicle
(Darden & Thomas, 2013, 253) to buffer them against the dramatic cuts in public transportation
service throughout the city in 2012 (Sands, 2012).
Detroit as a city in crisis looms large, arguably for all Detroiters, but not without that
sense that Detroit “hustles harder.” Malik Yakini, executive director of D-Town Farm notes, “In
a sense, Detroit has become the poster child for urban decay. So because it is the poster child for
urban decay, and [we] are perceived as being that, we also have this tremendous opportunity to
show how alternative systems can be created, and model those” (Yakini, 2012). Indeed,
Detroiters have always responded vigorously and creatively to crisis.

Black Organizing in Detroit after the Rebellion
Historian Heather Ann Thompson, referring to the myriad of Black power, labor,
education, housing, and policing struggles in the city in the 1960s, noted “Detroit—arguably
more than cities usually thought to epitomize the radical 1960s, such as Berkeley—witnessed
militant left-wing activism in virtually every realm of civic and labor life” (Thompson, 2001, p.
7). The Rebellion in particular underscored the urgency of fighting against racism in the city and

55

mobilized young Black people to organize. However, the groundwork for the upsurge of
militancy that occurred in the late 1960s had been quietly building throughout the decade.
Since the 1940s, radicals James and Grace Lee Boggs had been organizing and writing in
Detroit, as well as fostering a vibrant political community out of their living room. Grace Lee
had originally moved to Detroit from New York City with Trinidadian Marxist philosopher
C.L.R. James, and former Russian revolutionary Raya Dunayevskya, when the three broke with
Trotskyists to form what they called the Johnson-Forest Tendency, after Dunayevskya and
James’ pen names. The Johnson-Forest Tendency asserted that any revolutionary struggle in the
United States must center the Black worker as the people who have most suffered under
capitalism. Grace Lee Boggs wrote in her autobiography, “the Johnsonites took the position that
instead of waiting for ‘Black and White’ to ‘Unite and Fight,’ revolutionists should encourage
and support independent black struggles” (G. L. Boggs, 1998, 56). James, Dunayevskaya, and
Grace Lee Boggs, then Grace Lee, wrote prolifically on their “passionate conviction that the
independent black struggle was a formidable threat to the U.S. power structure” (G. L. Boggs,
1998, 66).
In 1953 Grace Lee married James Boggs, a full-time factory worker at the Detroit
Chrysler plant, and member of the editorial board of Correspondence, the Johnson-Forest
Tendency’s publication. James Boggs and Grace Lee’s marriage was one of passionate intellect
and radical convictions. The two collaborated on writing projects and in activist work in Detroit.
James Boggs gained visibility in radical communities throughout the U.S. with the publication of
his book The American Revolution in 1963, which contained an analysis of the declining
necessity of Black workers in Detroit factories and the growth of permanent Black
unemployment in industrial cities. Boggs asserted the urgency of engaging unemployed Black

56

youth, who he called “the outsiders,” to envision and struggle for a new economic and social
structure (J. Boggs, 2009).
Many of the figures who later would go on to become pivotal in the various movements
which arose after the Rebellion, spent a good deal of time in the Boggses living room in the
1950s and 60s, discussing, debating, and strategizing about revolution and Detroit politics. By
all accounts, the Boggses pushed the young radicals to think deeply through their revolutionary
politics (Ahmad & Jeffries, 2006; Joseph, 2006), though as individuals they eventually came to
varying conclusions.
These young radicals included, for instance, Luke Tripp, who founded UHURU (Swahili
for “freedom”) (Joseph, 2006), which became one of the first groups to explicitly reject non-
violence in favor of an ethic of “self-defense” and to “embrace the logic of anticolonial and third
world revolution” (Dillard, 2007, 264). UHURU was also closely affiliated with Reverend
Albert Clauge’s Black nationalist church, Shrine of the Black Madonna.
Another was Max Stanford, a twenty-two year old college drop-out who would, with his
friends, “stay up all night in the Boggses living room plotting rebellion” (Joseph, 2006, 59). In
1962, Stanford went on to found the Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM) with a group of
radical Black college students in Ohio, and also worked actively in Detroit. Robert Williams
eventually served as RAM’s international chairman, and James Boggs as ideological chairman
(Ahmad & Jeffries, 2006). As Malcolm X began to develop The Organization of Afro-American
Unity after he broke with the Nation of Islam, he discussed with Max Stanford and Grace Boggs
the possibility of RAM acting as the underground liberation front for the organization, although
there are conflicting accounts as to the arrangement at which they eventually arrived (Ahmad &
Jeffries, 2006; G. L. Boggs, 1998; Marable, 2011).

57

Organizers from both RAM and UHURU, including Luke Tripp, John Watson, Ken
Cockrel, and General Baker emerged among the leadership of the League of Revolutionary
Black Workers (Dillard, 2007; Georgaskas & Surkin, 1998; Geschwender, 1977; Joseph, 2006).
Additionally, after Boggs, Williams, and Stanford all resigned from the leadership of RAM in an
organizational split, RAM eventually decided to dissolve itself into the Republic of New Africa
(Ahmad & Jeffries, 2006), a Black separatist organization that also became significant in Detroit
organizing after the Rebellion.
As tensions in the city between police and Black neighborhoods grew in the late 1960s,
organizers who would later found pivotal Black power organizations in the city, actively
organized. A few weeks before the rebellion the Boggs’ as well as Reverend Clauge of the
Shrine of the Black Madonna, and Milton and Richard Henry (the brothers that would go on to
found the Republic of New Africa), all spoke at a mass rally to demand action organized by
UHURU after police shot a Black sex worker without provocation (Ahmad & Jeffries, 2006;
Dillard, 2007). Outrage in the Black community at this shooting is commonly cited as one of the
incidents which clearly built tension leading to the Rebellion a few weeks later (G. L. Boggs,
1998; Dillard, 2007; Geschwender, 1977; Joseph, 2006).

The League of Revolutionary Black Workers
The League of Revolutionary Black Workers (LRBW), like many other organizations in
the period, was founded within a year of the 1967 Rebellion, birthed out of a rising tide of
movements for Black power in Detroit and elsewhere. On May 2, 1968 Black workers under the
banner of the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement (DRUM) shut down the Dodge Main plant
in a wildcat strike in which 4000 workers participated (Georgaskas & Surkin, 1998). In the

58

next year, RUMS began to appear in most of the major manufacturing employers in the city
including FRUM (at Ford’s River Rouge complex), JARUM (at the Chrysler Jefferson Avenue
Assembly plant), ELRUM (at the Eldon Avenue Gear and Axel plant), CADRUM (at the
Cadillac Fleetwood factory), DRUM II (at the Dodge Truck plant). They also formed in non-
auto industry workplaces: UPRUM among United Postal Services workers, HRUM among
healthcare workers, and NEWRUM at the Detroit News (Georgaskas & Surkin, 1998;
Geschwender, 1977; Thompson, 2001). All of the RUMS eventually came to be organized under
the umbrella organization League of Revolutionary Black Workers.
The vision of the LRBW was expansive. Dan Georgakas and Marvin Surkin wrote in the
introduction to the iconic account of the LRBW Detroit: I Do Mind Dying, “The revolutionaries
combined the experience of the Black liberation struggle with the radical tradition within the
labor movement to speak of a society in which the interests of workers and their families would
become the foundation of all social organization” (Georgaskas & Surkin, 1998, 2). In this, the
League positioned itself to protest both factory management and union leadership. Indeed, the
first of DRUM’s programmatic demands was not a demand on the plants. It was a demand for a
halt to racism in the UAW (quoted in Hamlin, 2012, 125).
The League carried on a vigorous program of study, including book groups and research
units (Geschwender, 1977; Hamlin, 2012). By 1972, it had established its own film production
company, book publisher, and bookstore, as well as numerous study groups and book clubs. The
League’s influences ranged from Marx and Lenin to Mao Tse-Tung, Franz Fanon, Malcolm X,
and Che Guevarra. They also took seriously the theorizing of the Johnson-Forest Tendency
(Geschwender, 1977). Like the Johnson-Forest Tendency, the League held that “Black workers
are more responsive than white workers to organizational attempts because of their

59

superexploited position in American society” (Geschwender, 1977, 135). As League leader
Michael Hamlin put it, “Our overall line was that: Black workers were the vanguard of the
revolutionary struggle” (Hamlin, 2012, 19, italics in original).
A wide variety of different kinds of workplaces—factory workers, postal workers, and
newspaper workers organized under the League banner. It was not necessarily similar working
conditions that united them, although many did face similarly abusive conditions. It was the
League’s contention that the workers struggle in Detroit and elsewhere was simultaneously a
Black struggle, and that the Black struggle in the U.S. was also a labor struggle.

The Black Panther Party
Like the LRBW, the Detroit branch of the Black Panther Party (BPP) formed less than a
year after the Rebellion, founded by young radicals Ron Scott and Eric Bell). Both Scott and
Bell had participated in the Rebellion and were much affected by it. Their organizing drew from
growing anger and energy in the Detroit Black community in its aftermath. The Panthers took a
stance of militant self-defense of the Black community as well as organized a number of what
they called “survival” programs. By February 1969 they had established free breakfast programs
for children in three locations, a free rat extermination program, and a free barbershop. They had
also opened a free health clinic in the Jeffries Housing Project (Rahman, 2008). The Panthers, in
contrast to the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, believed that the lumpenproletraiat, that
is the unemployed or underemployed Black poor, would be a key revolutionary force. Their
social programs were designed to improve conditions for this group and to build support.
Panther scholar Ahmad Rahman points out that the social programs organized by the
Party were in fact more alarming to the FBI than were the guns that Party members were known

60

to brandish. By spring of 1969 it was clear that the Detroit BPP had been infiltrated by the FBI.
The Party disbanded and regrouped as the National Committee to Combat Fascism (NCCF).
They continued their affiliation with the National Black Panther Party, however and distributed
the party newspaper throughout the city. It was a scuffle over distribution of The Black Panther
that set the stage for a police siege on the NCCF headquarters at 16
th
and Myrtle Street in
October 1970. Fifteen NCCF members were arrested after a standoff with police and charged
with conspiracy to murder a patrolman (Rahman, 2008).
The chaos that this mass arrest caused at the upper levels of the NCCF, as well as
continuing FBI infiltration, national and local infighting, and a crumbling infrastructure on the
national level eroded the Party’s organization and influence. Nevertheless, the Detroit Black
Panther Party would continue its survival and social programs into the mid-1970s (Rahman,
2008).

The Republic of New Africa
The Republic of New Africa (RNA), founded in 1968 in Detroit by brothers Richard and
Milton Henry (who later changed their names to Imari and Gaidi Obadele), was another
prominent nationalist group that operated in the area in the 1960s and 70s. The Milton brothers
had been involved with previous organizing in the city, including acting as key organizers of the
Freedom Now Party. The RNA sought to create a separate Black socialist nation in the Southern
U.S. that would consist of the states of Georgia, Alabama, South Carolina, Mississippi, and
Louisiana, whose nation building was to be funded by reparations which they sought from the
United States (Obadele, 1972; Sonebeyatta, 1971). In their inaugural event, a conference on
March 31, 1968, 100 attendees signed a declaration of independence from the United States

61

(Cunnigen, 2006). Two years later, in 1970, the RNA purchased land (in a deal that would
eventually go bad) in rural Mississippi, where they planned to found El Malik, the capital of their
new Black nation (Cunnigen, 2006).
The RNA “saw itself as fighting a war of national liberation” (Martin, 2010), and took
seriously the idea of nation building. “Freedom,” Imari Obadele wrote in 1972, “cannot be
amorphous and misty—it must be for sovereignty” (Obadele, 1972, 27). For the RNA, this
meant, in large part, economic sovereignty, and the group outlined a plan to establish internal
economic self-sufficiency and external economic relationships with nations like China. In 1971,
Yusufu Sonebeyatta, the RNA’s economic minister, advocated a plan to create an international
partnership and common markets with Black Caribbean nations, as well as countries in Africa,
Asia, and Latin America (Sonebeyatta, 1971).
The cornerstone of the RNA’s theory of economics was the idea of Ujamaa, an idea
popularlized in the U.S. by Maulana Karenga of the cultural nationalist US organization (Hayes
III & Jeffries, 2006), which Sonebeyatta translated as “familyhood” (Sonebeyatta, 1971), and
which elsewhere has been translated as cooperative or collective economics (Cunnigen, 2006;
Darden & Thomas, 2013; Hayes III & Jeffries, 2006). RNA’s overarching economic message to
Black people was “rely on oneself!” (Obadele, 1974).
Before the formation of the RNA, Gaidi Obadele (then Milton Henry), had a close
friendship with Malcolm X (G. L. Boggs, 1998; Marable, 2011). The RNA maintained some of
the connections that the Henry brothers had developed in earlier periods with a number of public
figures in Black Power movements, such as Betty Shabazz and Robert Williams (Cunnigen,
2006; Geschwender, 1977).

62

Inner City Sub-Center and Operation Get-Down
While many of the activist groups that emerged in the post-Rebellion years had relatively
short lifespans of activity, due largely to FBI and police infiltration and attack, a few developed
into more long-standing organizations. The Inner City Sub-Center (ICSC) and Operation Get-
Down (OGD) were two of these.
ICSC was incorporated as a non-profit in 1969, affiliated with the Education Committee
of the Association of Black Studies at Wayne State University to “address the needs of ghetto
residents” (Darden & Thomas, 2013, 19). ICSC was formed as a Black self-help organization,
and developed programming based on Maulana Karenga’s “Nguza Saba” or “Seven Principles of
Blackness” : 1) Umoja (Unity), 2) Kujichajulia (Self-Determination), 3) Ujima (Collective Work
and Responsibility), 4) Ujamaa (Collective Economics), 5) Nia (Purpose), 6) Kuumba
(Creativity), and 7) Imani (Faith) (Darden & Thomas, 2013; Hayes III & Jeffries, 2006).
ICSC operated an evolving range of programs in the next thirty years, incorporating a
preschool, a senior program which included hot lunches and activities, adult GED prep and
career counseling, and youth programs. The organization especially emphasized modeling
economic self-help, including operating a cooperative store to model collective work and
collective economics. Eventually, ICSC began a larger project of encouraging youth
entrepreneurship and the establishment of Black-owned businesses in Detroit’s Black
neighborhoods (Darden & Thomas, 2013)
Similarly, Operation Get-Down was started shortly after the Rebellion, incorporating as a
non-profit in 1971. OGD was founded by Bernard Parker, a former member of the Black
Panther Party, and like ICSC, his organization regarded itself as an institution of Black self-help.

63

OGD underscored this emphasis by explicitly drawing on only funding acquired from the Black
community (Darden & Thomas, 2013).
Their biggest program in the 1970s and 80s was a food cooperative. A former OGD
member explained, “The 1967 rebellion was still fresh in our minds and we understood the
consequence of challenging authority without a source for our food supply. Certain that there
was a need for change and willing to take on the task, we decided to develop a Food Co-op
program. In the event of a revolution, we would be able to supply ourselves and our community
with adequate food” (Darden & Thomas, 2013, 26).
Both ICSC and OGD drew heavily on the existing energy and theorizing of the post-
rebellion Black power movements in Detroit. However instead of taking a directly
confrontational strategy, they established non-profit organizations to promote Black self-help
and cooperative economics in order to build independent Black institutions. ICSC and OGD,
while they had quite radical underpinnings, were never heavily infiltrated by COINTELPRO,
and continue to operate in the city. It should be noted, however, that OGD in particular changed
form considerably over the years, evolving into one of the largest United Way organizations in
Detroit. In its current materials, OGD downplays its more radical past rhetoric and presents
itself primarily as a charity organization, albeit one which continues to be Black-run.

Religious Nationalism
Detroit is also one of the most important centers for religious Black Nationalism in the
United States. It is in Detroit that, for instance that arguably the most influential Black
Nationalist religious organization in the U.S.—the Nation of Islam—was founded, and continues
to heavily impact. Indeed, as Angela Dillard has noted, it is these three influences—race, labor,

64

and religion—that have shaped “at almost every turn” (Dillard, 2003, 157) activism in the city. I
include here a brief overview of some of the religious influences that have most impacted radical
Black organizing in the city.

The Nation of Islam and Malcolm X
Detroit is the founding city of the Nation of Islam (NOI), and while its headquarters had
not been located there since the 1930s, when Elijah Muhammad fled the city, it remained a
mainstay of Black politics in Detroit. Moreover, Malcolm X, throughout and then after his
association with the NOI, frequently returned to the city in which he began his oratory work.
James and Grace Lee Boggs, as well as Reverent Albert Cleage, promoted Malcolm X’s
ideas and actively organized for him to come speak in Detroit. This triad had, for instance, been
instrumental in bringing Malcolm to the city to give his 1963 “Message to the Grassroots” at the
Grassroots Leadership Conference, where he spoke to 2000 people in a mass rally (Joseph,
2006), and his 1964 “The Ballot or the Bullet” speech in the city (Rahman, 2008).
After Malcolm’s affiliation with the NOI ended, he returned to Detroit a number of times
to speak, to continued enthusiasm. Grace Boggs urged him to make the city his home base,
because he had so much support in Detroit’s radical organizations whereas it seemed that his
backing in Harlem was more precarious (Marable, 2011, 355). Max Stanford, founder of RAM,
was one of the well-established organizers in the city who vocally supported Malcolm, and
helped him to forge ties with other young revolutionaries in the city (Joseph, 2006). More
privately, he, Malcolm, and Grace Boggs discussed the possibility of reshaping RAM into the
“underground cadre organization” of Malcolm’s new secular organization, the Organization of
African American Unity (G. L. Boggs, 1998; Marable, 2011, 354).

65

The Nation of Islam continues to be an influence in Black politics in Detroit. Particularly
resonant have been ideas around Black self-reliance. Louis Farrakhan wrote immediately before
the Million Man March in 1995, “We will make the shoes and cobble our feet. We will make the
suits and dresses to clothe our backs…We will take responsibility for food, clothing and shelter
for our people” (Farrakhan, 1994). As part of this vision, the Nation of Islam purchased 1,556
acres of land in rural Georgia to create a farm to develop food self-sufficiency (McCrutcheon,
2011). Grace Boggs noted in her autobiography that the NOI’s vision of self-reliance is
particularly resonant in Detroit.

The Pan-African Orthodox Church and Reverend Albert Cleage
On Easter Sunday, 1967, just a few months before the Rebellion, Reverend Albert B.
Cleage renamed Detroit’s Central Congregational Church, The Shrine of the Black Madonna,
and “formally launched his ecumenical Black Christian movement” (Dillard, 2003, 153). The
church was the founding congregation of the Pan-African Orthodox Christian Church (PAOCC),
which was “guided in part by the notion of a black Christ as a black revolutionary, and of a
(new) black church as the cornerstone of a (new) black nation…[which called] for community
control of institutions in the inner city, as well as for self-determination in economics, politics,
and, above all, religion” (Dillard, 2003, 153-154). His sermons combined “the practical with the
prophetic,” as he “reimagin[ed] biblical tales as contemporary allegories of race, rebellion, and
redemption” (Joseph, 2006, 55-56).
Cleage was influenced greatly by his own family’s pastor, Reverend Horace A. White,
who was one of the few pro-union Black clergymen who publically critiqued Ford’s
“cooperative” arrangement with Black churches to recommend anti-union members for

66

employment. White wrote of the Black church in Detroit in a 1937 article in Christian Century:
“The one organization through which the Negro ought to feel free to express his hopes and work
out his economic salvation cannot help him because the Negro does not own it—it belongs to the
same people who own the factories” (quoted in Dillard, 2003, 159).
Reverend Cleage’s influence extended well beyond the church. Historian Peniel Joseph
noted that “possessing limited connections to ‘responsible Negro leadership,’ the good reverend
became the Pied Piper of the city’s scoundrels—an assorted collection of militant youth, veteran
activists, and the simply disgruntled” (Joseph, 2006, 55). Before the Rebellion, Cleage had been
active in city and national Black politics. In 1961 he helped found the Group on Advanced
Leadership (GOAL) which asserted a more militant approach to organizing for political power
than the more established Black civil rights groups in the city, organizing vigorously against
urban renewal, picketing stores which discriminated against Black workers and customers, and
protesting unequal education for Black students (Dillard, 2007; Joseph, 2006).
After the Rebellion, Cleage was elected chairperson of the City-Wide Citizen Action
Committee (CCAC), as the “most influential spokesman for black militancy and black
nationalism in Detroit following the riot” (Fine, 2007, 373). The CCAC was a coalition of
radical Black organizations that partnered with more moderate Black forces to organize for
greater Black control of post-Rebellion city politics.
The PAOCC and Reverend Cleage loomed large in the radical Detroit organizing
community. Grace Lee and James Boggs attended church at the Shrine (G. L. Boggs, 1998) as
well as organizing with him. Some of the most influential figures in the League of
Revolutionary Black Workers, John Watson, Ken Cockrell, and General Baker, all had ties with
Cleage and GOAL (Dillard, 2003), as did Milton and Richard Henry, who would later go on to

67

found The Republic of New Africa (Joseph, 2006). Students from the Revolutionary Action
Movement and Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee discussed Cleage’s ideas,
particularly his push for a “strategy of chaos” which called for “devastating civil disobedience”
in order for Black people to take control of their neighborhoods (quoted in Ahmad & Jeffries,
2006, 264).

1960s Movements in Synthesis
These organizations, while all committed to the development of Black power, were by no
means unified. There were tensions between them, ranging from more minor disagreements to
major and fundamental antagonisms. Some of these were questions of strategy. LRBW, for
instance, was quietly critical of the Black Panther party as “too crazy in their approach” and
objected to having “had to come to their rescue and, literally, bail them out of the tight spots they
got into” (Hamlin, 2012, 27). There was much more explicit and serious tension in the 1960s
and 70s between adherents of a more cultural nationalist approach, particularly the Republic of
New Africa, and the Black Panther Party’s revolutionary nationalism. In general, the Panthers
objected to what they called "porkchop nationalism” or nationalism which emphasized
reclaiming cultural flourishes like African style clothing, at the expense of political
transformation (Joseph, 2006). However this mistrust hit an apex when conflict erupted
violently between the US organization and Maulana Karenga, based in Los Angeles, and the Los
Angeles chapter of the Black Panther Party. In January of 1969 tensions between US and the
Los Angeles Panthers exploded into a shootout at Campbell Hall on UCLA’s campus, instigated
and fueled by the CIA and the Los Angeles Police Department (Churchill & Wall, 2001). US
members killed two Panthers, Bunchy Carter and John Huggins. Antagonisms between groups

68

affiliated with either group grew in Los Angeles and nation-wide, spurred on by rumors that
Karenga had strategized with the FBI and police to attack the Panthers (Brown, 1992; Hayes III
& Jeffries, 2006). These tensions bled out into Black movements nationwide, including in
Detroit. For instance, US leader Maulana Karenga was forced to cancel an appearance in Detroit
in March 1970 because the NCCF announced a “death warrant” on him and Black playwright
LeRoi Jones who also had associations with cultural nationalism. Jones kept his Detroit
engagement, heavily guarded by members of the Republic of New Africa (Rahman, 2008).
Indeed, it is now clear that the antagonism between these groups were fomented, or at the very
least exacerbated by FBI provocateurs (Hamlin, 2012; Rahman, 2008).
Despite these tensions, however, these organizations in Detroit had similarities. Most
central of these is a rich legacy in the city of critique of racial capitalism—that is, the ways in
which capitalism profits from, develops, takes advantage of, and operates through racial
hierarchies, and the ways in which racism is integral to the operation of contemporary capitalist
systems.
4
Most of these organizations identified racial capitalism as one of the greatest sources
of injustice for Black people and had various programs to develop alternative economic forms,
either through Black self-help programs, “pending revolution,” like the BPP, the idea of building
a separate nation state with a national economy, like the RNA, or by developing Black-run
commodity chains for food and other essentials, like the PAOCC and the NOI. Moreover, most
of these movements in the city centered the necessity of building independent institutions and
even independent territories operated by Black people, for Black people.

Movements for Black Self-Determination

4
As Stuart Hall noted in his essay “Race, Articulation and Societies Structured in Dominance”: “Race is…the
modality in which class is ‘lived,’ the medium through which class relations are experienced (Hall, 1980, p. 341)

69

D-Town Farm founder Malik Yakini has said that “in many ways the work we do is
rooted in this decades long struggle in the city of Detroit for Black self-determination, and [the
farms are] really one aspect of the larger struggle for community empowerment and community
self-determination” (Yakini, 2014). The organizations that emerged in the 1960s and 70s had a
number of common themes on which Detroit farmers draw currently. The four most dominant of
these are 1) a deep focus on Black labor, 2) a sense that developing cooperative forms of
economics is a necessary aspect of Black liberation and self-determination, 3) a sense that
acquiring access to and control of land is a necessary aspect of Black liberation and self-
determination, and 4) some kind of a focus in their programming on issues of food.
Contemporary farmers draw deeply on the arguments about Black liberation, especially those
centered on these threads, articulated by these earlier movements.
Most of the radical Black movements in Detroit in the 1960s had some kind of Marxist
analysis and as such, often centered labor in their visions. This is perhaps unsurprising in a
traditionally industrial city like Detroit, where labor movements and the lives of laboring people
were and are so central of the operation and identity of the place. The most obvious example of
this was the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, which identified labor as one of the most
central Black struggles, and Black struggles as central to the success of a workers’ revolution.
However all Black movements in Detroit paid a great deal of attention to relationships between
Black working conditions and Black dignity and self-determination. Some of these, like LRBW,
explicitly built their organizing around labor struggles.
Others, focused their analysis of work towards the idea of building a Black centered
cooperative economy. The Republic of New Africa and the Nation of Islam both took a
separatist approach, declaring that Black freedom depends in part on building an independent

70

economy. The Pan-African Orthodox Church, the Inner-City Sub-Center and Operation Get-
Down, while not outright declaring the need to form a sovereign Black nation, also incorporated
aspects of cooperative economics into their programming. For ICSC the need to develop Black-
centered, cooperative economic practices were based on the ideas of Ujima (collective work and
responsibility) and Ujamaa (Collective economics), both principles of “Nguza Saba,” Maulana
Karenga’s formulation of “Principles of Blackness.” Among these principles were). Similarly,
The Republic of New Africa framed their economic program in cultural nationalist terms, calling
their national economic program Ujamaa (Sonebeyatta, 1971).
Other groups drew less on cultural nationalism in the formation of Black centered
cooperatives. The Revolutionary Action Movement (many of whose members went on to found
the League of Revolutionary Black Workers), for instance included the development of “Black
Farmer Coops” as one point in its twelve point platform (Ahmad & Jeffries, 2006). Operation
Get-Down, which was not explicitly cultural nationalist in formation, formed a food cooperative
as its centerpiece program in the 1970s and 80s.
Separatist organizations in particular also emphasized the need for land and territory as
central in order to attain Black freedom and sovereignty. These included most obviously the
Republic of New Africa, which saw itself as formally establishing a sovereign territory in the
Southern United States. In addition to viewing the acquisition of land in order to form an
independent nation, they also saw the development of Black agriculture as central to the
development of an independent economy. As RNA president Imari Abubakari Obadele wrote
from prison, after having been arrested in a shootout with police at the RNA headquarters in
Jackson, Mississippi, “Our major work now is the establishment of cooperative farms across the
state, owned by blacks in America’s ghettos as well as the people here on the land, as the basis

71

for establishing a full-range of cooperatively owned industry and modern New Communities”
(Obadele, 1974, 40).
Other groups made similar moves as well, generally in the direction of acquiring land
specifically on which to grow food. As Malik Yakini of D-Town farm noted, “within the Black
liberation movement there has always been a strain of thought that growing our own food is an
important part of our movement. And probably that has manifested on the highest level with the
Nation of Islam and the farms that they own in Georgia and Michigan” (Yakini, 2014). In this,
land translated into the ability of Black people to secure their own food sources, and therefore to
be able to begin to develop a greater degree of autonomy.
Even groups which did not center the acquisition of land in their programs, often
included food as central to their overall programs for Black liberation. These were often framed
as self-help programs, such as the Black Panthers’ breakfast programs and the Inner City Sub
Center’s senior hot lunch program. These programs, while not striving to build an alternate
economic structure, highlighted the extent to which food security and inadequate access to
nutrition were pressing issues in Detroit’s Black community.

Farming in Detroit
Southern Roots
The roots of the practice of urban agriculture in Detroit, for many farmers in the city, can
be traced from the South, from family histories of growing food as enslaved people, as
sharecroppers, as independent farmers, and as migrants trying to make a life in the industrial
North. “The physical distance between Alabama and Detroit might be substantial,” historian

72

Angela Dillard notes, “but the two locations are bound together—by patterns of migration and
travel, by culture, by family ties, and by mutual identification” (Dillard, 2003, 155).
Migrants inevitably brought with them many aspects of Southern culture. Michael
Hamlin, one of the main organizers of the League of Revolutionary Black workers in Detroit, in
his autobiography noted “We had a culture in the South of sharing scarcity” (Hamlin, 2012, 4)
where families and communities would, as James and Grace Lee Boggs were fond of saying,
work together to “make a way out of no way” (Ward, 2011, 7). Hamlin remembered a culture of
Black migrants helping each other: “The ones who had already arrived would take in the new
ones and help them get established. That was one of the healthy parts of Southern culture that
we carried with us” (Hamlin, 2012, 6). Reverend Cleage explicitly worked to retain some of
these aspects of Black Southern culture which he saw as fostering Black survival and resiliency
(Dillard, 2003).
Some Black migrants settled outside of the city center in small “colonies” where Blacks
were permitted to live. Charles Butler, a Detroiter who came from Arkansas in the Great
Migration remembered, “One of the things that was inbred in us in the south is that land is
extremely important—a home and land” (quoted in Sugrue, 2005, 34). Because Black
homebuyers were unable to quality for mortgages, they often pooled their resources into
collective financing arrangements (Sugrue, 2005). One of the things that made settling in the
1920s and 30s into the outlying areas near Eight-Mile, where there was a small Black rural
neighborhood, was the accessibility of land for gardening. Residents frequently turned the land
around their homes into large corn and vegetable gardens (Sugrue, 2005, 40).
These traditions of farming persisted in the city long after it had built up from rural
enclaves to urban neighborhoods. Feedom Freedom’s Wayne Curtis remembered, “When I was

73

small, living on the East Side, people had gardens. Basically everybody on my block was either
from Georgia or Alabama, and everybody ate beans or fresh vegetables. They had their gardens.
And they had a good time!” (W. Curtis, 2014).

The Farms
D-Town Farm
In 2000, Malik Yakini, a long-time activist in Detroit’s Pan-African Nationalist
community was principal at Nsoroma Institute, an Afro-Centric elementary and middle school on
Detroit’s Northeast Side. Yakini remembered, “We had an organic garden behind the school.
And then, after a couple of years, some parents and staff said, I want a garden at my house. I
want a garden in the lot next to my house. So we started this collective, called the Shamba
Organic gardening collective that had about twenty gardens around the city…We had a team
called the groundbreakers that would go out on Saturday morning with tillers and tools and we
would prepare people’s gardens for them” (Yakini, 2012).
In 2006, the group established themselves formally as the Detroit Black Community
Food Security Network (DBCFSN). Immediately, DBCFSN began to rally the city to take the
issue of food security more seriously. Yakini recalled, “In June of 2006 we spoke before the
Detroit City Council…and we asked the city to give us two acres of city owned land. And we
also kind of criticized the city for not having a food policy. And so out of that one meeting
eventually grew the Detroit Food Policy Council because we were appointed on the spot to kind
of create that” (Yakini, 2012). Though they did not get the land that they asked from the city,
DBCFSN was still determined to create a farm to serve as a model for the possibilities of Black

74

food sovereignty in Detroit. Ideally, they wanted at least two acres, so that it could legitimately
be called a farm rather than a garden.
Their first sites were smaller, however. They began farming on the East Side by the 4-H
club at Gratiot and McClellan Streets. “The director of the 4-H club at the time told us, oh yeah,
you all can garden on that plot, you know…He didn’t really have any jurisdiction, but he told us
we could use it and we said, okay, let’s go ahead and do it…And at the end of our growing
season it was purchased by a developer to build some kind of senior citizen’s complex or
something. So we had to move” (Yakini, 2012)
In 2007, DBCFSN began farming at Cascade and Collingwood, on a Westside lot owned
by the Shrine of the Black Madonna. The Shrine had used the site for their own farming projects
previously, but it fell out of use and they offered to share it with DCBCFSN. It was at this site
that DBCFSN began to call their farm D-Town. They installed irrigation systems and began to
develop their systems for organizing planting, as well as organizing labor and volunteers at the
site (Yakini, 2012).
However in 2008, The Shrine decided that they needed the land for other programing,
and DBCFSN was left scrambling for a place to farm. Luckily, the group’s longstanding
relationship with the city “began to bear fruit” (Yakini, 2012) and the city offered them two acres
in River Rouge Park on the city’s West Side. It was an ideal location to develop a large farm—
the site was mostly a wide open field, and because it had previously been a tree nursery a small
orchard of apple trees remained. Moreover, it had a fire hydrant nearby, which could be used as
a water source. In October of 2008, DBCFSN received a ten year license agreement with the
city to use two acres of the land for growing food. In 2011 the city extended the agreement to
include five more acres (Yakini, 2012).

75

Currently D-Town farms occupies seven acres of land in River Rouge park and grows
nearly forty different kinds of crops including vegetables, fruits, herbs, and mushrooms. They
also raise bees. In the growing season D-Town operates regular work days twice a week which
are open to anyone. Like many farms in the city, they participate in the Youth Growing Detroit
program, in which young people get paid a small stipend to work on the farm and get farming
skills. They also run a twelve week internship program for aspiring Black farmers to learn
agricultural skills (Yakini, 2014). Additionally, DBCFSN also runs the Ujamaa Buying
Collective for staples that cannot be grown at the farm. They have been laying the groundwork
expand this collective into a brick and mortar cooperative store in 2015.

Feedom Freedom
Feedom Freedom is a much smaller farm than D-Town, located on eighteen vacant city
lots on Detroit’s Far East Side. However, despite their small size, Feedom Freedom grows a
similar variety of crops, albeit on a smaller scale, including a wide variety of lettuce and
tomatoes, kale, chard, grapes, and berries. Like D-Town they also raise bees. In the summers
Feedom Freedom operates a program for teenagers partially through Youth Growing Detroit.
Their program with youth includes both a hands-on farming component and programming
designed to develop youth’s knowledge about food sovereignty in Detroit, and to build their
writing and facilitation skills. Feedom Freedom also has an “Art in the Garden” program for
small children, and holds monthly “Cook Fresh” workshops to teach teenagers and adults how to
cook with fresh fruits and vegetables.
Wayne Curtis, a former member of the Black Panther Party, was an art teacher at
Nsoroma Institute as the school launched its gardening program in 2000 (Yakini, 2014).

76

Although he started gardening only after he left his job there, he cited it as influencing his sense
of food as part of a larger Black struggle. “I realized later,” he said, “that some of the things that
I learned at Nsoroma about food security and good health are very much a part of the things that
Black people have been doing in general in Detroit for a long time. The Black Panther Party and
the Republic of New Africa, a host of other organizations that were in the city, plus the people in
the neighborhoods trying to find a more secure and more efficient ways of responding and living.
So we found ourselves engaged with creating an atmosphere where we could do that ourselves”
(W. Curtis, 2014).
In 2008, Wayne Curtis and Myrtle Thompson-Curtis moved in together to a flat in the
middle of what is now Feedom Freedom. At the time, their duplex was surrounded by weeds—
weeds across the street, weeds in the lots next to theirs, weeds that grew up waist high in the
summer months. Thompson-Curtis told me once that initially she wanted to cut down the weeds
not for gardening, but because she was afraid of what kinds of animals and “creepy crawlies”
might be lurking in them.
However it was Wayne that pushed to make the site into a garden. Wayne Curtis
described his motivation:

We started growing food…with the idea in mind that we were just going to have a
little farm and grow us some food…But always in the back of my mind I was
thinking that this would be a good catalyst to have contact with people in the
neighborhood, to have contact and talk about social issues, political issues,
economic issues. I didn’t know a lot about tomato growing or a lot about aphids,
like I do now, or a lot about flea beetles, different types of insects, the seasons, crop

77

rotations. But I did know a lot about the need to empower ourselves so we could
start controlling and determining the destiny of ourselves and the things we want to
do (W. Curtis, 2014).

Thompson-Curtis recalled, “He started saying we should make it a garden. So Wayne
and I started getting introduced to the garden resource program and got the application and the
seeds. We didn’t know a lot about it” (Thompson-Curtis, 2014). Curtis and Thompson-Curtis,
like many Detroit farmers, learned many of their farming skills through an intensive program
called Urban Roots
5
. D-Town farmer Kadiri Sennefer remembered the 2010 Urban Roots class:
“We had an all-star class. That was the turning point. Like, in my life. From there I met a slew
of wonderful people. The majority of us are still in contact today. Mama Myrtle [Thompson-
Curtis] was in that class. [He lists other well-known Detroit farmers] It’s a lot to name. It was a
lot of people in that class that are doing some wonderful work now” (Sennefer, 2012).
Feedom Freedom quickly plugged into the urban agriculture network in Detroit, and this
led to opportunities to be involved in a more national and international conversation about food
and food sovereignty. Thompson-Curtis described, “The first, no the second year I was able to
go to Growing Power to meet with Allen
6
, to be exposed to that history. The second year I was
able to go to Oakland, California…I got to sit down with Raj Patel
7
, folks from the People’s
Grocery
8
, and just understand the global impact—agriculture, being in control of your food”

5
Urban Roots is a farmer training program which was, in 2010 operated through the Gardening Resource Center
which was the urban agriculture subsection of a larger environmental organization called the Greening of Detroit.
The urban agriculture program of The Greening of Detroit broke away in 2013 and is now called Keep Growing
Detroit and is operated independently.
6
Growing Power is a well-known urban agriculture project in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, founded by former
professional basketball player Will Allen.
7
Raj Patel is a British-born international food justice activist, who has authored a number of books, including
Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System.
8
People’s Grocery is a community market and urban agriculture organization in Oakland, California.

78

(Thompson-Curtis, 2014). Feedom Freedom has also developed strong connections with Grace
Lee Boggs, now 98, and the Boggs Center to Nurture Community Leadership.
In 2012, Feedom Freedom received funding through the CHIRP program, funded by the
USDA and administered by nearby Oakland University. The grant has had a dramatic impact at
Feedom Freedom; previous to this funding, Feedom Freedom had operated with almost no
budget at all. The CHIRP grant allowed Thompson-Curtis to quit her job as a short-order cook
and focus on Feedom Freedom full time, and gave the organization (and the Thompson-Curtis
family) a level of financial stability which they had previously not had.
However, it also meant that the organization was beholden to their funders in ways that
they found constraining. Neither Wayne nor Myrtle had ever worked in a non-profit setting and
were unfamiliar with the budgeting, accounting, and record keeping protocols that the USDA
grant and Oakland University demanded. In the first two years of the grant, enormous amounts
of time were spent deciphering, doing, and then redoing administrative tasks. Additionally,
granters often framed goals and achievement in ways which were not necessarily in alignment
with Feedom Freedom’s priorities. Thompson-Curtis notes, “Sometimes those dollars represent
challenges. Because they want outcomes that are a mile wide when we are actually going a mile
deep. And not being corporatist or in love with our capitalist society, it’s a challenge in that area
also” (Thompson-Curtis, 2014).
Nevertheless, Feedom Freedom has managed to retain the spirit with which they began—
to connect with people in their community. Like many of the gardens in the city, it is deeply
embedded in the neighborhood in which it is located. Neighbors often stop by and hang out on
the Thompson-Curtis’ front porch or pull up a lawn chair in the garden. It is from this dynamic
that Feedom Freedom comes to their catch-phrase—“Grow a garden, grow a community.”

79

Genealogies
The programs of Feedom Freedom and D-Town farms have clearly evolved out of the
economic and racial context of the city and the region. On one hand, these farms developed, on
a very basic level, out of need. This is a similar need that Black migrants carried with them as
they came to the city at the beginning of the twentieth century—the need for food and to create a
life in a city which is not structured for their success, indeed, was arguably structured against
their success.
On the other hand, the farms developed out of the opportunities that were created because
of Detroit’s economic crisis and abandonment. Unlike most other cities in the United States, it is
relatively easy in Detroit to find land that is unclaimed, at least by de facto if not on paper, and to
farm on it. The city’s abandonment, while absolutely leading to incredible hardship for most city
residents, has also opened it up to opportunities to experiment with various forms of alternative
food systems and alternative social and economic systems.
Feedom Freedom and D-Town Farm both trace their genealogies from histories of radical
organizing in the city. They link the work that they do with these earlier movements to build
Black power and Black self-determination in the city. It is with this consciousness that both
explicitly view their work as dealing both with food security as an issue of immediate justice,
and as working toward building alternative food systems as a crucial node in working towards
racial and economic justice.

80

Chapter Three

Farming for Freedom: Food Security, Food Sovereignty, and Urban
Agriculture in Detroit

“I think sometimes our message gets confused for folks. Because they think of “grow a garden
grow a community” and they stop at the grow a garden part and they just see the food aspect of
it. But I think it takes a conversation with Wayne or myself or some of our kids to really get an
insight into it’s so much more than just the food. It’s so much more than growing the food. But
that is a great place to start.”
--Myrtle Thompson-Curtis, Feedom Freedom Growers (Thompson-Curtis, 2012)

The spring in Detroit is like waking up. After a long Midwestern winter of grey skies,
brown leafless tress, and piles of dirty snow, each of the first bright green buds on the trees feels
like an affirmation of survival; we made it through the winter.
Spring is when farming in Detroit gets back into full swing. Regular farm work days
restart after winter hiatuses. Work boots replace snow boots. The first early crops are ready in
the early spring: cool weather greens like lettuce and spinach, which farmers grow in hoop
houses to protect them from spring frost, and asparagus. Asparagus is an apt metaphor for
commitment to a place and slow processes. The first year you plant it, you can only harvest very
little, in order to give the plant time to establish itself it its new ground. But if you care for it for
a year or two with some patience, that same spot will produce asparagus every early spring for
up to thirty years.

81

At the heart of farming projects in Detroit is, of course, the production of food—
producing healthy food, learning to work with soil and seeds, communities built around growing
food. This chapter explores Detroit farmers’ ideas about food, identity, and power which
undergird their agriculture projects. One of the questions with which I began this project was
“Why food? Why farming?” Farmers from Feedom Freedom and D-Town Farm have all been a
part of Black struggles for justice and, as I discussed in the previous chapter, the farms evolved
largely out from a genealogy of radical Black organizing in the city. But why did food and the
production of food become such a prominent node of Black struggle in the city? What is so
important about food?
In this chapter, I discuss three answers to this question. First, I answer from the
perspective which is most obviously talked about in academic literature with regard to Detroit:
need. Numerous studies have pointed to the difficulties that Detroiters, particularly Black
Detroiters, have accessing (affording, finding transportation to, etc.) high quality, healthy, fresh
food. This lack of access has dire, and sometimes life threatening consequences, including many
food related illnesses like diabetes and heart disease. Farmers in Detroit often point to an urgent
need to create ways for Detroiters to access nutritious food, both as a matter of health, and,
crucially, a matter of survival. In the first section of this chapter, I examine the issue of food
access through a discussion of competing ideas of what it means to be “food secure.” NGOs,
governmental agencies, the City of Detroit, and Detroit farmers themselves all use the terms food
security and food insecurity to describe the need for food access. However, Detroit farmers and
the City of Detroit Policy on Food Security define food security in ways which expand the
meaning to include such issues as transportation, employment discrimination, and the need for
Black Detroiters to have greater control in the food system as a whole.

82

Second, I examine the ways in which Black-led agriculture in the city emphasizes
farming as a way to claim and celebrate African and African American culture, traditions, and
history. Detroit farmers actively work to reframe farming from an activity which is primarily
associated with oppression and enslavement, with one which is a source of pride, a connection
with one’s family and ancestors, and a source of power and self-determination.
Third, I explore the use of the term “food sovereignty” in food movements in Detroit.
Food sovereignty is an idea born out of peasant movements in the Global South to denote the
ways in which food production is linked with poor people’s, peasants, and indigenous
sovereignty. Increasingly, Black-led farming projects in Detroit use this term as well, as a way
to explain the link between urban agriculture and Black people’s wider struggles for self-
determination. As with the term food security, Detroit farmers rework this term to adapt to the
context of Northern, urban, postindustrial Detroit.
Both Feedom Freedom and D-Town Farmers view food—its production and
consumption—as central to struggles for Black freedom. In the previous chapter I described the
ways in which two different strains of radical Black thought in the city—particularly Black
cultural nationalism and legacies of the Black Panther Party and Black socialism—both viewed
access to food, and to controlling food systems as central to Black freedom, in the city and in
general. In this chapter I discuss farmers’ contemporary theorizing from this legacy, and the
ways in which farmers think about food access, food systems, and freedom in the context of
contemporary Detroit.

Expanding Notions of Food Security

83

One of the primary ways in which scholars have engaged with food and Detroit is
through the lens of “food security.” The term food security is employed in the U.S. and
internationally to refer to the extent to which a particular individual, household, or population
has consistent access to food. The idea of food security has been used most widely by NGOs
and governments, including reports published by the United States Department of Agriculture
(USDA) and the United Nations through the World Health Organization (WHO).
The City of Detroit, through the Detroit Food Policy Council, which is a committee
appointed by the City Council, has a definition of food security as well, one which is much
broader in scope than either the USDA or the WHO definitions. The Detroit Black Community
Food Security Network (DBCFSN) lobbied for and was foundational in the formation of The
Detroit Food Policy Council and as a result, their definition of food security is heavily influenced
by and in many ways reflective of the work of Black-led urban agriculture in the city. Currently
farmers from both Feedom Freedom and D-Town are council members. I begin this chapter with
a comparison of the USDA and WHO definitions of food security to begin to outline some of the
primary differences between these and the ways in which Detroit farmers frame needs around
food access.
The USDA defines food security in two tiers. “High food security” indicates no
problems or limitations at all with a particular household’s access to food. “Marginal food
security” reflects anxiety over food shortage in the household but that the household has enough
food. “Low food security” designates reduced quality or desirability of food and “Very low food
security” indicates serious problems accessing food, including lowered food intake and disrupted
eating patterns in the household (United States Department of Agriculture, 2013). The USDA
definition of food security is primarily at the household or individual level and has little

84

specificity about the food itself. For instance, there is no framework for examining the
availability of nutritious food, and no mention of such issues as whether or not food may be
appealing or fresh.
WHO’s definition of food security contains first the general statement that food security
exists “when all people at all times have access to sufficient, safe, nutritious food to maintain a
healthy and active life.” It then goes on to define three pillars of food security:
 Food availability: sufficient quantities of food available on a consistent basis.
 Food access: having sufficient resources to obtain appropriate foods for a
nutritious diet.
 Food use: appropriate use based on knowledge of basic nutrition and care, as
well as adequate water and sanitation (World Health Organization, n.d.).

The WHO definition much more than the USDA’s emphasizes community food security
rather than individual family food security, as well as contains in the heart of its definition an
assessment of community, regional, and cultural factors such as community knowledge and food
“appropriateness.” WHO also much more explicitly places food nutrition as central, in
comparison with the USDA definition, as well as addresses some factors which may impact food
access, like sanitation and the availability of clean water.
The City of Detroit’s definition of food security was established in 2008, when the city
council unanimously adopted “The City of Detroit Policy on Food Security.” The policy was a
broad reaching statement which critiqued the food access climate in Detroit, called for a wide
variety of policy solutions, and established the formation of The Detroit Food Policy Council as
an advisory board of the Detroit City Council. “The City of Detroit Policy on Food Security”

85

defined “community food security” (the statement does not define individual or household food
security) as “the condition which exists when all of the members of a community have access, in
close proximity, to adequate amounts of nutritious, culturally appropriate food at all times, from
sources that are environmentally sound and just.” “The City of Detroit Policy on Food Security”
goes on to define access to public transportation, the fact that many Detroiters get most of their
food from convenience and liquor stores, GMOs, and the fact that there are few African
American owned grocery stores in the city all as issues of food security (Detroit Food Policy
Council, 2008). Like the WHO definition and unlike the USDA, “The Detroit Policy on Food
Security,” explicitly foregrounds the issue of community food security, rather than focusing on
food security at an individual or household level. It also incorporates a broader scope of issues
under the umbrella of food security than the WHO definition, including racial injustice, labor
issues and employment discrimination, transportation, and environmental issues.
Unlike the WHO and USDA definitions, The City of Detroit Policy on Food Security
specifically highlights racial injustice in the food system as an issue of food security. For
instance, under the heading “Economic Justice within Food Systems,” the Policy states,
Aside from cashiers, baggers, stock persons and a few butchers, Detroiters,
specifically African Americans, are absent from the food system. Our primary and
predominant role is that of consumer. Detroit’s majority population must be
represented at all levels and in all aspects of the food system. Having an
economic/agricultural safety net to support the most vulnerable in our community
should be included in our goals. Redefining wealth and prosperity within our social
relationships and spiritual values will be a major step towards ensuring economic
justice (Detroit Food Policy Council, 2008).

86

This section of the policy is remarkable for its scope. First it argues for the need for
“Detroit’s majority population,” African Americans, to be included at all levels of the food
system rather than just the lowest echelons (cashiers and baggers) and as consumers—that its it
argues that Black Detroiters must be producers of food, not just consumers. Second, it argues
that food security may be provided for “the most vulnerable” in the community through a safety
net which is both economic and agricultural, that is, that producing food in Detroit is central to
food security in the city. And third, it includes the quite radical statement that we should
redefine wealth outside of capitalist economic value, and that we should reorient toward social
relationships and spirituality.
The City of Detroit Policy on Food Security is, in reality, more of a position statement
than a concrete plan. Indeed, Detroit is currently operating under the auspices of a state
appointed Emergency Financial Manager, which has rendered all elected city government
officially impotent—that is, they may make statements but conduct no official action—including
the City Council and City Council Committees such as the Detroit Food Policy Council.
However, previous to the appointment of the emergency manager the Detroit Food Policy
Council was able to use this document as a springboard for city programs. Perhaps the most
notable of these is the passage of Detroit’s Urban Agriculture Ordinance in 2013, which
legalized many forms of farming in the city (City of Detroit, 2013a). Nevertheless, the City of
Detroit Policy on Food Security is important as a guiding policy statement for the city of Detroit.
It is especially notable both for the wide range of issues that it enfolds under the rubric of food
security as well as for its locality and specificity to conditions in Detroit. The Policy particularly
prioritizes both the immediate food needs of Detroit’s residents as well as expressing the need to
build greater power in the African American community.

87

The policy largely reflects many of the main points that farmers made to me in interviews
and elsewhere on the issue of food security in Detroit. In interviews, farmers often narrated the
issue of food security and access to healthy food as a starting place for their work. Almost every
farmer I spoke with mentioned, for instance, the incredible toll that fast food and unhealthy food
has taken on the health of Black Detroiters. Numerous studies have shown that Detroit in
general, and African Americans in Detroit in particular, have much less access to fresh, high
quality healthy food from stores and supermarkets than their suburban and White counterparts
(Mari Gallagher Research Group, 2007; Pothukuchi, Mohamed, & Gebben, 2008; Sahnnon N.
Zenk et al., 2006; Shannon N. Zenk et al., 2005).
In 2007, The Mari Gallagher Group conducted a study of food deserts in the city and
concluded that “primarily poor food purchasing options are available through the USDA food
stamp retailers in Detroit” (Mari Gallagher Research Group, 2007)—that is, those relying on
food stamps in the city mainly have access to stores which offer little to no fresh, unprocessed
food—that is, no unprocessed fruits or vegetables. This study notes that this is a reflection of a
dearth of food options available in the city more generally, a situation which impacts healthy
food availability for more middle income residents as well. Another study concluded that there
were dramatic disparities in food safety compliance in grocery stores based on race, class, and
residence in the city (Pothukuchi et al., 2008). In other words, even where fresh food was
available in Detroit stores, it was left out longer, less attention was paid to temperature control,
and food was ultimately less safe and less fresh.
One major difference between farmer’s critiques of lack of access to healthy food and
many academic studies, is the academic emphasis on obesity and maintaining “healthy weight.”
Obesity in urban areas, Black obesity, and links between poverty and obesity are a major theme

88

and starting point for many studies of Detroit food deserts. Indeed, obesity is often the “hook” at
the beginning of these articles (Budzynska et al., 2013; Rose, 2011; Sahnnon N. Zenk et al.,
2006), to explain why the study of food insecurity and access to fresh fruit in Detroit matters.
In contrast, Detroit farmers tended to frame both food security in general, and Black food
security in particular, as a matter of community empowerment. They often included health under
the rubric of community empowerment, but only very rarely specifically mentioned obesity.
Detroit farmers often treated the issue of the health problems related to the issue of food access
and food security as an issue of survival, both individual and collective. As Malik Yakini noted
to the Detroit News about food related diseases like diabetes, “Literally, that lack of access [to
healthy food] is killing us” (Lynch, 2011).
Similarly, D-Town Compost Manager Kadiri Sennefer noted, “I mean there’s clearly
documented information about the health disparity within our communities. High levels of high
blood pressure. The numerous cases of diabetes. Hypertension. Etc. I mean, the list goes on.
And so once we really take a critical look into our food system, we realize that these foods that
we have easy access to, that we eat every day, are some of the main causes our health disparity”
(Sennefer, 2012). Sennefer’s contention is not only that healthy food is needed in order to
maintain life, that is, to survive, but also conversely: the inadequate, unhealthy, and toxic foods
that saturate the Detroit food system directly cause illness and premature death. His emphasis on
structural exposure of African Americans to conditions which damage their health resonates with
the environmental justice movements’ concerns about unequal exposure to toxicity. It also
echoes the work of local Detroit movements such as the Black Panther Party, which organized
health programs and health screening to address health disparities. Like academic researchers,
Detroit farmers regarded food security as deeply intertwined with health concerns. Crucially,

89

however, they related those health concerns to the broader and structural issues of poor and
Black suffering and premature death.

Black Agriculture
As discussed in the previous chapter, Black-led agriculture in Detroit draws from
previous and ongoing Black movements for freedom and power, particularly those which placed
an emphasis on Black economic and political power and self-reliance as well as groups like The
Republic of New Africa, the Nation of Islam, and the Pan-African Orthodox Christian Church
which have had emphases on acquiring and controlling land, and had developed some kind of
agricultural programs.
In part, for Detroit farmers, this has meant reclaiming Black cultural traditions around
food production, from learning about pre-slavery agricultural histories and traditions that stem
back to Africa, to remembering individual family food traditions from the Southern U.S. to
Detroit. This is not uncomplicated. The history of enslaved agricultural labor in the United
States has meant that African American’s relationships with agriculture are especially fraught.
Yakini notes that, “we [African Americans] tend to associate [farming] either with enslavement
or sharecropping or some other form of farming that essentially exploited our labor to enrich
somebody else. And so you’ve got a lot of Black folks that don’t want anything to do with it
because of that” (Yakini, 2012). Therefore, part of the struggle that Yakini sees is the work of
Black farmers in the city is to reframe farming as something that is possible for Black people to
control, rather than to be controlled by. Yakini notes that in working with youth at the farm:

90

Typically within the first fifteen minutes of having some young people at the
farm, there is some mention made of slavery. Either ‘you’re working me like a
slave’ or ‘I thought slavery was over.’ Some reference to that. Because that’s
the frame of reference we have. And so part of what we’re doing is to put
farming within a wider historical context—teaching about African
contributions to agriculture prior to our enslavement, so we can see that we
didn’t get into this just because we were enslaved, but that this is something
that, you know, we’ve been doing for centuries and centuries (Yakini, 2012).

He goes on to say, “The main thing we do is frame it as an act of community self-
determination. We’re not doing this to make somebody else rich. We’re doing this to empower
our own community.” To hold these two perspectives in tension is one of the main analytical
features of food sovereignty work in Detroit—on one hand to examine the ways that food
systems, their production, distribution, and consumption, have been and continue to exploit and
do damage to the bodies and cultural ties of Black people in the United States. And then on the
other hand to present an alternate vision of a food system which is controlled by and for Black
people, with their best interests in mind.
Detroit Black farmers then, tend to share a sense that Black agriculture in general, and
Black agriculture in Detroit in particular, have long, proud traditions, and that the creation of
collective Black farming in the city is merely a reiteration of past agricultural practices. This
telling of a history of Black agriculture tends to emphasize a need to reconnect with those roots,
remember family traditions, and relearn older traditions. For instance, Kadiri Senneffer relates

91

Black agricultural traditions from Africa and from the U.S. South to the Detroit tradition of
growing food in the backyard, critiquing the ways that these traditions have been lost.

Especially coming from an African-centered background, it’s like clearly being
aware of African’s roles in agriculture, how that’s a part of our legacy and our
heritage. And somehow, being a part of this society, we got away from that. Or
at least our generation. You know, even though my parents and our grandparents
grew food, you know, they came from the south and grew food, and when they
came up here a lot of people still grew food in their backyards. But somehow,
through our generation, we got away from that (Sennefer, 2012).

Similarly, Thompson-Curtis explains her relationship to land and agriculture as strong,
precisely because she is African American.

I mean, Black in America. Your connections to the land are just there. They’re
just there. And it didn’t represent…I never thought of sharecropping or
anything like that because I didn’t have any experience like that. I didn’t have
any bad memories. I had pleasant memories connected with growing food
(Thompson-Curtis, 2012).

The pleasant memories that she talks about are largely connected with her grandmother,
who grew food in a kitchen garden in her back yard in Detroit: “I always remembered the
garden that my grandmother had, and the food that came out of it. It just was an overall good…it

92

just…I didn’t have any warning bells or whistles saying this is not something we could do. This
was definitely something we could do.” Like Sennefer, Thompson-Curtis claimed urban
agriculture as a proud part of African American legacy and history. Moreover, both Sennefer
and Thompson-Curtis relate agriculture as something with roots that were both personal, roots of
kinship, and also that were based specifically in agricultural traditions in Detroit. By associating
agriculture with both African American tradition and Detroit history, they discursively distanced
it from the legacy of racist Southern agricultural structures.
Thompson-Curtis further underlined this by claiming an agricultural tradition that
preceded Black enslavement. She explained how she talked to youth at the farm about taking
pride in agricultural traditions: “I always reflect back when I’m talking to the kids,” she told me,
“Why do you think they went and got certain folks? Could it be that they actually had
knowledge about how to grow stuff? Could it be, you know, could it be that? And I’m thinking,
pretty much” (Thompson-Curtis, 2012). Indeed, Thompson Curtis’ position is borne out in the
work of, for instance, Judith Carney, who argues that the development of rice cultivation in the
United States, including local innovations, relied heavily on knowledge systems which enslaved
African brought with them to the Americas (Carney, 2001).
Here then, Thompson-Curtis rejects enslavement and exploitation as African American’s
primary relationship to land, nature, and growing food. Rather than explaining African
American’s relationship to land in terms of enslavement, she explains enslavement as an
exploitation of skilled agriculturalists. Furthermore, she stresses that their skills existed prior to
and independently of slavery. Indeed, she placed emphasis on particularly African American
strength and traditions of food growing and connection to land.

93

Sometimes Thompson-Curtis, and other farmers, reflected this contention in a relatively
abstract sense of Black American’s African agricultural roots. But more often, it was related to
the concrete memories of family food traditions. For instance, Thompson-Curtis reminisces:

Going back to when I was a kid, I remember—wow—how things revolved
around food. Celebrations. My aunts coming up north, I mean from the
South, to cook in the kitchen. To go out to the garden to grab food, to go to
the fresh air markets, Eastern Market. And food would come, we would all
be together preparing food (Thompson-Curtis, 2012).

Shopping at Detroit’s Eastern Market (a Detroit institution which remains today, and is
currently the U.S.’s largest farmers’ market), aunts growing food, families cooking and eating
together, food and celebration—farmers referred to these experiences as central to the Black
experience in Detroit, and connected them to both farming and food traditions in the U.S. South
and Black Detroit.
Implied in these narratives is a sense that knowledge of these skills and traditions,
particularly of African agricultural traditions, were not merely forgotten—that they were erased.
The counter-narrative which the farmers tell emphasizes the skills and capacities of Black
ancestors, both recent and distant, in growing their own food. In framing farming as a
particularly African American and Detroit tradition, farmers critique, sometimes implicitly,
sometimes explicitly, that the erosion of this tradition itself, and with its association with Black
culture, denies Black people tools of survival, a sense of self within history, and a sense of
themselves as holding the capacity to generate their own means to maintain life and health.

94

Indeed, over and over farmers I talked to rejected the idea of African American’s
inevitable alienation from land and growing because of the historical experience of slavery and
sharecropping. Almost every farmer I spoke with noted that one of the things that African
Americans have been robbed of by racism and capitalism is their traditions of connecting with
land and nature. They also emphasized that it is crucial to recuperate these.

Food as Connector
While all of the farmers who participated in this project have a strong emphasis on the
idea of food sovereignty specifically for Black people in Detroit, at some point almost every
farmer I spoke with mentioned food as a great universal, and as a force which has the potential to
bring together and connect disparate groups of people across racial, national, cultural, and
economic boundaries. As Yakini said to me, “Food is a great unifier” (Yakini, 2012). Rather
than emphasizing food’s universality, however, farmers tended to emphasize the potential in
food as a connector, as a way to build and maintain strong relationships, trust, intellectual
engagement, and solidarity. Sennefer told me of the relationships that he made not just in the
work of farming at D-Town, but in eating with other farmers as well. “This is the best way to
build relationships though—food,” he told me as we ate together in a Middle Eastern restaurant
close to D-Town Farm. “Man, that’s the best way to build a friendship, like, eating with
someone” (Sennefer, 2012). He went on to describe how he became close with a group of
interns at the farm.

We had rented the house across the street and we were like, okay, you go grab some
tomatoes, and you go grab some greens, and we’d come back and we’d be in the

95

kitchen and we’re all contributing to preparing the food. And, like, cooking talk,
basically. And we would develop a salad. And we would sit down and break bread
together and it was, it’s a different feeling, seriously. And that’s one of the things
that’s the best, it’s the best feeling in the world (Sennefer, 2012).

In Sennefer’s description it is preparing food that you have an intimate relationship with,
in a community of people—grabbing greens and tomatoes that the group had grown, preparing
the food together, and then sitting down to share the food and their collective energy—that built
the relationships and a sense of community.
In addition to developing relationships among people working with food together in
Detroit, farmers also frequently noted the ways that their involvement with farming had
connected them to a broader food justice movement. Often when I asked about connections with
people outside of farmers own farms or from outside of Detroit, their answers were in list form.
And often these lists were long, accompanied by descriptions of specific instances of working
together and/or learning together.
Curtis-Thompson told me,

When I think of community, man, I can’t say Manistique or Jefferson or East Side.
I have to think California, Germany, Denver, Kansas. Where is J___ [a college
student who worked on the farm for a summer] from? North Carolina. I have to
think of the community like that, of all the folks who come and bring their energy
(Thompson-Curtis, 2012).

96

With each place that she mentioned, Curtis-Thompson is referring to a specific person
who came to the garden and spent significant amounts of time there—commitments of multiple
years in two instances—working, eating, cooking, talking, and playing. These connections
sometimes took on even more significance given the fact that many of the farmers had traveled
little outside of the state before they began to interact with a larger food justice community.
In the four years since I began this research, Detroit has become increasingly well known
as a center for urban agriculture. As a result, farmers from both D-Town and Feedom Freedom
have become increasingly well known outside of the city. This new level of exposure has meant
that Detroit farmers have increasingly built relationships with the food movement outside of the
city. Thompson-Curtis has met with international food justice activist Raj Patel to discuss urban
agriculture in Detroit. Eric Holt-Giménez visited the city in 2012, holding meetings at the Boggs
Center to Nurture Community Leadership with local food justice activists, which farmers from
both Feedom Freedom and D-Town attended.
Farmers draw on national and international food movements, particularly those who
come visit the city because of its growing reputation in food justice circles, to build connection,
relationships, and solidarity with both African American and non-African American farmers and
activists. Simultaneously, farmers also consciously make connections with farming and Black
history, as well as more personal family histories. So then food and the growing of food
becomes a way to assert agriculture as part of the Black radical tradition while simultaneously
connecting with non-Black people, both through an ideal of food as a human universal, and
through the very concrete connections that farmers have made through their food justice work.

Food Sovereignty in the D

97

Given the ways that even the conversations on food security operate in Detroit, with a
heavy emphasis on the ways that food impacts the collective survival of poor and Black people,
it is perhaps unsurprising that Detroit farmers increasingly tend to frame food security in terms
of food sovereignty. The term food sovereignty emerged from peasant movements in Africa,
Latin America, and Asia and was first used by the activist group La Via Campesina, to challenge
and push beyond the idea of food security, and to link the issue of food with struggles against
neoliberalism (NGO/CSO Forum on Food Sovereignty, 2002). The paradigm critiqued global
economic policy that prioritizes the needs of capital over human needs, including global debt
policy and structural adjustment, the patenting of traditional foods, and globalizing food markets
that put small producers out of business. The food sovereignty movement also pointed to
solutions: democratizing agriculture globally, cultivating the diversity of global knowledges
about farming, nurture biodiversity, and contribute to food security. Food sovereignty
movements, in contrast to the much more policy oriented idea of food security, emphasize not
only access to food in general, but access to culturally appropriate food, ecologically sound
production of food, and, most importantly, the right of people to define their own systems of
agriculture (NGO/CSO Forum on Food Sovereignty, 2002; Nicholson, Basque Farmer’s Union,
EHNE International Organizing Committee, & La Via Campesina, 2011).
The food sovereignty movement includes, explicitly and at its base, a direct rebuke to
industrial agricultural systems which produces food at enormous cost to the environment
(Kimbrell 2002; Anderson 2009), indebts farmers through the patenting of seeds (Shiva, 1997),
and treats food as a commodity rather than a requirement for life (Shiva, 1997; Wood, 2002).
The call for greater peasant sovereignty in the production of food made food sovereignty a
movement not just about food, but about culture and economics, a call not just for adequate

98

nutrition but for self-determination, in resistance to a neoliberal global economy. Ultimately, the
shift from working toward food security to working toward food sovereignty was a move to link
struggles for food with larger struggles for greater sovereignty, greater control of land, and for
the ability to build survival systems outside of the structure of global capitalism.
Both Feedom Freedom and D-Town Farm frequently refer to their work as moving toward
food sovereignty in the city of Detroit. Malik Yakini traces the genealogy of the term in Detroit
as coming through conversation with First Nations people at a gathering in Vancouver:

Before that, I had heard the term food security, you know, which is important too,
but then to hear them frame this as, you know, something larger. Not just having
access to food, but you know, really having control over the food system and
preserving their traditional foodways really appealed to me because, I mean, what
many of us have been struggling for, for a long time is sovereignty, period. Not
just food sovereignty, but you know to be a sovereign. And so hearing it framed
like that really resonated with me. And, you know, so others also began to hear this
idea of food sovereignty. And again, because many of us are already political
activists, and are in favor of sovereignty or self-rule, particularly for so-called
African American people, the idea of food sovereignty resonated with us as well
(Yakini, 2012).

Kezia Curtis, of Feedom Freedom Growers, defined food sovereignty as “having self-
reliance or community reliance. Where we are able to provide for ourselves and we can
orchestrate on our own, without even needing you, Big Brother” (K. Curtis, 2012). Her

99

description, ending with her rebuke of “Big Brother” was followed by laughter in our interview,
but is also serious. For her, the need for food sovereignty in Detroit is predicated on the idea that
the food systems on which most Detroiters rely, do not have their best interests in mind. The
idea of self-reliance that she evokes echoes longstanding moves in Black struggles in the U.S. for
Black self-help, but frames them in terms of the more contemporary, international, and
specifically food focused terms of food sovereignty.
Nefer Ra Barber, Vice Chair of the Detroit Black Community Food Security Network,
defines food sovereignty specifically in terms adapted from Black cultural nationalism: “Food
sovereignty to me is an example of the second Kwanzaa principle, Kujichagulia—self-
determination. We can speak for ourselves and no longer have other people speak for us. We
can speak and define what is healthy for us. We can define what is culturally appropriate for us.
We can define what our food system should look like. We can define our own agricultural
system” (Barber, 2011). Barber bases her definition of food sovereignty on the idea of
Kujichagulia, one of the Kwanzaa principals based on Maulana Karenga’s “Seven Principals of
Blackness.” These principals were also the basis for earlier organizing in Detroit, including, for
example, the Inner City Sub Center’s (ICSC) programs in food and cooperative economics.
Barber, like Curtis and Yakini, incorporates the call for food sovereignty in Detroit into already
existing frameworks for Black struggle in the city. Organizations like the Black Panther Party
and ICSC had previously called for Black self-reliance and Black self-determination, and
farmers often framed food sovereignty in these terms.
Detroit farmers then have reframed the term food sovereignty somewhat from
international movement’s focus on, for instance, free trade agreements. What they have retained
is the terms’ implication that food is deeply interrelated with issues of power and cultural

100

survival, and issues of collective sovereignty. They then have adapted it to the conditions of
post-industrial, North American Detroit. While on one hand Detroit is a quite different context
than that of many in the food sovereignty movement, African American farmers in Detroit work
the counterintuitive connections between land, access to growing food, and survival, to argue for
building a local food system for Detroiters to gain control not only of their food, but all aspects
of their lives. Food sovereignty in Detroit, for instance, is deeply connected with the ability to
control one’s own working life, for instance. Growing one’s own food, or having access to an
alternate food system, for instance, may allow one to become less reliant on an exploitative job.
Ultimately it may allow one to produce for one’s self and one’s community, allowing for a
greater degree of personal autonomy. Arguably, this is similar to the ways in which farmers in
the global south think of food sovereignty—as a way to be able to de-link from capitalist
economic structure and to be less at the mercy of global financial currents.
Also influential in the Detroit food sovereignty movement specifically, is the work of
James Boggs and Grace Lee Boggs, two Detroit activists and thinkers much of whose theorizing
focused on work, and the increasingly tenuous relationship that Black Detroiters had with
manufacturing labor in the city throughout the second half of the twentieth century. In his 1963
book, The American Revolution: Pages from a Negro Workers’ Notebook, James Boggs
projected that Black workers would became increasingly “surplus” through the automation of
factory work, a weakening and racist labor movement, and the movement of manufacturing jobs
out of cities like Detroit. However, he argued, this swelling unemployed class, were well
positioned as a revolutionary force to begin to envision and build new ontologies outside of
capitalism. As put it, “The outsiders, the workless people, now have to turn their thoughts away

101

from trying to outwit machines and instead toward the organization and reorganization of
society” (J. Boggs, 2011e).
Grace Lee Boggs, now in her late nineties, has more recently continued this line of
thinking, now living in the future that James Boggs predicted—a deindustrialized Detroit with
massive Black unemployment. In particular, she and others working with her at the Boggs
Center to Nurture Community Leadership have advocated heavily for the formation of
independent and collective gardens and farms and other small scale local businesses, operated by
Detroit residents, as a way to build a small scale local economy that does not hinge on the
fluctuations of corporations, and in which workers would have more control over their lives and
labor (G. L. Boggs & Kurashige, 2011). Feedom Freedom and D-Town both have ties with the
Boggs Center to Nurture Community Leadership. Feedom Freedom in particular used the Boggs
Center space for events frequently, and supported much of the activist work of the center,
including, for instance an upcoming two day conference on the changing nature of work in the
city.
9

In Detroit, the food sovereignty movement draws off of these traditions of Black
economic thought to critique, in Yakini’s words, “this huge global food system that is driven
primarily by profit,” in favor of “creating smaller, local and regional food systems that are
specific to the climate people are living in and specific to the cultures of the people living in
those areas, that distributes the wealth that is generated from purchasing the food within the food
system among those people within the locality or region. Where people are making decisions
about what types of food they want to eat (Yakini, 2012)” Embedded in Yakini’s vision of food
sovereignty is a priority on attaining greater economic autonomy, and retaining the wealth that is

9
The New Work New Culture Conference, http://reimaginingwork.org/

102

generated from the production of resources within that community. It also emphasizes an
attention the geographical context in which people are growing—what are appropriate foods for
the climate— the cultural context—what foods make most sense to produce, culturally—as well
as leaving room for individual desire and innovation—the various decisions that people make
about what kinds of foods they want to eat. These ideas echo international conversations of food
sovereignty—local control over food systems, an emphasis on geographical and cultural
specificity in food production systems—and at the same time are influenced particularly by
traditions of Black economic nationalism in the United States—the idea of retaining Black
wealth within the Black community.
The Detroit school of thought on food sovereignty heavily links seeking freedoms around
work, and freeing one’s self and community from exploitative employment as fundamental to
food sovereignty. The idea of using independent food production as a way to de-link from
capitalist systems is also present in international and peasant food sovereignty movements.
However, generally, in food sovereignty movement in the Global South, the goal is to resist
incorporation into international food markets. In Detroit, as in most of the Global North, most
Detroiters have lived their entire lives as incorporated into capitalist markets, however
marginally, and relatively removed from agricultural economies by at least one or two
generations. Moreover, their historical relationship with agriculture has largely (although
certainly not completely) been one of exploited labor rather than agriculture as a means for
autonomy. So in Detroit, rather than attempting to retain forms of rural autonomy which come
from the survival of collective and traditional agricultural forms despite encroaching capitalist
food systems, Black Detroiters are responding to the failure of food and capitalist economic
systems by creating alternate food systems that in some ways resemble traditional collective food

103

systems. The Detroit food sovereignty movements may be viewed as a direct result of the failure
of capitalist markets to provide for the needs of Black Detroiters.
Indeed, food sovereignty in Detroit, as with food sovereignty movements elsewhere, is
one key node in struggles for greater community sovereignty and autonomy overall—not just
with regards to food. Yakini put it this way:

For us, nothing is more basic than a people being able to provide their own food.
And so while there are many other things that we need to struggle around, one
of the first steps, if we’re serious about creating self-reliant communities is to
be able to provide our own food (Yakini, 2012).

So then working toward food sovereignty, for Yakini, is at once an end in and of itself,
and also a strategy to work toward the goal of greater sovereignty of the Black community in
Detroit overall.
It also means that much of the conversation about food sovereignty in Detroit is focused
on struggles around labor in the city. However, this focus is less on the iconic image of labor
struggles of the city in the factories or even the Black labor struggles of the 1960s and 70s, such
as the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement. Rather, the basic arguments for food sovereignty
in the city are undergirded by the current context of Black unemployment and underemployment,
particularly the Black working poor who labor in minimum wage service industry jobs. It is also
in the context of a city which does not provide access to basic needs through the routes which are
standard under late capitalism—large grocery stores, for instance. These conditions—very little
income coming into families, few places in which to spend money and food aid other than gas

104

stations and party stores, and few city resources—has left many Detroiters with a sense that there
is no outside help—that if Black Detroiters need something, they must do it for themselves, by
themselves. This gives specific urgency to Yakini’s goal of people being able to provide their
own food, and to “creat[e] self-reliant communities.”
For instance, Feedom Freedom’s Myrtle Thompson-Curtis talks about the need for access
to food as an issue of basic survival, and also as a vulnerability if one cannot produce for one’s
self:

Because you can totally depend on someone else, who at any given moment could
cut it off! If you don’t have a job, you don’t have any, you don’t have, if you live
in an apartment, if you don’t have a job—I’m using an apartment, because at least
if I have a back yard I can grow me something. But if you don’t have that access,
and it might be illegal if I’m doing it, but I’m still going to do it. But if you don’t
have any access to the resources, or if you have the resources but you don’t know
what to do with them it’s just as bad. So, you know, the issue is with the need for
resources, and to have the knowledge of what to do with the resources (Thompson-
Curtis, 2012).

Here, Thompson-Curtis makes an argument about the need to avoid dependence on
outside systems for essential needs like food. She frames access to land (a back yard) and
farming skills (the knowledge of what to do with the resources) as crucial to food security. And
yet while in the immediate term, her argument here is largely geared toward basic survival, the
solutions she sees as most urgently needed are the elements of food sovereignty—that is, to

105

create a scenario in which the Detroit community has control over their food production and
distribution systems. Crucially, rather than seeing a job as a route toward independence,
Thompson-Curtis describes a job which could be taken at any time as representative of
vulnerability and dependence.
Thompson-Curtis’ argument, that food cultivation frees one somewhat from dependence
on capitalist systems could be viewed as the flip or the end result of Ellen Meiksins Wood’s
argument on the origin of capitalism. Wood highlights the ways in which the development of
capitalism in the sixteenth century Europe depended on the enclosure of food production. Wood
locates the fundamental difference between capitalism and other economic systems in “the
emergence of the market as a determinant of social reproduction” through “its penetration into
the production of life’s most basic necessity: food” (Wood, 2002, 97). In other words, one of the
defining features of capitalism is a dependence on the market for social reproduction. Capitalism
relies on the masses of workers to specifically be unable to produce their own means of social
reproduction, including, especially, food, in order to compel people to work as wage earners.
Thompson-Curtis, conversely, argues that independent food production is a strategy in order to
not become dependent on unreliable capitalist wage labor markets.
Farmers also often included into the issue of food sovereignty, the nutrition of the food,
and ensuring that it is healthful for one’s body. Kadiri Sennefer notes, “We don’t have any
connection to our food in this current food system. We don’t know how it’s produced. We don’t
know what is being injected into it. We don’t know where it’s coming from. Most people don’t
have any knowledge of the working food system to even know what processes their food goes
through to make it to their table, let alone care about the ingredients and how it affects our

106

health.” Therefore, farming is a way to have greater control over one’s own body. He
continues:

The power in growing our own food is that we know what’s going into our food.
We’re knowing how it’s produced. And it’s real food. We know that it’s real
food because we planted the seed. We watched the plant grow up. We watched
it bear fruit. We tended to the plant. We know that we didn’t pump it full of
chemicals and pesticides that are hazardous to our health but they’re going to tell
us that it’s not. The problems that we have in our society is because we allow
people that aren’t part of our communities that none of us see and have no
connection to our lives, we let these people have so much power over us. We
allow them to feed us. And if they say that they want to cut food, then we’ll
starve. Because the majority of us don’t know how to grow our own food. So
that’s where the power of that is. It’s taking yourself from being dependent on a
system that really doesn’t care for you at all (Sennefer, 2012).

Sennefer here connects control over a food production process with control over
individual health and one’s own body, and collective health and control over community well-
being. He positions growing food as a way to gain greater autonomy from an industrial food
systems which does not “care” for the needs and well-being of “communities”—presumably the
Detroit Black community in particular, but also, he implies, most people’s communities.
Replacing this system with one where the community that consumes food is the same or has

107

personal relations to the community which produces it, means then displacing a system which
does not care for the community with one which has a vested interest in its well-being.
This orientation toward growing as a way to ensure the purity and nutrition of one’s food
is in fact a common theme in urban agriculture movements in the U.S. and Europe generally.
Melanie DuPuis has pointed out the extent to which food movements are often centered on the
idea of purity and cleanliness, for instance (DuPuis, 2002). Indeed, as Julie Guthman notes, that
it is a goal of much popular writing on industrial food practice—the work of authors like Michael
Pollan and Eric Schlosser—to “evoke a ‘yuck’ reaction” (Guthman, 2011, 263) through an
emphasis on the dirtiness and impurity of industrially produced food.
Black Detroit farmers’ engagement with this differs from the national culture of urban
farming movements in important ways. Detroit farmers tend to emphasize disparity, and the
ways in which not only does the industrial food system produce unhealthy food, but the extent to
which that unhealthy food disproportionately negatively impacts Black people. Therefore the
problem isn’t just the lack of purity in food, but the ways in which industrial food production
colludes with racism and capitalism to degrade the health of African Americans, as well as other
communities of color and poor people in general. Thus the solutions they turn to, to provide
greater health and purity in food, include growing organic and GMO –free food, but also center
on providing greater collective Black control over their own bodies.
Sennefer’s position here is also similar, but deviates somewhat from the common themes
of international food sovereignty movements. The theme of control over one’s food supply is
one of the most basic touchstones of all food sovereignty movements, including that of
Detroiters. However, Detroit farmers tend to emphasize health and the need to avoid diseases

108

that stem from relying on industrially produced food as an issue of sovereignty, a stance which is
much less common, internationally.
Illnesses like diabetes, have grown exponentially with the expansion in the U.S. of a food
system which increasingly generates high sugar, high fat, industrially produced food. As many
of the food security studies I examined earlier in this chapter note, these diseases
disproportionately impact poor communities of color because, in the U.S., these are generally the
cheapest foods available (Mari Gallagher Research Group, 2007). While these diseases
increasingly impact people in the global South as well, they tend to reflect growing urbanization
and growing consumer resources (Prentice, 2006). However, in Detroit, as in the rest of the
U.S., eating a diet primarily of processed food is a mark of poverty, not rising affluence. Poor
people and people of color in general and African Americans in particular disproportionally
suffer from food related chronic disease, leading to illness, and ultimately, for many, to
premature death (The Office of Minority Health, 2012). This then, for Black farmers in the U.S.,
is an issue of both survival and sovereignty—the ability to produce one’s own food to decrease
dependence on an industrial food system which is indeed killing people.
For both Sennefer and Thompson-Curtis, a greater degree of control over one’s life,
one’s body, and for a community to have a greater degree of control over its present and future,
lies with having access to some land (and presumably other necessary resources like water) to
use for farming and to the knowledge and skills to grow food. Moreover, they both regard food
sovereignty and the ability to generate one’s own means of survival as a way to avoid
dependence in general—to be able to free one’s self at least a little from forces outside of one’s
control, who do not care for one’s well being, and who could at any minute, “cut it off.”

109

However, even as farmers draw heavily from the specific context of Detroit to develop a
particular urban, Black, North American, post-industrial conception of food sovereignty, they
consistently relate this to international struggles. Yakini, for instance, quoted in an article on
welfare politics, uses the example of Cuba to assert that urban agriculture could be used as a
response to urban poverty, both as a way to create economic stability and to provide food: “I
think because we do have so much vacant land it gives us the opportunity to have food
production in Detroit like they do in Havana, Cuba, which has created an example of urban
agriculture around the world,” (Bankole, 2011). Here he draws from the Cuban example, but his
rationale for why it would be relevant to Detroit is local—poverty and vacant land.
Similarly, Thompson-Curtis compared Detroit’s food sovereignty movement to land and
food struggles in South America:

I mean, it’s a fight for survival. Plain and simple. If we have access to, we will
survive. If we don’t, we kind of get pushed into these corners and become
dependent on someone who doesn’t have our best interests at heart. And I’m
thinking here about quinoa. The people who originated it hardly have access to
it because of the affordability of it now. Because it’s been so comodified. It’s
just…it’s heavy. When I think about it in terms of what’s really happening with
the resources that make life sustainable, I think about indigenous folks who
really rely on the land. I mean, believe it or not, we rely on the land too. I
mean, at this point it’s a resource that’s abundant right now [in Detroit]
(Thompson-Curtis, 2012).

110

Here, Thompson-Curtis reinforces the urgency of food sovereignty struggles in Detroit,
by reiterating that this is a struggle for survival. She then relates this to the struggle of
indigenous people in the Global South, with a specific example of the ways in which the
commodification of food production and the ways that they no longer have control over their
food system has undermined their ability to survive. This, she reflects, is not dissimilar from
Detroit, even with its urban, Northern context, in that control over land is a pivotal issue there as
well.
Importantly, here she also expands her definition of survival to include not just survival
of the body but survival framed as the exercise of some form of sovereignty. To not survive is
not just to not die. Becoming dependent on forces which do not care for one’s needs is also a
form of failing to survive. This is in part because it means that one has lessened ability to access
the means of sustaining life on one’s own. It also implies that the kind of survival in which
Thompson-Curtis is interested requires maintaining degrees of autonomy and power to control
one’s life circumstances, not just being able to continue to stay alive.
There is a particular kind of internationalism in the food sovereignty movement in
Detroit—where Black movements in Detroit are consciously aligning with international struggles
which are normally not associated with either North Americans in general and are not associated
with African Americans in particular. This kind of affinity works in a number of ways.
Contemporary Black movements and Black political culture in the United States has
overwhelmingly urban associations. Black Detroit farmers flip this script by declaring solidarity
with peasant farmers in the Global South. By taking on the term food sovereignty, they declare
that their context is similar, related, intertwined with that of peasant farmers. And moreover, by
using the term, they flag that they too are engaged in a similar struggle to de-link from

111

dependence on a capitalist system which, as with farmers in the global south, has done much
damages to individual lives and to the lives of the Black community in Detroit.
Detroit farmers use of term sovereignty with practical nuance. Yakini goes on:

You know, for me, any time we use these terms ‘food security,’ ‘food justice,’
‘food sovereignty,’ we’re really more talking about relative sovereignty.
Because if we were talking about it in an absolute sense, we’d be talking about
having state power, and, you know, having control over all those aspects of our
life. So we’re really talking about a relative form of food sovereignty, within
this society as we know it now (Yakini, 2012).

His definition of sovereignty treats sovereignty as an ideal that may be attained to greater
or lesser degrees, rather than an absolute end point. Yakini highlights that food sovereignty is
deeply interconnected with political and other forms of power and sovereignty. In our interview,
he told me, “Something I often tell people is that you can’t have food sovereignty, without
sovereignty. You can’t have food justice without justice in general. These concepts are not
separate from each other. Because the reason you have food sovereignty is you have sovereignty
over your life as a whole. And then the food sovereignty is one aspect of this larger notion of
sovereignty.”
“And maybe vice versa too?” I aksed, “You can’t have overall sovereignty if you don’t
have control of the food system?”
“Absolutely,” He answered, “Absolutely. In fact, we have plenty of examples where
people have had so called political independence, political sovereignty, but because they didn’t

112

control the economic system, and didn’t control the food system, they still wound up being in a
dependent situation on the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, and things like
that” (Yakini, 2012).
Yakini makes clear that as in international conceptions of food sovereignty, food
sovereignty in Detroit is one component of attaining a larger vision of sovereignty. In
international and peasant contexts, farmers draw off of working knowledge of traditional
economic systems, and strive to retain the ability to operate within these. In Detroit, farmers also
draw off of non-capitalist economic traditions, but, given the context of long colonization,
enslavement, and a severing of many individual family lineages of traditional knowledge from
Africa, their relationship with these systems is more complicated. They do work to reclaim these
older traditions, as well as embrace the more recent traditions of African American backyard
gardening in the city, while using farming to survive the very contemporary conditions of
postindustrial Detroit.

Some Conclusions about Food
Why has food become central to movements for Black power in Detroit? In a variety of
ways Black Detroit farmers assert that food is central because food is an incredible node of
power. It is a node of power over one’s body, over its strength, over its pain and wellbeing, over
its longevity. Food, for many Detroit farmers, is an embodiment of power over survival, a way
towards greater control over the contours of their lives in the context of deindustrialization,
unemployment, racism, and community food insecurity. Growing food is a way to attain greater
control over one’s body. It also is a strategy to reduce dependence on systems—industrial food
systems, low wage labor systems—which do not have, as Thompson-Curtis puts it, “our best

113

interests at heart” (Thompson-Curtis, 2012). It is, in short, a strategy to reduce one’s dependence
on racial capitalism.
In this chapter, I discussed the ways in which Detroit farmers theorize food, food access,
food security, and food systems in the city. Detroit farmers borrow, reframe, and rework
terminology used in policy conversations, NGOs, and international social movements to fit the
needs of poor and Black Detroiters to create a kind of Detroit school of thought on food security
and food sovereignty.
Detroit farmers often expand the idea of food security, a term which is widely used by
both governmental and non-governmental agencies, into realms which it has not been traditional
used, including such factors as transportation as well as to connect food insecurity with unjust
economic systems and racism. Their concern with food security, as with many academic studies,
is on health and the disproportionate impact of poor nutrition on Black communities. But unlike
most academic conceptions of food security, Detroit farmers frame health not only as an issue of
suffering for individuals and families, but as a matter of Black survival. Detroit also farmers
draw on the international food sovereignty framework to highlight the ways in which food is
connected with larger systems of power in general—particularly racism and capitalism—and as a
way to work towards greater power and security for Black and poor people.
In addition, farmers in Detroit use farming as a way in which to assert and reconnect with
Black histories, exploring and emphasizing African agriculture as well as reclaiming Southern
African American farming in the narration of their work. Many farmers regarded the
recuperation of these Black agricultural traditions as a central aspect of their work.
As the idea of food sovereignty calls us to attend to, food is a great controller. Because
human beings physically need food in order to go on living, whoever has control over food,

114

whoever and however it is produced, distributed, and prepared, has a great deal of control over
the lives of people in general—over people’s bodies and indeed over people’s live much more
broadly as one of the basic goals behind most people’s livelihoods is to acquire enough food for
one’s self and one’s family. Many other individuals, groups, and movements have made this
point, both through the food sovereignty movement and long before it. Detroit farmers assert
that, as with peasant food struggles in Peru, food and its systems of production, distribution,
preparation, and consumption are central to struggles for survival in the United States. Through
their work and analysis, Detroit farmers assert that contemporary industrial food systems has
been a significant source of disempowerment and damage to Black people in the United States.
Furthermore, they assert that greater control over food systems could be a route to secure greater
Black power and self-determination in Detroit and elsewhere.

115

Chapter 4

Farming, Survival, and Rethinking Work

Detroit’s economic crisis is slow moving, a heavy jug that began to tip in the 1950s and
has poured jobs, money, and people out of the city for the last sixty years. Crisis is the focus of
and the context for much conversation about Detroit since the 1980s. This is true for urban
agriculture in the city as well. Ever looming in the background of conversations of farming in
the city is Detroit’s long economic crisis, the impossibility of finding fulfilling work in the city,
and the precariousness of Detroit’s labor market for most Black workers.
Also present are the various movements and organizations that emerged in Detroit,
particularly directly after the Rebellion. Labor was in issue in many Black Power movements in
the 1960s and 70s as radicals envisioned how to create a just economy. This was especially true
in Detroit, where labor issues were so central to radical work in the city in general.
In this chapter I ask—how do farmers connect farming with their analysis of work and
economy? How is their thinking influenced by Detroit’s long economic crisis? This chapter
explores farmers’ theorizing about work in the context that I describe in Chapter Three—years of
industrial, White, and middle class flight and ever increasing Black unemployment.
In Chapter Two, I discussed the evolution of Detroit’s economy from a manufacturing
powerhouse to a postindustrial city in financial crisis. Through the last half of the twentieth
century, Black workers increasingly bore the brunt of the consequences of deindustrialization.
By the 1970s there had developed a generation of young people in the city that James Boggs
called “the outsiders”—young working age people who did not see any possibility of meaningful
employment for themselves in a formal capitalist economy (J. Boggs, 2009). Given this context,

116

it is perhaps unsurprising that much of the impetus for and the theorizing of Detroit farmers is
around work—wrestling with the question of how to creating meaningful working lives and what
systems of labor best facilitate that. Accompanying this is a critique of the kinds of work which
is most available to most Detroiters.
In this chapter, I begin with farmers’ descriptions of their lived experience of Detroit’s
economy, as an entry point to understand their theorizing on work. I then begin to outline some
of the contours of Feedom Freedom and D-Town farmers’ theories of work. Farmers heavily
critique the operation of capitalism in Detroit, including the precarious and exploitative working
conditions in which many Black Detroiters find themselves.
They also envision and work to build alternatives frameworks for thinking about what
meaningful work would look like. Here I focus on three main areas. First, I analyze the ways in
which farmers view meaningful work, nature, and spirituality as interconnected. Farmers also
tend to theorize connection with nature and work together with envisioning ways to create
greater connection between one’s work and the product of one’s labor, and a local economy.
Second, I assert that farmers also hold as prime values collectivity and developing long term
affective relationships in order to provide stability and meaning to work. Third, I explore the
ways in which farmers integrate and prioritize learning and intellectual labor as central to
meaningful work.

The Lived Experience of the Detroit Economy
As I discussed in the previous chapter, Detroit farmers frequently frame urban agriculture
as an issue of survival—the survival of people of color and of poor people. This view of the
importance of urban agriculture is deeply interrelated to the ways in which the Detroit economy

117

does not facilitate garnering people’s basic needs. These needs include food, but also many
other needs as well.
Kadiri Sennefer of D-Town Farm described the binds in which many Detroiters find
themselves:

Maybe I’m wrong, but I don’t really feel that anyone decided to stay here. The
people that are here are the people that don’t really have a choice. I believe that the
people that really had choices moved. You know, and the people that are here love
Detroit, but I think a lot of people don’t have a choice. And then the powers that
be and these institutions aren’t necessarily giving people a choice, you know, with
the mortgage crisis and foreclosing homes. I just had a friend of mine, she didn’t
have a choice, you know? There wasn’t nothing really popping for her in Detroit.
She lost her home. There’s really no jobs. So what are you going to do? These
types of conditions drive people into the underworld. Seriously. Your options are
very minimal. Pick up a sack and I’m going to sling crack, you know what I’m
saying? (Sennefer, 2012)

Myrtle Thompson-Curtis associates the development of urban agriculture in the city, and
the support it has received in her neighborhood in part to the fact that Detroiters often live
precariously and are seeking better options. We were talking about Feedom Freedom’s efforts to
talk about their work with neighbors and she told me, “Lately, when we talk to people, people
are ready to hear. They’re ready to listen. They know we’re at a very crucial, critical point.
You know?” When I asked her why she thought that was, she said,

118

The lack of. It’s harder to get simple things. Driving a car in the city is difficult
because of the cost associated with it. It’s difficult. And if you’re on any kind of
minimum wage paying job or anything like that…Most folks out here are illegal
[driving cars unregistered or without insurance]. Or they’re sacrificing one bill to
pay for the other—they’re juggling. Or it’s taking everybody to do half of the stuff
that we used to do ten years ago, maybe (Thompson-Curtis, 2012).

Many Detroiters struggle to maintain a bare minimum of necessities—food, rent, heat,
water, electricity, and transportation. The issue of managing transportation in Detroit is
particularly pressing for many people. In Chapter 2 I discussed the spatial mismatch of jobs in
the Detroit metropolitan area, that is, that Detroiters are more likely to find a job in the suburbs
than in the city (New Detroit, 2014). The distance that Detroiters travel to work is made more
difficult by drastic cuts in bus service in 2012 (Sands, 2012). Additionally, unlike in most
metropolitan areas, the Detroit bus system is completely separate from the suburban bus system,
so riders must transfer at the border of the city and pay an additional fare to ride into the suburbs.
All of this makes it incredibly difficult, both logistically and financially, to actually get to work.
This is especially true because most of the jobs to which Detroiters commute are generally low
wage service industry positions.
Cars, also, are untenably expensive for most people. Car insurance in Detroit in 2014
was the most expensive of any city in the United States, costing an annual average of $10,723
(Kuo, 2014). Considering that the average annual household income in Detroit is $26,955
(United States Census Bureau, 2014), for many Detroit families car insurance is simply

119

impossibly affordable. This leads to very high rates of, as Thompson-Curtis put it, driving
illegal.
Given the financial struggles that many Detroit households face, farming, and other
community projects are often a matter of survival, similar to the myriad of legal and extralegal
strategies that many Detroiters employ to make do in an economy which is not adequate to meet
even their most basic needs. Farmer Octavia puts it this way:

Look—if we want to grow food, we’re going to grow food. We don’t care. We
got chickens, we got goats. Some people might have a cow. You don’t know.
But look. You don’t leave us any choice. You can’t continue to just pillage and
take. And for me, when I think of petty crimes or stupid crimes, I always reflect
to the crimes that created this country. You know. What do you expect? Angels
running around? It’s not going to happen! It’s not going to happen like that. And
once again, if there’s no resources, if there’s not much left, then what’s the point?
(Anonymous, 2012)

Octavia frames urban farming as a logical response to the extreme conditions of trying to
survive under racial capitalism. Furthermore, she presents farming in alliance with and as part of
the same conditions which give rise more generally to crimes of poverty. This position was
especially apt at the time of the interview, in early 2012, prior to the passage of Detroit’s Urban
Agriculture Ordinance, which legalized many (although certainly not all) kinds of urban farming.
Prior to this ordinance, much urban farming was still technically illegal. The idea of farming as
a kind of underground activity also makes sense in that much farming (it is unclear exactly how

120

much, but certainly a significant portion of farming in the city) is done on squatted land, that is,
land which has been abandoned by the legal owner but to which the farmer has no legal rights.
So here then Octavia frames urban agriculture as an extralegal strategy to make do, a survival
strategy in response to the conditions of Black urban poverty. In her framing it could also be
considered a potential alternative or perhaps addition to other kinds of hustles.
The Detroit economic context underscores many farmers’ emphasis on survival in their
intellectual work, which I discussed in Chapter Three. Detroit farmers frame farming, accessing
food, and having control over one’s own food supply as an issue of survival. And the solutions
at which farmers arrive to address this issue arise out of an economic analysis. The question
which arguably dominates most grassroots work in Detroit, and certainly most Black-led
agricultural work is one of how to shape an economy in which people are able to meet their most
basic needs, while maintaining their dignity, and gaining greater control over the contours of
their lives.

A Subsistence Economy
Feminist economists Maria Mies and Veronika Bennholdt-Thomsen define subsistence
production in contrast to capitalist production, and as specifically that form of production which
capitalism seeks to enclose. Mies defines subsistence as “all work that is expended in the
creation, re-creation, and maintenance of immediate life, and which has no other purpose.” This
definition she places in contrast with commodity production: “For subsistence production, the
aim is ‘life.’ For commodity production it is ‘money,’ which ‘produces’ ever more money, or the
accumulation of capital. For this mode of production life is, so to speak, only a coincidental side
effect” (Mies, 1983).

121

Capitalism, Mies and Bennholdt-Thomsen, as well as J.K. Gibson-Graham point out,
relies on a deeply held common sense that there is no outside, there is no alternative, no
legitimate, rational, or practical non-capitalist alternative (Bennholdt-Thomsen & Mies, 1999;
Gibson-Graham, 2006a, 2006b). They describe that particularly in so-called developed nations,
a hegemonic sense of what it means to live a ‘good life’ relies on the idea that all security,
stability, progress, culture, etc. require access to money. For most working and middle class
people in the global north this means a conception of life possibilities shaped by a process that
Marx conceived of as the equation C-M-C (Marx, 1992). One’s source of both reproducing
one’s life in general and of obtaining ‘a good life’ is to sell one’s labor power as a commodity
(C) to attain access to money though wages (M) to then be able to purchase the commodities (C)
that support one’s life. These purchased commodities can be basic means of survival—things
like food and housing—the means to reproduce oneself and to reproduce one’s labor. They can
also be things that represent what it means to not just live, but to achieve a “good life”—a nice
car, for instance, to be able to buy a house in a desirable neighborhood, and to send your children
to good schools. One’ sense of both what is needed to survive and what is needed to live a good
life is circumscribed by the idea that both are attained by having access to money.
In contrast, Mies and Bennholdt-Thomsen present subsistence production as an alternate
to capitalist logic about how one might attain both the means to reproduce one’s life, and to
attain a “good life,” although what it means to live a “good life” is framed in different terms.
Erika Märke outlines three main attributes to subsistence production: “1) independence—in the
sense of autonomy; 2) self-sufficiency, in the sense of non-expansionism; and 3) self-reliance, in
the sense of cultural identity” (as cited in Bennholdt-Thomsen & Mies, 1999, p. 21).

122

The idea of self-reliance is a theme that has been a jumping off point for many
discussions around building an alternative economy in movements that have been influential in
Detroit. From the Republic of New Africa, who aimed to build a sovereign Black nation in the
Southern U.S., to non-profits like the Inner City Sub-Center and Operation Get-Down, who
organized food cooperatives in the name of “Ujamaa,” or cooperative economics, there have
been numerous efforts to build economic systems in the city which build Black self-reliance.
Moreover, the Nation of Islam and the Shrine of the Black Madonna have taken seriously the
idea that farming and independent food production could be a central node of power in building
self-reliance through the farms that they operate in Georgia and Michigan.
As I described in Chapter Three, Feedom Freedom and D-Town farmers similarly saw
food as intricately linked with Black struggles for sovereignty. Building up systems of self-
reliance was one component of this. But first, to a large extent, farmers viewed the need to build
up the means for self-reliance as a survival strategy. Indeed, in this way, farmers often framed
food sovereignty as one tool towards Black survival.
I asked Thompson-Curtis what her goals were for Feedom Freedom ultimately, and she
told me this: “[That] I can eat every day. I can have a place to sleep. Nothing fancy. We’re
talking about people who say I just want to survive. And what does survive mean? It means
surviving without all of the fancy trappings that folks think that we need” (Thompson-Curtis,
2012).
On the surface, the goal of mere survival may seem paltry. And indeed, mere survival—
attaining basic life sustaining needs like food, water, and shelter—is a live issue for many
Detroiters. However Thompson-Curtis’ definition of survival can also be read as a critique of
consumerism—an objection to the idea that a good life necessarily requires “fancy trappings.”

123

Indeed, Curtis-Thompson’s sense of what it would mean to survive (outlined in greater detail
below) with one’s full humanity intact is in fact quite ambitious and explicitly goes beyond the
bare bones goal of being able to continue to sustain life. However, the requirements of a good
working life, for Curtis-Thompson have much more to do with relationships, and one’s ability to
control one’s life circumstances then access to “fancy trappings.”

Nature, Work, and Sprit
One of the most consistent themes in our interviews, was the connection that farmers saw
between developing a relationship with work (physical labor, intellectual labor), developing a
relationship with nature (through connecting with land and non-human life), and being able to
live a healthy balanced life. Both D-Town and Feedom Freedom Farmers articulated a concern
that integration into a capitalist economy has meant that people in general, and people of color in
particular, are increasingly alienated from both their own labor and from land and nature. This
alienation, in turn, they saw as having done a grave violence on Black people’s ability to enact
self-determination and to live healthy, balanced, connected lives.
Detroit farmers often framed connection with nature as a crucial node in food security—
that having connection with nature through farming meant that one could secure one’s own food.
They also often brought up the broader ecological consequences of not understanding and
respecting nature. In both of these framings—connection with nature through food and
connecting with nature more generally, the need to have a better relationship with nature was
framed as a matter of survival—survival of Black people, survival of poor people, as well as a
broader concern with the survival of humanity and other species in the face of ongoing and
worsening ecological crisis. For example, when I asked Yakini about his vision for self-reliance

124

overall, he answered with three priorities—1) developing a symbiotic relationship with nature, 2)
a rejection of capitalism, and 3) the need for sovereignty and self-determination, culturally and
otherwise, for the worlds’ colonized people. Of these, he viewed the need to develop a
relationship with nature as the first:

[We need] a new way of humanity looking at ourselves that is based on 1) an
understanding of our relationship to the planet. That we don’t exist independently
of the animals and plants and other organisms that co-inhabit the planet with us.
And if we are going to survive as a species we are going to have a shift in how we
think, so that we understand that we are part of this kind of matrix of life. So that’s
first.

Yakini makes developing a relationship with nature a priority because it is a matter of
survival. He also emphasizes human interdependence with nature and the ways in which we are
a part of nature. Indeed, he emphasizes that humans “don’t exist independently” by positioning
humans as co-inhabitants with other organisms. This understanding for him is foundational—
that one needs to grasp “first” the centrality of human’s relationship with nature in order to
approach the other two priorities of rejection of capitalism and self-determination.
Farmers often articulated a connection with nature in terms of connection with culture,
with history, with other people, and with a vision for a more just world. However they rarely
expressed the need to connect with nature in isolation, as a good in and of itself, a la Walden
Pond. Rather, connection with nature was important in part precisely because it is integral to a
wide variety of other kinds of connections.

125

Much more than with contemporary strains of environmentalism or environmental
justice, Detroit Black farmers’ narratives about connection with nature were deeply intertwined
with ideas about work and with a sense of spirituality. Take, for instance, Thompson-Curtis’
description of the benefits of working in the garden and growing one’s own food:

I think a lot of people are beginning to look at how they can work for themselves
and do work that feels good, that feels like I’m making a contribution instead of
just being like, what am I doing this for? You know, people are having work that
feeds their spirit, their body. It feeds someone else and you develop these
relationships to your work. It connects you to the very thing that gives you life,
which is food, which is the soil, which is the air, which is the water. I mean, it does.
Look, I could just have me a little cart where I sell my vegetables. Or I could create
this dish and just sell it, and make money from it. I mean, just enough to survive.
That’s what folks are saying—survive!

Like Yakini, she relates developing a connection to nature with survival. Nature provides
means of survival, “the very thing that gives you life.” However she does not frame the means
of life in mechanical terms. While working with soil and water is a way to provide for the
biological needs of the human body, Thompson-Curtis suggests something deeper—that it is a
way to provide a connection with a kind life force, that farming, and the connection with nature
that it provides, is a spiritual as well as a practical practice. It feeds both the spirit and the body.
Moreover, it is not just a connection with nature that creates this spiritual dynamic. It is
work that develops a relationship with nature, and through nature one may develop a relationship

126

with one’s work, and one’s own self—one’s body and spirit. Through farming, one can work for
one’s self doing work that “feels good.” It is also important here that an essential component of
work that is satisfying, that “feels good,” is that it provides a way for people to feel like they are
“making a contribution.” For Thompson-Curtis, satisfying work is about being able to have a
certain amount of autonomy, “that they can work for themselves,” and that their work have
tangible purpose beyond themselves. This means that an essential component of these
connections with nature, work, the body, and the spirit, is about caring for others—“It feeds
someone else.”
In her description of independent farm work in Detroit, she implicitly critiques the nature
of much of the work that is available to Detroiters—low wage, de-skilled, boring, and, crucially,
having little to do with benefitting one’s community. In such jobs it is easy to feel, as she puts it,
“what am I doing this for?” She presents the idea of growing one’s own food and selling the
fruits of one’s labor independently—vegetables or prepared dishes—as an alternative to wage
jobs. In part, here, she is offering an analysis of the need to divest from systems of alienated
labor. In contrast to jobs which feel disconnected and pointless, farming, she asserts, provides
for the needs of the spirit, the body, and the need to connect and contribute. It is notable, as well,
that she folds this critique of capitalist labor in with an analysis of what can be gained spiritually
from agriculture.
Similarly, Kadiri Sennefer frames a critique of consumer culture through his narration of
connection to natural processes:

That’s what agriculture also shows us—it takes that instant gratification out of us.
It shows you the proper way that life flows. Because you’re not going to plant a

127

seed today and then tomorrow you’re going to pick up a broccoli or a pepper. No,
you’re not going to see that pepper or that broccoli or that green till maybe two,
three months from now. So it shows you that yes, if you plant the seeds, it’s
going to produce, it’s going to bear fruit. But it’s not going to be right away.
And that’s the natural order of life. So that shows that there’s a time in between,
and everything has it’s natural process. I think what America has done for is, is
that it has made us addicted to instant gratification, and that’s unnatural. You
know, there’s nothing natural about instant gratification. And that’s the whole
thing about Monsanto. With these GMOs, they’re tampering with the natural
process of things, and it becomes unnatural. We’re natural people. We’re a part
of natural creation just like everything else on in life. And so I believe that’s why
we have the problems that we are, because we’re not living in accordance to our
true nature.

Senneffer begins by critiquing consumer culture and contrasting expectations of instant
gratification with the slower natural process of growing food. His crucial point, however, similar
to Yakini’s, is to place humans as not only gaining from nature, but to place humans as a part of
nature. Farming reacquaints people with patience and with “the proper way that life flows”—that
is, farming requires that people acquire a sense of processes of creation for the things that they
consume. He frames his argument by emphasizing that humans are “a part of natural creation,”
and that to lose connection with “the natural process of things,” is, indeed, to lose our connection
with part of what makes us human. This loss of ourselves as “natural people,” he argues, has
profound consequences—making genetic modification seem justifiable, for instance.

128

Thompson Curtis, like Sennefer, emphasizes the process of building a relationship with
what one produces as an essential part of building a local economy.

I don’t want to see everybody growing food and hauling it down the street to the
store and selling it. No! Living off of it! Eating off of it! Understanding! Because
people don’t understand. Everybody wants to provide a processing space for folks
to process food. They don’t understand. Before you get off to racing off to market,
experience it! So that it means something to you! So that you understand what it
is that you’re racing off to the market with to get that exchange of dollars. Get an
understanding of what it is. How important it is, and what it means to keep
growing—not just for the money. Because we’re getting lost, once again. We’ve
got to get this food to get this money to—okay—have you eaten any of the stuff
you sold? No. So how do you know what’s really coming out? That’s just me.
Does their money taste all their green beans?

Thompson-Curtis makes an argument for an ethic of subsistence here, but not simply
subsistence in order to generate a local economy to provide means to attain basic needs. Rather,
her sense of subsistence requires that producers build a relationship with what they produce.
Like Sennefer, Thompson-Curtis argues against instant gratification. For her, production
requires a certain amount of longevity in order to experience what one produces, get to know it,
build a relationship with it, before “racing off to market.” Thompson-Curtis’ vision here not
only argues for an economy in which people of color and poor people produce for themselves.
She also explicitly critiques the anonymizing impacts of alienation from what one produces

129

under capitalism. “Does their money taste all their green beans?” she asks rhetorically,
implicitly arguing that small producers should not only create the means to survive in the sense
of remaining alive, but also to survive in the sense that one’s relationship with one’s work,
nature, and what one produces also remains intact and is developed.
In Thompson-Curtis’ critique, as with many political theorists who have written and
worked in Detroit, the industrial context looms large. Her analysis of work consistently refers
back to work in industrial plants, even as she also contextualizes her thoughts on labor in the
current moment in which few Detroiters actually work in factories. For instance, she quips:

People say we’re going to work in a “plant.” What is the “plant?” Okay, you think
it’s a fancy word for factory, but you called it the “plant.” The “plant-ation?” The
“plant.” The workers. And what is our sole existence? To work. Now the plants
look like hospitals. They look like office buildings. But it’s the same premise.
You know. And see, here we are, growing food on this land. Who do we think we
are? You know. Not trying to get rich. Not trying to get rich. Not trying to buy
fancy sparkly stuff. We’re just trying to maintain, you know, some sort of existence
where we are free enough to be who we are as human beings.

Thompson-Curtis’ conception here plays with words—comparing factory labor to
plantation labor—to make a connection between alienation of workers under conditions of
enslavement and the experience of industrial labor in Detroit. She implies that both deny
workers the freedom to “be who we are, as human beings.”

130

Moreover she frames producing for oneself as a kind of audacity—“who do we think we
are” to try to produce outside of that plant/plantation system? In this conception, food
production is a form of reclaiming power against these systems of alienated labor. However,
crucially, this audacity does not move toward a capitalist conception of a “good life” of attaining
greater power as a consumer. Her conception, while advocating that people in the city should
produce, never moves into an ambition of moving into the M-C-M’ production strategy, in which
one produces for the end product of profit. Rather, her vision audaciously points toward
subsistence—the ability to produce for one’s self and to be able to secure the conditions to
cultivate one’s own life and indeed one’s own humanity.
Thompson-Curtis’ critique extends beyond farming into critiques of work in general, as
well as of the ways in which a capitalist economy circumscribes one’s life expectations. When I
asked her about her basic goals of Feedom Freedom, she talked not only about farming but about
education and an expanding sense of possibility:

[Our goals are] to provide those institutions who give accurate knowledge of the
things that sustain life. I mean, whether it be farming, technology, creativity, a
history, an education, you know, things like that. That provide a relevant education.
Or relevant existence. As opposed to I’m going to grow up and get a job and work
the rest of my life and then die. Or even I’m going to grow up, I’m going to go to
school, to college, get a debt, then worry the rest of my life about trying to pay it
off.

131

Her conception here is important to highlight for a number of reasons. First, like Mies
and Bennholdt-Thomsen, Thompson-Curtis centers that which sustains life over that which
generates money. She advocates for farming and generating an alternative food system. But
rather than viewing this work independently, she explicitly incorporates food systems into a
much larger project of institution building. The goal of both farming and of developing these
other institutions is to create broader and freer life possibilities.
Thompson-Curtis’ critique of educational institutions under a U.S. capitalist economy
here is explicit. She describes such institutions as limiting people’s ambitions such that people
expect to “grow up and get a job and work the rest of my life and then die,” all the while
“worry[ing] the rest of my life about trying to pay it off,” particularly operating through the
mechanism of debt. She views their impact as locking people into jobs which do not feed their
humanity, that is, that they do not facilitate a “relevant existence.”
In Chapter Three, I argued that, rather than viewing a job as a route to independence, as it
is often framed, Thompson-Curtis and other farmers often framed a job as representing
dependence and vulnerability. Noting Detroit’s history of factory closures, Thompson-Curtis
warned, “You can totally depend on someone else, who at any given moment could cut it off!”
Growing food, then, is a form of protection against making one’s survival, one’s life, dependent
on a job. Her critique of education follows a similar logic, reiterating her larger sense that a job
and wage labor is often a trap, a way that one loses control over one’s life, and as a limit on
one’s life possibilities.

Collectivity

132

Consistently, farmers from Feedom Freedom and D-Town emphasized the ways in which
the financial struggles of individuals and families and indeed their survival, was intertwined with
the collective struggle of Black people in general and Black people in Detroit in particular.
Farmers made this point in two main senses. First, they highlighted the ways in which collective
action and working collectively is effective as a survival strategy. And second, they often
evoked collectivity in the sense that Black self-determination or self-reliance is inherently a
collective project.
Feedom Freedom farmers, in particular, often used the phrase “collective self-reliance,”
to describe their vision for poor people in the city. James Boggs also used this wording as he
thought about how to reshape Detroit’s economy (J. Boggs, 2011a, 330). When I asked Feedom
Freedom farmer Kezia Curtis what she meant by this, she explained,

It’s a lot harder for me to be sustained, like, to sustain myself all by myself. Like,
okay, so I’m going to live in this house and I’m going to have to pay all these bills
all by myself. Or I’m going to have to do this whole thing all by myself.
Whereas if we all come together it’s like, oh, well, some people could live here or
some people could live there and we could have one lawnmower and use it
everywhere.

At its base, Curtis’ contention about the need for collectivity is a practical issue. It is a
strategy to make the best use of scarce resources. Curtis’s vision initially is about the everyday,
very local business of living and making do, and using collectivity as a tool with which to better
do that.

133

Her analysis expands from there, however, into a more structural theory of the ways in
which individuation and isolation—collectivity’s opposites—not only make survival difficult,
but are depoliticizing as well. “I feel like that happens a lot in the community,” she told me,
“Like, how am I going to pay for my bills, how am I going to do this, I need to provide for my
kids. And so it creates a whirl where you can’t see all of the other things that are going on and
how you’re being taken advantage of. Because I don’t have time to go and vote. I don’t have to
do this. I don’t have time to march in the streets.”
“So collectivity winds up being kind of a way to protect against [depolitization]?” I
asked.
“Right,” she said, “It’s the sharing of this weight. Whereas if you’re by yourself, you can
be consumed with…with not living.”
Like Thompson-Curtis, Kezia Curtis notes the ways in which being consumed in a
treadmill of just barely making do prevents people from living to their full capacities. Here she
emphasizes that ways in which living with the concern of not being able to pay one’s rent, of not
being able to feed one’s children—issues of bare survival—mean that one has a diminished
capacity to organize for change. So collectivity in the day to day issues of survival, the “sharing
of this weight,” can mean that one is freer to pay attention to larger structural analysis and action.
The consequences of struggling on one’s own is not only the exhaustion of what she calls “a
whirl” of trying to make do. It is also a sense that in all that struggling on one’s own, in an
economy in which one may never get ahead, one loses one’s humanity in a certain sense—that is,
that one is “not living.”

Relationships and Longevity

134

How Feedom Freedom dealt with neighbor relations was revealing of their theory of
work and a healthy life as intertwined with relationality and longevity. Feedom Freedom
farmers often highlighted long term ties to places and people as crucial nodes in doing effective
work. Relationships with neighbors came up constantly because the Feedom Feedom farm was
located in a very public location right at the end of a route many walked down to get to the main
thoroughfare of Jefferson Avenue, firmly embedded within a residential neighborhood.
Consistently, Feedom Freedom farmers emphasized relationships with neighbors, and especially
getting input and consent from neighbors for what they wanted to do in the neighborhood. Their
position was in part boosted by the fact that all members of the Thompson-Curtis family, the
core of Feedom Freedom, grew up in Detroit and had deep and longstanding relationships with
many people in the city—people with whom they had school with, worked with, played with,
and lived near for most of their lives.
When I asked Kezia Curtis why she thought Feedom Freedom had so few problems with
theft or vandalism in the garden, she replied,

I think some of it has to do with Trevor and Tyson [Family members], honestly,
because they have so much street credit. I mean, we lived on the East Side our
whole lives. And Trevor and Tyson have ripped and run the streets our whole lives.
And so everybody knows Trevor and Tyson. Like, I can be on the East Side and
randomly be like, oh, you know my [family members]? And they’ll be like, yeah.
We went to [High School] together, or blah blah blah. So I think a part of it is that.

135

This meant that Feedom Freedom, from its inception, (and in fact, long before) had
longstanding ties with a wide variety of people in the community. These ties included people
who were among those who might be less respectful to the space if they had no relationship to it.
Kezia Curtis’ comment also highlights the importance of the fact that Feedom Freedom is not
only run by Detroiters, but that it is run by a family of Detroiters. One of the family members
that Curtis mentioned in this conversation had only peripheral involvement with the garden. But
he had a presence at the site because it was also his family’s home, and his relationship with it
carries a weight of respect from those with whom he has relationships. So the garden benefits
from the street credit that accompanies his longstanding position in the community, without him
being actively involved in daily garden activities.
Kezia Curtis went on to describe the relationship that her father, Wayne Curtis, has with
the surrounding community.

I think part of it is that people just love Baba [Wayne Curtis]. And, I mean, he does
respect people. And so, I think it’s with that too. And then, I think that too, because
people just see us out there. I think like…people would feel bad [if they stole from,
or vandalized the garden]. Even if people did it, I think, really, I think they might
feel bad. Because when you can put a face to something like that, then it’s different.
It’s not like, oh, I never speak to those people ever, so if I put the rock through this
window, like, I don’t have anything to associate this with…Versus, like, I have
interaction with somebody on a regular basis, so if I do something, when I sit back,
I’m going to connect it to that person rather than just that object.

136

Kezia Curtis’ comments exemplify the importance of personal relationships in the
development and strength of the garden. She highlighted a number of important points here,
including, particularly, how central affective ties and relationality are to the strength of the
garden. She also notes the garden’s visibility in the neighborhood—not just the visibility of the
physical garden but the visibility of and building relationships with the people working on it. As
she insightfully points out, personal connections, and, crucially, respectful interactions, shift
neighborhood people’s connection with the space from a relationship with an object (the garden)
to a relationship with people (Baba Wayne). So then the importance of the garden, while
obviously still about food, farming, and the very necessary material resources it generates,
extends to being about affect, community, and a personal sense of investment and attachment.
Kezia Curtis’ comments undergird the fact that much of the garden’s success and
character has to do with the fact that it is deeply embedded, in both a physical and an
interpersonal way, in the neighborhood and community in which it is located. Thompson-Curtis
contrasts the ways that Feedom Freedom works with, the way developers treat land purchased in
the city:

I got to deal with my neighbors. I ain’t going to just slap some stuff over there if
they’ve got to deal with it. Just like when we ask about the garden. When we hear
feedback, we adjust it. You know, folks don’t want to see this, that, and the other.
Oh, well we can make some adjustments. Folks want to see this that and the other.
So we make the adjustments. But I believe in living amongst people. Not just, you
know, ‘I don’t care what they say.’ I think sometimes I feel like that. But, you
know, I try not to act on it. There’s a lot of old attributes that have to be shed.

137

Thompson-Curtis acknowledges that operating in a more democratic way around
developing land parcels in the community is sometimes not instinctual—there is much to be
unlearned, she notes. But, she emphasizes, she believes “in living amongst people.” This is
especially important for Feedom Freedom since the garden site continues to be Wayne Curtis and
Myrtle Thompson-Curtis’ place of residence. The garden is an extension of their personal lives,
and blurs boundaries between personal lives and professional livelihood.
Indeed, one of the main reasons that these ties are so deep is precisely because of this
blurring. The Curtis-Thompsons have lived, worked, made friends, and established themselves
in Detroit for their entire lives. Some older people in the Black agricultural community and
elsewhere in the city, have known Kezia Curtis, for instance, who is currently in her 30s, since
she was in diapers. The family ties that are at the core of the garden solidify this as well. Wayne
Curtis and Myrtle Thompson-Curtis have six grandchildren who live in Detroit, and are constant
fixtures at the garden. They have been around Feedom Freedom for their entire life memories.
As with any family, there is a strong sense that all of the people involved in the garden will know
each other for most of each other’s lives. The fact that the family has such deep ties in the city
extend this assumption beyond the immediate family. The ties that are generated before and
through the garden are not simply political ties, or even simple ties of friendship. They often are
ties that blur family-type relationships with farming, and are assumed to be potentially life-long.

Learning and Work
Detroit farmers’ conception of liberatory work also significantly incorporates learning
and theorizing through conversation. Some of this, on the farms, certainly is about building

138

concrete skills—how to plant, the science of compost, how to map out vegetable beds and plan
for the season, for instance. But also included in this are much more theoretical discussions,
politics, linking the work of the farm with larger systems and institutions, and constantly refining
one’s analysis through study and conversation.
Study was often unexpectedly integrated and prioritized into the work and culture of
Feedom Freedom. I arrived at a Feedom Freedom meeting one day, a little late and frazzled, to
find Wayne Curtis and Myrtle Curtis-Thompson sitting at their dining room table watching
footage of the historical debate between James Baldwin and William F. Buckley on YouTube.
As I sat down, they greeted me and restarted it, so that I could see the whole thing. We sat and
watched the debate, with occasional comments, while I forced myself to mentally switch gears
from my expectation of planning crop rotation to content analysis. After it was over, we had a
discussion about the video, which then led to a dialogue about justifications for white supremacy,
stemming from Buckley’s comments. It wasn’t until a full hour after the meeting had officially
started that we actually got down to covering who was writing what for the newsletter, and what
the plan was for the youth on Saturday. Indeed, these last discussions, on this day, were rushed
and cursory, because being able to relax and have the discussion on Baldwin had been
prioritized.
Additionally, when plans got derailed because of weather or other circumstances,
Feedom Freedom often turned work days into discussions or learning sessions. One rainy
Saturday Curtis-Thompson called me early in the morning and asked me to bring books over to
Feedom Freedom. Instead of a work day with the teenaged youth in the garden, we were going
to have a reading and discussion day. “Black history, food justice, anything that you think would
be interesting,” she told me. I brought over a motley assortment, including books by Robin

139

Kelley, Vandana Shiva, and the INCITE! Women of Color Anthology. When I got to Feedom
Freedom, I added my books to the pile that I found in the middle of Curtis and Curtis-
Thompson’s living room floor.
We all sat in a circle around the pile of books—about ten young people ages 12-17, and
four adults, including myself. There was some debate as to how we would go through the books
but the youth ultimately came up with a randomizing process. We each grabbed a book from the
pile and turned to page 63 and quietly read the second sentence on the page. Each person took a
few minutes to try and figure out the context of what was being said by reading the surrounding
paragraphs, as well as to get oriented to book as a whole. We then went slowly around the room.
Each person introduced their book, from what they were able to gather from the cover and some
skimming, read aloud the sentence, and any around it that seemed necessary for understanding.
Then the group discussed first what the sentence meant, putting it in their own words, and then
what it meant to them, to Detroit, to the work in the garden. Some of the books were harder than
others to decipher, and required more background knowledge. In one instance the group looked
to me expectantly to explain an obscure reference to Hegel. In another, we spent half an hour
talking about the idea of Black economic nationalism. Curtis-Thompson added her own
knowledge, telling the youth about the 1921 race riot in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in which racist Whites
burned down “Black Wall Street,” a thriving Black business district. We did this exercise for
almost four hours, circling around the room, until each person had introduced their book.
Amazingly (to me), the young people never seemed to flag in this process, opting to stay longer
than they had been scheduled so that we could get around the entire circle.
More formally, Feedom Freedom incorporated intellectual work into their work with the
teenaged youth that worked on the garden in the summer. The youth were required to write short

140

essays as a component of their work at the farm. Sometimes these short papers were designed to
come to some kind of group definition or understanding about a topic—they all wrote a short
piece defining the term food justice, for instance—and sometimes these were on a topic of their
choosing. In the summer of 2013, these essays ranged from defining the term “food
sovereignty,” to a short response piece to the George Zimmerman verdict.
From these essays and from other discussions, both formal and informal, the youth
organized “roundtables” to which they invited their friends, family, and anyone else associated
with garden. These roundtables were held in the garden, with participants perched in a circle on
crates, stumps, and garden chairs. One roundtable, for instance, held with Feedom Freedom
youth and youth from a local environmental justice organization, began with a consideration of
the term “marginalization” and ended in a lively discussion about the similarities between food
served in schools and in prisons and the school to prison pipeline. Another, also conceived of
and led by the Feedom Freedom youth, was essentially a workshop and brainstorming session on
“How to make meetings less boring”—a conversation about youth inclusion in community
organizing.
In a wide variety of ways, Feedom Freedom heavily emphasized dialogue and
conversation as a organizing strategy, and as a way to learn and teach. They often prioritized
making space to wrestle with questions of theory and social structure—for instance, asking what
dynamics, rhetorical techniques, and broader cultural ideas structure racist arguments like
William F. Buckley’s, or youth making connections between school lunches and prisons. It was
assumed that learning was a life-long process, and Feedom Freedom farmers explicitly devoted
structured time and space for adults and youth alike to have conversations to gain a better
understanding of social structures, to develop theory, and to make unexpected connections.

141

Capitalism
Ultimately, the arguments that farmers made about work and the need for collectivity
were undergirded by an explicit and studied critique of capitalism. Malik Yakini’s analysis, for
instance, was explicitly rooted in Marxist analysis, as well as critiques of colonialism and
imperialism.

I don’t think the capitalist system is a workable system. You know, it works for a
few people, but the rest of us get fucked, basically…It’s just, you know, not a
system that can promote equality. It’s not a system that can see that the needs of
everyone are provided for. It’s an exploitative system, because it’s based on those
who own the means of production and distribution making these mega-profits off
of the labor of others. And also the whole question of how the capitalist obtained
the land and the resources that they used to generate capital, you know, is rooted in
colonialism and imperialism. So, you know, I reject all of that. All of those systems
that disempower people all over the world are not, for me, viable systems.

Yakini here draws on a Marxist analysis of labor—that those who own the means of
production profit from the labor of those who earn a wage, and that this relationship is inherently
exploitative. Within this, he also includes a critique of colonialism as a form of primitive
accumulation, the original theft of land and resources, which allows for capitalist control of the
means of production. Yakini specifically identifies colonialism and imperialism as forms of such

142

primitive accumulation, dispossessing of their land people who would otherwise be able to
produce for themselves, making them reliant on wage labor.
However the solutions that many of the farmers offered tended not to be straight Marxist
solutions. When I asked Kezia Curtis about how she envisioned alternatives to capitalism, she
told me:

Having those conversations and building community, and, as we reimagine those
things, being able to come together and say what fits for particular communities.
Like, it doesn’t necessarily even need to be something that is national, that covers
over everywhere. Or even all over Detroit. I think that’s something that capitalism
has robbed a lot of cultures of, is being able to identify those things [which fit best
for a particular community], on a wide range of things. Not just how they spend
money but how they communicate with the higher power in their life.
Or…anything. How they talk to their children. You know, all those things should
be left up to the community and how they come together and see fit that it should
be done. So there’s no one way I can answer [your question about specific
alternatives to capitalism], but if people are coming together and talking, better
things will develop.

Curtis here provides a critique of capitalism that goes beyond a strict economic analysis.
In her conception, capitalism is not only objectionable in that it is exploitative but also in that
Curtis sees it as limiting people’s visions, and limiting the possibilities of collective organizing.
Here she essentially calls for a system of radical local democracy, a system which does not need

143

to “cover everywhere.” Her conception calls for a system in which communities may be able to
envision a wide variety of ways of thinking about what it means to live a good life. Indeed, from
this, we may say that part of her vision is to actively create a context to build skills and space for
collective visioning that does not prioritize capitalist imperatives—that visioning is part of the
vision.
Curtis here places much higher emphasis on the process of building an alternate economy
and way of life, rather than a prescripted vision of what this would look like. In response, to a
critique of capitalism as a force which reduces community control, and even dulls people’s
ability to understand their own wants and needs, Curtis (and Feedom Freedon in general)
prioritize regaining community decision-making. Her implication, which was reflected in many
ways in Feedom Freedom’s emphasis on discussion and grassroots theorizing in their daily
operations, is that the vision that they are struggling for required many more voices than their
own to even understand. Moreover, she asserts, the process of listening and speaking with those
voices was the most crucial part of their vision, the base on which all other decisions must be
made.
Curtis’ vision of developing a hyper-local system, which does not require national or
even city-wide buy in was not universally held. Malik Yakini was especially explicit about the
ways in which the alternative food systems which D-Town farm was trying to build, existed in
tension with capitalism. He noted:

Clearly, clearly we’re not going to have a totally independent food system within
the rubric of the capitalist system. Sometimes when people talk about alternatives,
I think sometimes, sometimes people are a little naïve in thinking that we can have

144

kind of have this little utopia inside of capitalism. And so where I’m coming from
is that while these visions are important, and they help to create vision, at the same
time we have to be working to overturn this oppressive system. Because the two
ultimately are not going to co-exist…Ultimately, because of the way that capitalism
functions, you’re not going to have some little semi-autonomous sphere within the
capitalist system.

Yakini here cautions against thinking of the farms in isolation from larger capitalist
systems, warning that the idea of building a “little semi-autonomous sphere within the capitalist
system” is unworkable. Rather than seeing a future in small scale projects, or viewing these
projects as autonomy in and of themselves, Yakini presents them as providing a sense of
possibility beyond capitalism. As he puts it:

I think we’re creating an alternate food system now. It’s in the embryonic stages,
clearly. I mean, in Detroit the vast majority of people are getting their food from
the industrial food system. But we’re beginning to show, on a very small scale, that
another option is possible. That we can begin to grow food locally. That we can
begin growing food sustainably. We can begin to generate wealth as a result of the
food we’re growing and selling. And we can begin to create a system for circulating
that wealth within our communities, for our own benefit. So all of that, again, starts
as a seed, and as people begin to catch on, then it begins to grow and grow, until
you reach some kind of critical mass and then you have a shift in consciousness.

145

Here Yakini frames the urban agriculture projects in Detroit as models, as ways to help
Detroiters envision the possibility of producing and consuming outside of an industrial food
system, and as ways to generate a larger “shift in consciousness.” In contrast to Feedom
Freedom’s more subsistence-focused goals, Yakini also asserts that part of his goal in working to
build an independent food systems is to circulate money within the Black community and to
build Black wealth. His conception, much more than Feedom Freedom’s, evokes earlier
separatist movements in the city, particularly the Republic of New Africa’s call to develop a
sovereign Black economy as part of a larger effort to succeed from the United States.
However, like Yakini, Kezia Curtis also does not minimize the difficulty in trying to
create alternatives to capitalism:

The system isn’t going to be like, oh, okay, this is what you want to do. We’re just
going to give up. Like, they’re going to come up against communities and people
and individuals and groups, and that’s when my non-violence will really be…
[laughter] put to the test. Because at that point it will be really real. How do you
combat something like that? Capitalism is pure evil. I mean, it cares about nothing
and no one. It cares nothing about you even if you are also completely dirty rich—
you too. I could take you out of the game too, and make you a really poor person.
That’s scary. Capitalism is a scary thing, especially when it’s at the point when it’s
going to be trying to stay alive.

Here Curtis makes two crucial points. First, she takes seriously the likely response of
capitalist institutions to meaningful challenges to the capitalist system, particularly any challenge

146

that threatens the system “trying to stay alive.” Capitalist institutions, she notes, aren’t “just
going to give up.” She also worries that any meaningful or effective struggle against them is
likely to be terrifying and violent.
Curtis’ second point is her analysis as to why capitalism is, as she puts it, “pure evil.”
Her objections may stem somewhat less from the idea that Yakini cites, of capitalism being an
inherently exploitative system, although that is a contention with which Curtis would likely
agree. Rather, however, here she explains capitalism’s “evil” as originating in its anonymous
self-interest, in the fact that “it cares about nothing and no one.”
Her concern echoes James Boggs, who expressed a similar contention in his analysis of
the ways in which capitalist logic contributed to abandonment in Detroit: “Whole cities,” he
wrote in a 1986 speech on the need to develop local economies, “are now being devastated
because they are being abandoned by runaway multinational corporations that owe no allegiance
to any community, any city, or any state, or even to the United States” (Boggs, 2011, p. 326).
Curtis echoes this concern in her contention that one of capitalism’s deepest destructive
tendencies lies in the fact that it “cares” about no one.

Boggsian Influence
Farmers’ conscious articulation of a theory of work is arguably heavily influenced by the
major intellectual trajectory of Grace Lee Boggs and the Boggs Center for Community
Leadership. Arguably, the converse is true as well—Detroit farmers have also been influential
on Grace Lee Boggs’ more recent work on the possibilities of local urban food production as a
basis of a local economy.

147

James Boggs focused much of his work from the 1980s on, on the idea of generating a
local economy. This work stemmed from his earlier theorizing on capitalist abandonment in
Detroit, which asserted that Black workers becoming increasingly surplus with
deindustrialization. Both he and Grace Lee Boggs had spent much of the 1960s and 70s thinking
about the Black working class as a revolutionary force, as the group of people who have least
benefitted from and most suffered from capitalist development. Their later work centered (and
for Grace Lee Boggs, who is still alive, continues to center) on theorizing, then, on what is to be
done in the face of deindustrialization.
James Boggs’ robustly critiques capitalism in general, and in Detroit specifically, for
generating a culture in which abandonment of a city is rendered logical. However, he and other
Detroit activists also viewed deindustrialization as potentially creating conditions to generate
alternatives to racial capitalism. As he noted in his 1969 Manifesto for a Revolutionary Black
Party, “Automation and cybernation have made these blacks expendable to the economy, but
they have also liberated blacks for the first time in their history on this continent from the
necessity to work on behalf of white development” (Boggs, 2011b, p. 208). Much of the last two
decades of his life, James Boggs focused on this issue—how Detroiters could build a new kind
of economy, which nurtured individual skills and well-being and community self-reliance.
Both James and Grace Lee Boggs heavily emphasize the need to build a local economy in
their writings. Contesting Mayor Young’s litany of development proposals to bring large scale
employers back to the city, James Boggs wrote in 1988:

We have to get rid of the myth that there is something sacred about large-scale
production for the national and international market. Actually, our experience over

148

the last seventy-five years has demonstrated that large-scale production, because it
is based on a huge separation between production and consumption, makes both
producer and consumer into faceless masses who are alienated from one another
and at the mercy of economic forces and the mass media. Instead, we have to begin
thinking of creating small enterprises that produce food, goods, and services for the
local market, that is, for our communities and for our city. Instead of destroying
the skills of workers, which is what large scale industry does, these small
enterprises will combine craftsmanship, or the preservation and enhancement of
human skills, with the new technologies that make possible flexible production and
constant readjustment to serve the needs of local consumers (J. Boggs, 2011d)

Farmers with Feedom Freedom and D-Town Farm both make arguments similar to James
Boggs’ in this passage about the need to create a local economy in order to create a healthier
relationship with work, as well as to gain some measure of autonomy from capitalist labor
markets which have never benefitted Black people.
More recently, Grace Lee Boggs and her interlocutors at the Boggs Center for
Community Leadership have theorized a great deal on work as well, continuing James Boggs’
trajectory of critiquing wage labor while at the same time viewing Detroit’s economic crisis as
an opportunity to rethink work outside of capitalist labor markets. Grace Lee Boggs wrote in
2011 in the Michigan Citizen, “The continuing jobs crisis is an opportunity to go beyond
organizing protests for more jobs and begin imagining work that frees us from being the
appendages to machines that we have become because of our dependence on jobs. Instead of
looking to politicians for programs that will provide millions of jobs, we need to encourage the

149

creation of work that not only produces goods and services, but develops our skills, protects our
environment and lifts our spirits” (G. L. Boggs, 2011).
James Boggs, and more contemporarily Grace Lee Boggs, have loomed large in
conversations around urban agriculture in the Detroit. Farmers with Feedom Freedom in
particular tend to identify themselves as working within a Boggs tradition. The reverse is also
true—that farmers in the city, and their theorizing has influenced Grace Boggs (much more than
James Boggs, as he died in 1996 before the current upsurge in radical urban agriculture in the
city). Grace Lee Boggs for instance, cites listening to a conversation with Myrtle Thompson-
Curtis and Boggs Center board member Barbara Chmielarczyk Stachowski as helping shape her
sense of the revolutionary potential in women creating everyday solutions in reshaping local
economies (G. L. Boggs, 2013).

Fully Living
Farmers at Feedom Freedom and D-Town both approach urban agriculture through a
deep rethinking of work, of the economic, and of capitalism. Their theorizing is embedded in the
Detroit context of deindustrialization and Black unemployment and underemployment, as well as
in the thinking of previous Black theorists and movements. As I discussed in Chapter Three and
in this chapter, much of the work that farmers do is framed in terms of survival—individual
survival as well as the collective survival of Black people and poor people in Detroit. At their
base, the visions expressed by farmers at Feedom Freedom and D-Town Farm are about
survival—survival in the context of untenable and exploitative labor markets and working
environments, and survival in a city which often does not provide resources to meet many

150

people’s basic needs. But farmers tend to conceive of survival in ways which depart from mere
biological definitions of remaining alive.
First, farmers do frame survival in part as about meeting basic needs. Indeed the fact that
so many people in Detroit struggle to meet the basic need for nutritious food in Detroit is one of
the strongest motivations that farmers consistently expressed for needing to build both an
alternative food system and an alternative to industrial capitalism. Farmers consistently frame
the growing of food as part of a struggle and a strategy to survive the conditions of postindustrial
racial capitalism.
Second, farmers like Myrtle Thompson-Curtis often position the goal of survival against
the goal of materialism. The idea of survival, framed this way, is about trying to develop a way
of life which emphasizes basic needs over striving to gain access to the ability to consume, what
Thompson-Curtis calls, “fancy sparkly stuff” (Thompson-Curtis, 2012).
Third, farmers tend to frame mental and spiritual health as part of survival. Survival is
not just about the body, but about one’s sense of self and self-worth. Moreover it is about one’s
relationship with nature and with a sense of spirituality, which, farmers often connect with being
able to work with and build relationship with land, natural processes, and processes of growth.
And fourth, farmers tend to frame survival collectively—that is, not just about the
survival of individual bodies but also about Black survival, and the survival of neighborhoods
and communities. This means that survival is also in part about retaining and developing
community ties, honoring longevity, and centering relationships.
Together, this framing of survival critiques a mere biological definition of what it means
to live. Indeed, farmers like Curtis-Thompson share a sense that just barely surviving—as
people do in low wage, precarious, and unpleasant jobs—robs people of the time and energy and

151

connection that it takes to fully live. So their vision of survival, or really, fully living, requires a
sense of developing one’s potential, one’s relationships, and one’s ability to contribute.

Building a Local Economy
Feedom Freedom and D-Town Farmers frame building a local economy, one which
centers Black production and consumption, as one route to gain some security within and a
measure of autonomy from the operations of racial capitalism. Many Detroit farmers echo what
James Boggs wrote in 1986, as the runaway train of deindustrialization was impacting more and
more people in Detroit:

We must now begin to practice doing for ourselves—or collective self-reliance.
And as we do this, starting with relatively simple things—like creating support
networks to look out for each other and moving on to community gardens and
greenhouses, community recycling projects, community repair shops, community
daycare networks, community meditation centers—we will discover that we are
not only controlling and improving our space but that we are also transforming
ourselves and our young people from faceless masses who are afraid of one
another into socially responsible, mutually respecting, and politically conscious
individuals who are systematically building the power to change our whole
society (Boggs, 2011, p. 330).

This vision harkens to a number of previous calls for Black economics to build greater
Black stability and Black power in the city—the community farms developed by the Nation of

152

Islam and the Shrine of the Black Madonna, food cooperatives formed by the Inner City Sub-
Center and Operation Get Down, as well as the labor and Black power struggles of the 1960s and
70s in Detroit and elsewhere, and national conversations on Black economic nationalism. In
general, these movements have largely revolved around the need to build greater Black self-
reliance in order to have some security against, and greater degrees of autonomy from racial
capitalism at large. Farmers’ visions also draw on the broader experience of Black Detroiters,
where generally the work that is most available is difficult to get to unfulfilling, low wage, and
unreliable.
Both Feedom Freedom and D-Town Farmers argue that creating meaningful work is
crucial to survival—survival in the sense of maintaining one’s dignity, spiritual, bodily, and
mental health, and the ability to grow. Central to their idea of meaningful work is work which
brings close connection between one’s labor and what one produces, and also work which
creates growth for the worker—bodily, intellectual, and spiritual growth. Farmers like Sennefer
and Curtis-Thompson argue that when one works with land and nature through farming, one
develops greater control over one’s own physical well-being, as well as building a relationship
with natural processes, and with one’s own sense of self and self-worth. Moreover, through
endeavoring into farming work collectively, one creates greater stability as a community and as
individuals.
As a result, Detroit farmers put forth a vision of meaningful work, through the praxis of
farming, that holds relationality as a core value. That is, that meaningful work requires the
formation of deep relationships—relationships with nature, relationships to that which is
produced and the people with and for whom it is produced, relationships with the context of
production—neighbors and the city, and relationships with one’s self, one’s spirituality, and

153

one’s intellect. This vision implies serious critique of capitalism, both implicitly and explicitly.
Farmers have come to their theories both through movement discourse (Black Nationalism, The
Black Panther Party, the work of The Boggs Center), and though the praxis of living, working,
and farming in Detroit.
Foundational to their critique is the sense that Kezia Curtis articulated—that capitalism
“cares about nothing and no one” (K. Curtis, 2012). Detroit farmers are acutely conscious of the
ways in which businesses and capital abandoned the city, that is, did not care for the city or the
people in the city. They are extremely attentive to the ways in which the jobs that most people in
the city hold do not “care” for them—pay unliveable wages, are pointless, precarious, and often
unpleasant or even abusive. Their response has been to work to develop a sense of work which
explicitly values the worker as human, with human needs for health and relationships. The
vision for work they have developed through farming, drawing also a great deal from earlier
struggles, is of work which centers care—care for workers, care for nature, care for relationships
and context, and care for one’s own spiritual and intellectual needs.

154

Chapter 5

Development and Care

Detroit is, by all measures a “forgotten place.” Capital left the city for more profitable
pastures. Manufacturing plants closed. The city’s more affluent residents disappeared into the
suburbs. So did first the white middle and working class, and then the African American middle
class, riding freeways built through urban renewal out of the city.
Forgotten places, geographer Ruth Wilson Gilmore reminds us, far from being outside
capitalist processes, are places which have been intricately shaped by “the abandonment
characteristic of contemporary capitalist and neoliberal state reorganization” (Gilmore, 2008, 31-
32). Indeed, Detroit’s contours, its skyline, and its open spaces, have been shaped by waves of
capitalist reorganization. One can see the cycles in the structures that remain and in the open
gaps of the ones that do not. And one can see it in the gardens, cultivated on land that once
housed auto executives, middle management, and, in different neighborhoods, once housed
workers.
Detroit offers a unique vantage point from which to theorize what it means to live a good
life and to shape alternate ways of being in the U.S. First, it is a place where one cannot ignore
the ways in which capitalist cycles produce “organized abandonment” (Harvey, 2007). The
effects of this organized abandonment and the devastation it has wrought impact almost every
aspect of life in the city.
Feedom Freedom farmer Kezia Curtis compared the experience of Detroit with other
cities that she has visited:

155

Detroit is really no different than any other city. But in every other city there’s this
really nice backdrop of, like, oh, there are rich people here and they spend money
and you can walk around a feel safe. But, you know, that has nothing to do with
really building a sense of community. It just has to do with, like, we need to get
these poor people out of the way because we don’t want people to see them…You
come to Detroit and you see it. You see it. It’s just a lot more apparent here that
there are poor people (K. Curtis, 2012).

Poverty is unavoidable here, both individual poverty and the city’s poverty. It is obvious, when
you walk down any main thoroughfare in the city and see burned out storefronts. It is obvious
every dusk when street lights fail to come on.
Also in Detroit, the extent to which capital does not care for or about people’s well-being
is laid especially bare. It is made palpable by the hulking ruins of the Packard plant on Grand
Boulevard, one of the first to leave in 1958. The company left behind a wreckage the size of a
small town right in the middle of the city. What was once a three and a half million square foot
factory is now forty acres of seven story buildings, crumbling concrete and twisted steel never
cleared. It is obvious again on Michigan Avenue, where the towering ruin of the eighteen floor
Michigan Central Station looms over a small gentrified block which caters to out of towners who
want to eat a burger while shaking their heads at the enormity of the devastation. Every
weekend, a steady stream of suburbanites in full wedding regalia disembark from SUVs trailed
by photographers. They take their pictures in front of the station with enormous panoramic
lenses, dress trains blowing in the wind, high stone arches framing broken windows in the

156

background. And then they climb back into their vehicles and drive away, somewhere else,
somewhere out of the city.
Second, it is a movement city. An enormous variety of Black movements have been
birthed here, developed theory and action from the vantage point of the factory floor and
Detroit’s neighborhoods. And while white flight brought with it enormously destructive
consequences, it also meant that African Americans in Detroit were able to wield a level of
power in the city that is unusual in such a large city the United States. Malik Yakini noted this
when I asked about why urban agriculture has developed in Detroit in the way that it has.
“Because of growing up in the Black empowered political environment, you know, it has made
some of us very bold.” He went on, “And so, for that reason, also I think that Detroit has the
responsibility of setting an example of how the descendants of formerly enslaved Africans create
models of self-determination” (Yakini, 2012).
Abandonment in Detroit has brought with it both tremendous destruction and a certain
sense of openness and, indeed, obligation to generate better, more functional, more humane ways
of living. As Ruth Wilson Gilmore points out, those who live and organize in “forgotten places,”
do so within constraints of social and economic mobility, racialization, gender, nationality, and
the constraints that come with occupying a landscape which shifts according to capital’s needs.
Yet, she says, “Constraints do not mean ‘insurmountable barriers.’ However it does suggest that
people use what is available to make a place in the world…The awareness of imminent and
ineluctable change that comes with abandonment in new ways and at new scales, opens up the
possibility for people to organize themselves at novel resolutions” (Gilmore, 2008, 36). Urban
agriculture in Detroit is exactly such a novel resolution, or, rather than resolution, a novel
process toward resolution. Urban farmers draw on what they have—land, study, a sense of

157

history, and most importantly, relationships and a sense of obligation to each other and the city—
to generate, or at least work towards, what they need—food, stability, a back-up plan in the face
of unstable employment.

Blues Epistemology
Clyde Woods, in his landmark study of the blues as a response to “the permanent state of
crisis in the [Mississippi] Delta” (Woods, 1998, 26), called us to be attentive to grassroots,
covert, and cultural forms of planning and theorizing on development. Woods argues that for the
reconstruction era Black working class in Mississippi, the blues were a medium through which
people “grasped reality in the midst of disbelief, critiqued the plantation regime, and organized
against it” (Woods, 1998, 25). Examining the epistemologies embedded within the blues makes
visible (and audible) “African American traditions of explanation, development thought, and
social action” (Woods, 1998, 27).
Urban farmers in Detroit are not blues musicians in the Mississippi Delta. However, their
theorizing and organizing grows from a similar kind of tradition, and is arguably an extension of
the blues tradition of explanation, in that their work emanates from “a sense of collective self and
a tectonic footing from which to oppose and dismantle the American intellectual, cultural, and
socioeconomic traditions constructed from the raw material of African American exploitation
and denigration” (Woods, 1998, 29). Detroit urban farming operates from the experience of the
Black working class, and now the working poor, from exploitation in the economy of the post-
industrial Northern U.S., and from a deep sense of vision and movement from earlier
generations.

158

Good life/Care
Radical movements generally ask us, or ask society at large, to rethink core values, to see
and to question epistemological schemas that justify violence or that legitimize injustice. Detroit
farmers challenge the idea of The Good Life, a flexible concept for sure, but one almost always
dependent on winning at the game of capitalism—a good job (or even better, being the boss in
charge of others’ jobs), money, a nice house, a car, private schools. Most of these hallmarks of
The Good Life are at least in part about insulating one against consequences of unmitigated
capitalism, disinvestment in public services and in the public good, against forgotten places and
the people who inhabit them—to, as Kezia Curtis pointed out, hide poor people from view. An
integral part of the notion of The Good Life is the goal of winning at capitalism to escape from
the places and the people who suffer its consequences. As an alternative, Detroit farmers
radically reframe the goal of attaining The Good Life into active theorizing about what it means
to live a good life.
I began this dissertation with the idea of care—with the ambient conversations in the city
scoffing at and accusing that developers, the emergency manager, and new white residents don’t
really care about the city or about its long-time residents. This critique may be obvious. But is it
also a profound reframing of what development should mean. It implies that development, and
its underlying assumptions about what it is to live a good life, should, in fact, be about care.
Centering care is helpful in the sense that it interrogates interest. Does someone (a
developer or a person in the neighborhood) care about their impact on a particular place? What
about their impact do they care about? What are their priorities? What are their goals,
personally and ideologically? Who and what ultimately do they care about?

159

The idea of care also prioritizes stewardship. How does one take care of a place? Does
this development interact mindfully and responsibly with others? With nature?
And perhaps most crucially, centering the idea of care in development requires an
examination of the personal and of relationships—care as affect, affection, love. To say that care
matters as a measure of legitimate development is to say that people’s relationships matter—
relationships between family members and friends, with their neighborhoods, with place, with
histories, relationships between generations. It is to say that the strength of people and places,
and what it means to live a good life, is fundamentally dependent on the strength of these
relationships.
This idea of care resonates strongly with the conception of subsistence production
developed by Maria Mies, Veronika Bennholt-Thompson, and Erika Märke. Mies defines
subsistence in contrast to capitalist production, whose goal for the capitalist is ultimately money.
For subsistence production, however, the goal is life—“the creation, re-creation, and
maintenance of immediate life” (Mies, 1983).
Detroit farmers operate from this goal as well, as they center issues of survival. Survival
means at the bare minimum having secure access to food and a way to recreate one’s own life
and the lives of those for whom one cares. Survival is a constant urgency in a city with
extremely high rates of poverty, in which many, if not most people have difficulty securing a
secure livelihood, and difficulty accessing food which does not cause damage to one’s body and
premature death.
However Detroit farmers also tend to define survival in much broader and richer terms
than merely being able to remain alive. They asserted throughout their interviews that there is a
difference between staying alive and surviving with one’s full humanity intact—“really living”

160

as Kezia Curtis put it (K. Curtis, 2012). One “really lives” through developing strong
relationships, through work which feeds oneself and one’s community, through a sense of
purpose, and through having relative control over the circumstances of one’s life—a degree of
autonomy from systems which do not have one’s best interest in mind.
In this, is a sense that survival, in the rich sense of really living, requires collective
survival—the survival of one’s community, and more generally the survival of Black people, in
Detroit and elsewhere. With this, is a call for independent institution building and system
building in order to guarantee this collective survival, both as a good in and of itself, and as a
form of security for individuals within a collective. This contention echoes Märke’s conception
of subsistence as crucially developed around systems which are operate relatively autonomously
in that they can self-regulate, enable self-sufficiency, and are self-reliant (as cited in Bennholdt-
Thomsen & Mies, 1999, 21).
In Detroit, farmers often drew on the work of movements in Detroit and elsewhere to
argue for food sovereignty, that is, for the development of self-reliance through building
independent food systems. At the base of this goal was a struggle to reduce dependence on
systems which do not care for one’s community. Farmers in Detroit, like many other farmers
and food justice activists throughout the world, (see for example Borras, Edelman, & Kay, 2008;
Holt-Giménez, 2011) view industrial and corporate food regimes as a crucial way in which
people are rendered dependent on a wide variety of systems whose relationship with poor people
and people of color is primarily extractive—as exploited labor and as captive consumers.
Therefore the call for food sovereignty is a call to shift production of something so fundamental
to life as food from entities which clearly do not care for the wellbeing of Detroit, of people of
color, of poor people, to ones that do—to Detroiters, to people of color, to poor people.

161

Food sovereignty, then, relies on a sense of collectivity—in the sense of a common
purpose, in the sense of sharing resources and work, and in the sense of relationality.
Particularly in discussions of collective self-reliance, Detroit farmers called for Black Detroiters
and poor Detroiters to organize alternative economic and food systems for themselves.
Additionally, farmers like Kezia Curtis approached the collectivity in part as an issue of
practicality. Collective use of resources and work could be a way to lighten everybody’s load, to
hedge against individual insecurity, and to ensure time for reflection, learning, and organizing.
And third, Detroit farmers held at the core of their theorizing a sense that building
longterm, interdependent relationships were a source of security, as well as a moral and spiritual
good. Many farmers echoed James Boggs’ contention that “In order to be human we need to feel
that we belong to a community where people of different ages and interests have grown to
depend upon one another because over the years our personal lives and the life of the community
have become interdependent. We need to feel that we can look to our neighbors for help in
keeping the streets clean, in raising our children, in looking out for one another” (J. Boggs,
2011f). For Boggs, it is not just that interdependence is an efficient way to run things. Rather he
contends that people’s very humanity, or at the very least our well-being as human beings, is
contained within these relationships. “Really living” requires the cultivation and maintenance of
these relationships, of interdependence. It requires developing caring relationships with family,
neighbors, and others. This caring is both about the materiality of “looking out for” each other
and stewardship of the space to “keep the streets clean,” and it is also about the emotional
relationships—caring about each other’s well-being, friendship, love.
Farmers’ emphasis on relationality also extended beyond interpersonal relationships into
an analysis of the ways in which “really living” requires building strong relationships between

162

oneself and nature, and between oneself and one’s work. Again, on one hand farmers were after
practical goals. Building a relationship with nature through learning about it—learning cycles of
seasons, the mix of organisms in the soil, under what conditions a seed will thrive—will
empower one to be able to care for oneself. One can produce at least some of the means of one’s
own reproduction, support one’s self and others, reducing one’s reliance on labor systems which
do not “care” for one’s well-being.
This relationship-building with nature and work contained within it another aspect as
well, one which farmers often framed in terms of spiritual health and internal, mental well-being
and balance. Myrtle Thompson-Curtis framed this as people “having work that feeds their spirit
and their body.” Building a relationship with nature through working with it, in Thompson-
Curtis’ terms, “connects you with the very thing that gives you life, which is food, which is the
soil, which is the air, which is water” (Thompson-Curtis, 2012). Indeed, for her and other
Detroit farmers, a good life, or “really living” requires that one develops a sense of one’s place in
the world in relationship with non-human life, and with natural processes.
These ideas on work, collectivity, nature, and care form the foundation of what I argue is
a cohesive, yet continuously evolving, grassroots theory of urban planning and development. At
the base of this theory, as with all planning, is a vision of what it means to live a good life. The
underlying assumptions of what constitutes a good life—what people feel will make them happy,
what it means to be successful, life’s goals—that Black-led farming in Detroit supposes is
distinctly different than those of most dominant planning models, and has evolved in large part
out of movements for Black power and from a longer genealogy of a blues epistemology—of
theorizing, debating, and planning and building systems of meaning and institutions in resistance
to racism and exploitation.

163

Black-led farming in Detroit de-naturalizes dominant planning’s assumptions of what it
means to live a good life, and thus de-naturalizes its manifest “solutions” of wooing potential
large employers to the city, for instance, or selling land to outside investors. These “solutions”
to Detroit’s various crises rely on an entirely different set of assumptions of the good life than
farmers present here. J.K. Gibson-Graham argue against a “capitalocentric” discourse which
frames all economic questions, and sense of economic possibility in relation to capitalism. This
makes it “difficult to entertain a vision of the prevalence and vitality of noncapitalist economic
forms” and operates as “a brake upon the anti-capitalist imagination” (Gibson-Graham, 2006, 3).
In contrast, the theorizing of Detroit farmers and of Black-led urban agriculture in Detroit
center an ethic of care in framing what it means to live a good life, and as a way to become, in
Gibson-Graham’s words, “different kinds of economic beings” (Gibson-Graham, 2006a, xxviii).
A good life requires interdependent caring relationships between people and nature—
relationships in which one’s sense of well-being is interconnected with other’s well-being. It
also requires a sense of care for internal well-being, a sense that one’s spirit, intellect, and sense
of self and purpose in relation to nature, to history, and to one’s community matter to questions
of development. James Boggs, in his 1986 speech “Going Where We Have Never Been,”
outlined a vision for cities with cohesion based not on capitalist development but on human
relationships: “The city must be seen as the place where you create social ties with the people
you live with and not just as a place to which you come to get a job or to make a living. We
have to see the power that is in the people and not the people as existing only to create capital for
production or as dependent on capital for their livelihood” (J. Boggs, 2011b). Detroit farmers
reiterate this idea, that urban development should rely on strength in relationality rather than in
the service of capital.

164

Clyde Woods notes that “During the last three hundred years, the African American
working class has daily constructed their vision of a non-oppressive society through a variety of
cultural practices, institution building activities, and social movements. By doing so, they have
created an intellectual and social space in which they could discuss, plan, and organize this new
world” (Woods, 1998, 39). Black-led urban farming in Detroit is both influenced by and is an
extension of this tradition of planning and critique. Malik Yakini echoes Woods’ sense of
organizing a new world as he explains, “Now on the surface level, it looks like we’re growing
tomatoes and carrots and peppers and what have you. That’s part of what we’re doing also, and
that’s an important part. But at the root of it is really empowering our community to shape our
own destiny, and reclaiming that right that we have as human beings to determine what will
happen in our own lives” (Yakini, 2014).
Most of the farmers I spoke with for this project noted that these projects are small, are
more models than actual systems, foundations to a larger project of visioning and shaping what it
could mean to live in urban spaces. These projects are a base from which to theorize through
praxis, trying out, thinking through, trying again. Myrtle Thompson-Curtis reaffirms that this
kind of theorizing happens through dialogue, collectivity, and persistence:

That’s what we want to do—build the foundation to understand and then to do. So
that we can struggle, and struggle together, not by ourselves. I mean, Wayne is like
in his mid-sixties now. And he has not wavered. I mean, everybody gets shaky
here and there, like, what’s the point, ain’t nobody listening. But when you plant a
seed, sometimes you think that dang gone seed is not going to grow. And you look
at the spot where you put it and there’s nothing. Then you look around and you

165

see—what the heck? I thought it was dead and look at it! And you start watering
it and taking care of it. And that’s pretty much what happened here (Thompson-
Curtis, 2012).

166

Appendix A

A City of Detroit Policy on Food Security
“Creating a Food Secure Detroit”

Preamble
Community Food Security can be defined as the condition which exists when all of the members
of a community have access, in close proximity, to adequate amounts of nutritious, culturally
appropriate food at all times, from sources that are environmentally sound and just. This food
security policy was developed to affirm the City of Detroit’s commitment to nurturing the
development of a food secure city in which all of its citizens are hunger-free, healthy and benefit
from the food systems that impact their lives. This policy also affirms the City of Detroit’s
commitment to supporting sustainable food systems that provide people with high quality food,
employment, and that also contribute to the long-term well-being of the environment.

This policy addresses the following areas:
 Current access to quality food in Detroit
 Hunger and Malnutrition
 Impacts/Effects of an Inadequate Diet
 Citizen Education
 Economic Injustice in the Food System
 Urban Agriculture
 The Role of Schools and other Public Institutions

167

 Emergency Response

This document is organized by a statement of the issues, followed by actions needed to address
those issues. This policy also calls for the formation of a Detroit Food Policy Council devoted to
addressing the issues outlined herein.

Current Access to Quality Food in Detroit
Access is germane to any discussion about a community’s food security. Access is the
availability of quality food within a reasonable distance from where people live. Access also
includes the ease and ability to travel to where quality food is available, as well as the
affordability of that food and its cultural suitability to specific population groups within the
community.

In the city of Detroit, the most accessible food-related establishments are party stores, dollar
stores, fast-food restaurants and gas stations. Although most neighborhoods may have a grocery
store within a “reasonable” distance, the quality and selection of food items is exceedingly
lacking. Most city stores have a very limited variety of unprocessed (fresh) vegetables and fruits.
Most foods are canned, boxed, frozen and/or highly processed. Highly processed foods are
nutrient-poor, with excessive salt, sugar, and harmful fats. These stores also lack food
alternatives for persons with the chronic conditions, such as heart disease, hypertension and
diabetes, who require low-salt, sugar-free, healthy carbohydrates and healthy fats. These and
other chronic health conditions exist and are growing at alarming rates in the African-American
community.

168

The lack of access to transportation, an inadequate public transportation system, and safety
issues are all factors impacting a person’s ability to choose when and where they shop for food
items. Fast-food restaurants, dollar stores, party stores and gas stations are often the closes and
most convenient establishments from which people get food.

With regard to affordability, the cheapest food items are usually the most heavily processed and
unhealthy items. Fresh food items are more expensive, even though they are often of poor
quality. The availability and affordability of local and/or organic vegetables, fruits and meats is
practically non-existent in Detroit, while merely crossing jurisdictional borders gives one that
access. In fact, many Detroiters with transportation and economic means regularly, if not
exclusively, shop for food beyond the borders of this city.

Actions Needed:
 Increase the number of culturally appropriate food outlets within a reasonable distance
in all Detroit neighborhoods.
 Perform research on the type and location of food establishments and the extent to which
these stores fulfill neighborhoods needs.
 Create mechanisms with store operators and the Michigan Dept of Agriculture food
safety inspection system to ensure that Detroit stores comply with food safety codes and
maintain clean and sanitary food preparation and sales environments within stores.
 Ensure that food stores carry a variety of fresh foods and food items for persons with
special needs and chronic conditions.

169

 Put in place monitoring mechanisms to ensure that food items are safe and fresh.
 Review bus stops and put in place bus lines that give people direct access to grocery
stores without the need of a transfer. Assess the need for “grocery routes” which reflect
actual shopping needs (evenings and weekends).
 Make locally grown and organic foods accessible throughout the city by supporting
increased production within neighborhoods, neighborhood farmers markets, and small
business assistance to neighborhood stores that agree to participate in a “good neighbor
program” in which they agree to sell more locally grown fresh and healthy foods, do not
sell alcohol and tobacco to minors, and negotiate other mutual benefits with
neighborhood organizations that can appropriately represent neighborhood desires.
 Oppose distribution of genetically modified foods (GMO)’s in the City of Detroit.

Hunger and Malnutrition
The ability to sustain one’s life through eating adequate and healthy foods is the most basic of all
human rights. The City of Detroit should be committed to abolishing hunger, food insecurity,
and malnutrition. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, an estimated 400,000
households in Michigan live with hunger or the threat of hunger. With thousands of vulnerable
persons and families within the city finding that their resources are not enough to cover rent,
utilities, medicine, clothes and other basic necessities, one could guess that a substantial number
of the hungry live in Detroit.

The Director of the WIC program in Detroit writes that the program services approximately
65,000 residents per year; seventy-five percent are infants and children up to five years old. Year

170

2000 census data indicated that 12% of children had low birth weight, 20-26% of the children
were anemic, and 10% were overweight. A recent pediatrician’s report documented that “even
mild to moderate under-nutrition in young children is linked to problems that last throughout the
lifespan.”

While Federal programs, such as food stamps and WIC have helped to alleviate the most severe
forms of hunger, they haven’t adequately impacted food security. As well, the elderly population
suffers from hunger and malnutrition due to isolation, lack of access to stores, inability to
prepare nutritious meals, illness, general poor health and cognitive challenges.

Actions Needed:
 Institute and support community self-help projects that address both hunger and
malnutrition.
 Support and increase community food banks, as well as information about and access to
them.
 Identify government and other resources that support programs to alleviate hunger and
malnutrition, especially to the most vulnerable of the population.
 Advocate for increased availability of state issued food benefits to eligible recipients and
educate community residents about the role and importance of food stamps as the
society’s commitment to meeting basic needs of fellow citizens who are ill-served by the
marketplace.
 Encourage and work with faith-based institutions to do extensive out-reach and ensure
that the food needs of young families and the elderly are met.

171

 Educate the community and families about the benefits of breastfeeding and the risks
associated with infant formulas.

Impacts/Effects of an Inadequate Diet
Recent research suggests that many of Detroit’s children are consuming “foods” which do not
promote optimal health. The study indicated that many children are getting energy primarily
from powdered fruit flavored drinks. Children who do not have an adequate diet perform poorly
in school because they are absent more due to illness, have shorter attention spans, retain less,
and often exhibit inappropriate behaviors.

Far too many children and adults are overweight or obese and as a result suffer from poor self-
esteem, lack of energy, social challenges and various health problems. Obesity should be of
major concern in the city of Detroit. Clearly, at the heart of efforts to address obesity must be the
understanding that this is a cultural phenomenon that is deep rooted in the habits that have been
developed by post World War II generations of the American populace and federal policies that
greatly subsidize less healthy processed foods making them abundant and cheap over fresh
produce.

The movement towards convenience slowly led families away from the preparation of fresh
foods that sustained health and wellness, to pre-packaged, instant foods that reduced the time
spent in kitchens, but compromised nutrition. That downward spiral has continued with the
proliferation of “fast food” restaurants throughout the city of Detroit. Many families get
significant percentages of their food from such establishments. Research has shown that the fat

172

contained in burgers and fries contribute significantly to obesity in children and adults. The
tendency of those establishments to “supersize” their product has led to over-consumption, and
again contributes to obesity and poor health.

Many Detroiters suffer from illnesses that could be prevented or controlled by improved eating
habits including hypertension, diabetes, and heart disease. It has been suggested that certain
cancers may be caused by nitrates and nitrites in processing meats that are used frequently in the
African-American community such as smoked meats, bacon, sausage and lunch meat. African
American communities also face higher risk from diabetes, cardio-vascular disease, and other
diet-related illnesses.

The elderly, whose health is often more fragile than young and middle-aged people, are even
more adversely impacted by poor diet and nutrition. Poor diet accelerates the aging process,
contributing to degeneration of internal organs and mental capacity.

Culture is dynamic, and it can’t be created or altered by individuals. Creating culture is a
collective venture. Impacting the lifestyle habits that contribute to obesity and poor health will
require the commitment of the City of Detroit and a broad cross-section of the institutions,
families and individual members of our communities.

Actions Needed:
 Conduct research specific to the population of the city of Detroit to quantify rates of
malnourished, overweight and obese children and adults, as well as rates of diet-related

173

diseases and dental problems of youth. Set in place mechanisms to track or monitor the
rates over time.
 Educate the public and policy-makers on this issue to bring attention to the scope of the
issue and the immediacy needed in seeking solutions.
 Research and address cultural barriers to improving eating habits.
 Provide and promote opportunities for shared meal preparations at Community Kitchens,
and growing more fresh fruits and vegetables in backyards and within neighborhoods.

Citizen Education/Food Literacy
Providing affordable, healthy food choices and easy access to those stores and markets which
offer those choices is but one step towards impacting the health of our community through the
foods we eat. How to select healthy choices, understand food labels and ingredients, and
culturally appealing healthy methods of food preparation are essential as well. It is also
important that our community understands the connection between what they eat and dealing
with the health issues faced by so many.

There exist a need for youth and adults to be able to unpack and counter the marketing messages
of the mainstream food system that creates a disproportionate “toxic food environment” with
billboards and other forms of marketing in poor communities and communities of color.

Actions needed:

174

 Provide on-going education through the City of Detroit Health and Wellness Promotion
Department, schools, churches and appropriate agencies on healthy food choices and
culturally appropriate food preparation.
 Oppose especially marketing of sugar-, fat- and salt-laden food and beverages to kids
and in schools and other youth-oriented environments.
 Provide education on food choices and preparation as related to specific conditions and
diseases prevalent in our community such as high blood pressure, heart disease,
diabetes, asthma, allergies and cancer.
 Encourage grocery stores, Eastern Market and food markets to offer healthy recipes and
healthy food preparation demonstrations, and sponsor educational sessions and food
preparation classes.
 Educate community, parents, and youth about and oppose contracts with soda
manufacturers in schools.

Economic Injustice within the Food Systems
There exist two grocery stores owned and or operated by African Americans in Detroit. It is
unknown whether any food wholesalers, farmers, distributors or food processing facilities
providing food for the city of Detroit are owned, operated, or even hire Detroiters, specifically
African-Americans; or if any of the food products consumed in our community were developed
by people from our community. Aside from cashiers, baggers, stock persons and a few butchers,
Detroiters, specifically African-Americans are absent from the food system. Our primary and
predominant role is that of consumer.

175

Detroit’s majority population must be represented at all levels and in all aspects of the food
system. Having an economic/agricultural safety net to support the most vulnerable in our
community should be included in our goals. Redefining wealth and prosperity within our social
relationships and spiritual values will be a major step towards ensuring economic justice.

Actions Needed:
 Identify and eliminate barriers to African-American participation and ownership in all
aspects of the food system.
 Explore providing employment and re-distribution of wealth through cooperative
community ownership.
 Convene dialogues and create partnerships with local universities and national
organizations advocating for African-American communities to develop entrepreneurship
and low-cost loan programs which encourage African American entrepreneurship.
 Hold those accountable within the food system that profit from Detroiters to integrate
Detroiters into their operations at all levels.
 Develop frameworks for providing business incentives (such as tax incentives, small
business loans, etc.) so that businesses that receive public subsidies return maximal
benefits to the surrounding community in terms of healthy food access, local employment
and other forms of community responsiveness. Such frameworks should be developed in
collaboration with community organizations and residents. Incentives should support
stores development and improvement in currently underserved neighborhoods.

Urban Agriculture

176

Detroit has a history of gardening and farming lots that goes back decades. African-Americans,
who left southern states to provide for their families through factory jobs in the Detroit area,
brought with them their connection to the land and their knowledge of how to grow vegetables
and flowers. They knew how to preserve food, as well. Mayor Coleman A. Young started the
Farm-A-Lot program in the 1970s which allowed residents to obtain a permit to farm vacant lots
in their neighborhoods. The program provided seeds, seedlings and tilling of the land. Today,
there is an urban agriculture movement in Detroit that is recognized throughout the U.S., Canada
and Europe.

Three farms currently exist within the city, as well as over 100 community and school gardens as
well as hundreds of family gardens. There are also extensive training programs and support for
urban agriculture ranging from bio-intensive growing methods to building a solar passive
greenhouse.

Detroiters recognize that the value of the vacant land in the city goes beyond the construction of
a structure. Residents have turned “abandoned” lots into productive agricultural resources. Mini
farmers markets are springing up citywide providing Detroiters with fresh, organic food grown
right in the neighborhood. Urban agriculture should be recognized as an essential contributor to
the local food system. It ensures a ready supply of nutritious, high quality vegetables and fruits.

The entry costs associated with intensive food production on small urban farms in a cooperative
environment is much lower and accessible than the current trend of mega farms. Urban growers
stand to benefit from increased opportunities to market local products. The potential market for

177

local value-added products makes urban agriculture even more attractive as a local economic
development tool.

Actions Needed:
 Community, school and home gardens and mini-farms should be protected and supported
through local, state and federal legislation.
 The City of Detroit should support the efforts of the Detroit Black Community Food
Security Network and others to identify and turn into production, multiple acres of City
land on a long term lease with an option to purchase.
 Update city codes and laws to allow urban agriculture, food production, and farmers
markets on a neighborhood scale.
 The City should acknowledge the importance of community gardens and protect them as
resources that will not be taken over for other types of development.
 The City of Detroit should provide resources and equipment for communities, schools
and urban farms such as tractors, tools, seeds, topsoil, compost, fencing and access to
water.
 Identify and model other State programs that support small urban farms and help absorb
the costs associated with food production, marketing and organic certification.
 USDA initiatives to support the marketing and distribution of locally grown products to
schools and creation of school gardens should be explored and encouraged.
 Wherever possible, produce from local school gardens should be used in the preparation
of school meals.

178

 Encourage large public institutions such as Wayne State University, local hospitals, and
large employers to source their cafeterias from local growers.

The Role of Schools and other Public Institutions
Schools and other institutions such as churches, community associations, social service agencies,
nursing homes, homeless shelters and missions, hospitals, home daycare centers, and before and
after school programs can have major impact on the dietary habits and health of the community.

That impact can be made by purposefully educating the community as well as intentionally
making healthy food options a priority. These institutions are possibly the most direct ways to
reach the greatest number of people. As well, the growing nationwide interest in locally grown
organic foods and value-added food products should be considered as an economic opportunity
as it becomes necessary and is fitting that Detroiters seek independent employment. Our
community should also become the suppliers of healthy food choices to the institutions within
our community.

Many school related groups have traditionally relied on candy sales to raise funds for parent
groups, clubs and athletic teams. Other fundraising options should be explored that do not
promote excessive consumption of processed sugars.

Students attending Detroit schools should have the opportunity to plant, tend and harvest foods
in school gardens. Students working in school gardens eat more fresh fruits and vegetables than
those who do not. Many schools across the nation are realizing that farm-fresh produce is

179

superior to canned and frozen foods. They are also realizing that supporting local or regional
farmers helps to sustain local and regional food systems. When children have a greater
understanding of where foods come from, they generally develop a greater appreciation for those
foods, and are more willing to try food choices that may not be considered popular.

Schools and other public institutions have the responsibility of educating the citizens of the City
of Detroit about health and wellness. Newsletters, meetings, and other gatherings should
regularly feature information about diet, exercise and other components of health and wellness.

Block clubs, community associations and churches should be encouraged to partner with the City
of Detroit to develop a network of community gardens. These gardens will increase the amount
of fresh, affordable, nutritious food available to Detroiters, will promote community building and
intergeneration communication and will help to improve the city’s aesthetics and air quality.
Additionally, publicly owned land should be made available whenever possible to develop
community gardens.

Actions Needed:
 Schools and other public institutions should encourage young people to pursue careers in
agriculture, aquaculture, animal husbandry, bee-keeping and other food related fields, so
as to reduce the dependency of Detroiters on others for food.
 Schools and other public institutions should eliminate soda pop, candy, gum, and
“foods” with high sugar content, artificial preservatives, and artificial dyes from vending
machines. They should be replaced with high-quality snacks and beverages that promote

180

health and wellness such as fruit, nuts, granola bars, wholegrain chips, 100% juices and
water.
 Schools should be encouraged to develop food curriculum for pre-K through 12th grade
and beyond. Curriculum could include aspects of production, processing, healthy eating,
and recycling and composting.
 Every school should have a school garden that can provide food for their lunches.
 Schools should require school lunch programs to incorporate fresh local and regional
foods and develop relationships with those farmers who can provide educational
opportunities for children.
 Encourage the formation of health ministries in churches that includes a focus on
developing healthy dietary habits.
 Encourage churches to offer healthy choices at church functions, and incorporate
church-sponsored gardens and healthy food preparation information as part of any food
banks or programs.

Emergency Response
A food related emergency may involve the unintentional or deliberate contamination, or sudden
loss of access to food. A food emergency could occur at any point in the food system from farm
to table and may be the result of natural disasters, human error or intentional threat. Any food
emergency must be quickly identified followed by a well-coordinated and communicated
response. That response should include pre-established lines of communication, alternate food
and water supplies and delivery systems, as well as close coordination with local, State and
Federal emergency responders.

181

Actions Needed:
 A food emergency plan, that includes strategies for prevention of food emergencies, for
the City of Detroit that is communicated and made available to the public.
 Coordination among church and community organizations, elected officials and other
community leaders, law enforcement, schools, churches and other institutions, hospitals
and other medical facilities for dissemination of information and training as first
responders in case of a serious event or situation.
 Development of adequate food reserves in case of an emergency.

182

Bibliography
Ahmad, A. A., & Jeffries, J. L. (2006). RAM: The Revolutionary Action Movement. Urbana and
Chicago: University of Illinois Press.
Anonymous. (2012). Personal Interview.
Bankole, T. (2011, September 28). Welfare Politics: Is Urban Farming the Answer? The
Michigan Chronicle. Detroit, MI.
Barber, N. R. (2011, July 17). What is Food Sovereignty? Michigan Citizen, p. 10. Highland
Park, Michigan.
Bates, B. T. (2012). The Making of Black Detroit in the Age of Henry Ford. Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press.
Beckman, B. (2010). The Wholesale Decommissioning of Vacant Urban Neighborhoods: Smart
Decline, Public Purpose Takings, and the Legality of Shrinking Cities. Cleveland State
Law Review, 58, 387.
Bennholdt-Thomsen, V., & Mies, M. (1999). The Subsistence Perspective: Beyond the
Globalized Economy. London and New York: Zed Books.
Boggs, G. L. (1998). Living for Change: An Autobiography. Minneapolis and London:
University of Minnesota Press.
Boggs, G. L. (2011, September 11). Jobs Aren’t the Answer. Michigan CItizen, p. A11. Highland
Park, Michigan.
Boggs, G. L. (2013, October 27). Solutionaries are Today’s Revolutionaries. Michigan Citizen,
p. A10. Highland Park, Michigan.

183

Boggs, G. L., & Kurashige, S. (2011). The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism for
the Twentieth Century. Berkeley and Los Angeles, California: University of California
Press.
Boggs, J. (2009). The American Revolution: Pages from a Negro Worker’s Notebook. New
York: Monthly Review Press.
Boggs, J. (2011a). Community Building: An Idea Whose Time Has Come. In Pages from a
Black Radical’s Notebook: A James Boggs Reader (pp. 331–340). Detroit, Michigan:
Wayne State University.
Boggs, J. (2011b). Going Where We Have Never Been: Creating New Communities for Our
Future. In Pages from a Black Radical’s Notebook: A James Boggs Reader. Detroit,
Michigan: Wayne State University.
Boggs, J. (2011c). Manifesto for a Black Revolutionary Party. In Pages from a Black Radical’s
Notebook: A James Boggs Reader. Detroit, Michigan: Wayne State University.
Boggs, J. (2011d). Rebuilding Detroit: An Alternative to Casino Gambling. In Pages from a
Black Radical’s Notebook: A James Boggs Reader. Detroit, Michigan: Wayne State
University.
Boggs, J. (2011e). The American Revolution: Pages from a Black Worker’s Notebook. In S. M.
Ward (Ed.), Pages from a Black Radical’s Notebook: A James Boggs Reader. Detroit,
Michigan: Wayne State University.
Boggs, J. (2011f). Toward a New Concept of Citizenship. In Pages from a Black Radical’s
Notebook: A James Boggs Reader. Detroit, Michigan: Wayne State University.
Borras, S., Edelman, M., & Kay, C. (Eds.). (2008). Transnational Agrarian Movements
Confronting Globalization. West Sussex, UK: Wiley-Blackwell.

184

Brown, E. (1992). A Taste of Power: A Black Woman’s Story. New York: Doubleday.
Budzynska, K., West, P., Savoy-Moore, R. T., Lindsey, D., Winter, M., & Newby, P. (2013). A
Food Desert in Detroit: Associations with Food Shopping and Eating Behaviors, Dietary
Intake, and Obesity. Public Health Nutrition, 16(12), 2114–2123.
Bureau of Labor Statistics. (2014). Unemployment Rates for the 50 Largest Cities. Washington,
DC: United States Department of Labor. Retrieved from
http://www.bls.gov/lau/lacilg10.htm
Carney, J. (2001). Black Rice: The African Origins of Rice Cultivation in the Americas.
Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England: Harvard University Press.
Churchill, W., & Wall, J. V. (2001). Agents of Repression: The FBI’s Secret War against the
Black Panther Party and the American Indian Movement. Cambridge, Massachusetts:
South End Press.
City of Detroit. (2010). Summary Report City of Detroit General Election. Retrieved from
http://www.detroitmi.gov/Portals/0/docs/elections/2010Elections/November%2002,%202
010%20General%20%20Unofficial%20Election%20Results.PDF
City of Detroit. Detroit Urban Agriculture Ordinance, 1984 Detroit City Code (2013).
City of Detroit. (2013b). Executive Budget Summary. Detroit, MI: City of Detroit Budget
Department. Retrieved from http://www.detroitmi.gov/Portals/0/docs/budgetdept/2013-
14_Budget/Budget%20Summary_14/EBS_Section%20B_Summary%20All%20Funds_2
013_2014_stamped.pdf
Colasanti, K. J. A., & Hamm, M. W. (2010). Assessing the Local Food Supply Capacity of
Detroit, Michigan. Journal of Agriculture, Food Systems, and COmmunity Development,
1(2), 41–58.

185

Cunnigen, D. (2006). The Rebublic of New Africa in Mississippi. In J. L. Jeffries (Ed.), . Urbana
and Chicago: University of Illinois Press.
Curtis, K. (2012, June 22). Personal interview.
Curtis, W. (2014, February 7). A Conversation with Detroit Urban Farmers. University of
Michigan Detroit Center, Detroit, Michigan.
Darden, J. T., Hill, R. C., Thomas, June, & Thomas, R. (1987). Detroit: Race and Uneven
Development. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Darden, J. T., & Thomas, R. (2013). Detroit: Race Riots, Racial Conflicts, and Efforts to Bridge
the Racial Divide. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press.
Data Driven Detroit. (2010). Detroit Residential Parcel Survey. Detroit, Michigan: Data Driven
Detroit.
Detroit Black Community Food Security Network. (n.d.). About Us. Detroit Black Community
Food Security Network. Retrieved from http://detroitblackfoodsecurity.org/about.html
Detroit Fire Department. (n.d.). FAQs. Detroit, MI: Detroit Fire Department. Retrieved from
http://www.detroitmi.gov/DepartmentsandAgencies/FireDepartment/FAQs.aspx
Detroit Food Policy Council. (2008). A City of Detroit Policy on Food Security: “Creating a
Food Secure Detroit.” Detroit Food Policy Council. Retrieved from
http://detroitfoodpolicycouncil.net/sites/default/files/pdfs/Detroit_Food_Security_Policy.
pdf
Dillard, A. D. (2003). Religion and Radicalism: The Reverend Albert B. Cleague, Jr., and the
RIse of Black Christian Nationallism in Detroit. In Freedom North: Black Freedom
Struggles Outside the South, 1940-1980 (pp. 153–175). New York: Palgrave MacMillan.

186

Dillard, A. D. (2007). Faith in the City: Preaching Radical Social Change in Detroit. Ann
Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
DuPuis, E. M. (2002). Nature’s Perfect Food. New York and London: New York University
Press.
Eisinger, P. (2003). Reimagining Detroit. City and Community, 2(2), 85–99.
Esteva, G., & Prakash, M. S. (1998). Grassroots Postmodernism: Remaking the Soil of Cultures.
New York and London: Zed Books.
Farley, R., Danzinger, S., & Holtzer, H. (2000). Detroit Dividied. New York: Russel Sage
Foundation.
Farrakhan, L. (1994). Minister Louis Farrakhan Calls for On Million Man March. Final Call,
14(4).
Fine, S. (2007). Violence in the Model City: The Cavanagh Administration, Race Relations, and
the Detroit Riot of 1967. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press.
Foran, J. (2009). From Old to New Political Cultures of Opposition: Radical Social CHange in
an Era of Globalization. In J. Foran & K.-K. Bhavnani (Eds.), On the Edges of
Development: Cultural Interventions. New York: Routledge.
Freund, D. M. (2007). Colored Property: State Policy and White Racial Politics in Suburban
America. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.
Georgaskas, D., & Surkin, M. (1998). Detroit: I Do Mind Dying. Cambridge, Massachusetts:
South End Press.
Geschwender, J. A. (1977). Class, Race, and Worker Insurgency: The League of Revolutionary
Black Workers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

187

Gibson-Graham, J. K. (2006a). A Postcapitalist Politics. Minneapolis and London: University of
Minnesota Press.
Gibson-Graham, J. K. (2006b). The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It): A Feminist Critique of
Poltical Economy. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press.
Gilmore, R. W. (2008). Forgotten Places and the Seeds of Grassroots Planning. In C. R. Hale
(Ed.), Engaging Contradictions: Theory, Politics, and Methods of Activist Scholarship.
Berkeley and Los Angeles, California: University of California Press.
Guthman, J. (2011). If Only They Knew: The Unbearable Whiteness of Alternative Food. In A.
H. Alkon & J. Agyeman (Eds.), Cultivating Food Justice: Race, Class, or Sustainability.
Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England: The MIT Press.
Haase, D. (2008). Urban Ecology of Shrinking Cities: An Unrecognized Opportunity? Nature
and Culture, 3(1), 1–8.
Hall, S. (1980). Race, Articulation, and Societies Structured in Dominance. In Sociological
Theories: Race and Colonialism (pp. 305–345). Paris: UNESCO.
Hamlin, M. (2012). A Black Revolutionary’s Life in Labor: Black Workers Power in Detroit.
Detroit, Michigan: Against the Tide Books.
Hardt, M., & Negri, A. (2009). Commonwealth. London: Belknap Press.
Harvey, D. (2007). The Limits of Capital. New York and London: Verso.
Hayes III, F. W., & Jeffries, J. L. (2006). Us Does Not Stand for United Slaves! In J. L. Jeffries
(Ed.), Black Power in the Belly of the Beast (pp. 67–92). Urbana and Chicago: University
of Illinois Press.
Helms, M. (2013a, January 3). Audit Shows Detroit has $327M Deficit. Detroit Free Press.
Detroit, Michigan. Retrieved from

188

http://www.freep.com/article/20130103/NEWS01/301030088/Audit-shows-Detroit-has-
327M-deficit
Helms, M. (2013b, April 5). Detroit Mayor Dave Bing, EMF Kevyn Orr Put a Wager on
Saturday’s U-M Game. Detroit Free Press. Detroit, Michigan. Retrieved from
http://www.freep.com/article/20130405/NEWS01/130405076/Detroit-Mayor-Dave-Bing-
EMF-Kevyn-Orr-put-wager-Saturday-s-U-M-game
Holt-Giménez, E. (Ed.). (2011). Food Movements Unite! Oakland, CA: Food First Books.
Jacobs, A. J. (2008). Political Power, Collective Memory, and American Central Cities: The
Discourses of the Conservative Elite’s Counter-Memory of the City. The Open Urban
Studies Journal, 1(1), 25–34.
Joseph, P. E. (2006). Waiting ’Til the Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of Black Power in
America. New York: Henry Holt and Company.
Kuo, J. (2014, February 3). Most Expensive Cities for Car Insurance. Nerd Wallet. Retrieved
from http://www.nerdwallet.com/blog/insurance/2014/02/03/expensive-cities-car-
insurance/
Lewis-Coleman, D. M. (2008). Race Against Liberalism: Black Workers and the UAW in
Detroit. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press.
Logan, J. R., & Stults, B. J. (2011). The Persistence of Segregation in the Metropolis: New
Findings from the 2010 Census. Census Brief prepared for Project US2010. Retrieved
from http://www.s4.brown.edu/us2010/Data/Report/report2.pdf
Lynch, J. (2011, August 17). Experts: Detroiters Cut Off from Healthy Food. The Detroit News.
Detroit, MI.

189

Maloney, T. N., & Whatley, W. C. (1995). Making the Effort: The Contours of Racial
Discrimination in Detroit’s Labor Markets, 1920-1940. Journal of Economic History,
55(3), 465–93.
Marable, M. (2011). Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention. New York: Penguin Books.
Marchand, Y., & Meffre, R. (2011). The Ruins of Detroit. Göttingen, Germany: Steidl.
Mari Gallagher Research Group. (2007). Examining the Impact of Food Deserts on Public
Health in Detroit. Chicago, Illinois: Mari Gallagher Research and Consulting Group.
Martelle, S. (2012). Detroit: A Biography. Chicago: Chicago Review Press.
Martin, D. (2010, February 6). Imari Obadele, 79; Fought for Reparations. New York Times. New
York.
Marx, K. (1992). Capital: Volume 1: A Critique of Political Economy. New York: Penguin
Classics.
McCrutcheon, P. (2011). Community Food Security: “For Us, By Us”: The Nation of Islam and
the Pan-African Orthodox Christian Church. In Cultivating Food Justice: Race, Class, or
Sustainability (pp. 177–196). Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England: The MIT
Press.
McKittrick, K. (2011). On Plantations, Prisons, and a Black Sense of Place. Social and Cultural
Geography, 12(8), 947–963.
Mies, M. (1983). Towards a Methodology for Feminist Research. In G. Bowls & R. Duelli-Klein
(Eds.), Theories of Women’s Studies (pp. 117–39). London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Miller, M. H. (2011, November 29). Panic in Detroit Lures Shtterbugs, But How Much Ruin
Porn Can We Take? Gallerist. Retrieved from http://galleristny.com/2011/11/panic-in-
detroit-lures-shutterbugs-but-how-much-ruin-porn-can-we-take/

190

Montgomery, A. F. (2011). The Sight of Loss. Antipode, 43(5), 1828–1850.
National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders. (1968). Report of the National Advisory
Commission on Civil Disorders. New York: Bantam Books.
New Detroit. (2014). Metropolitan Detroit Race Equity Report. Detroit, Michigan: New Detroit.
NGO/CSO Forum on Food Sovereignty. (2002). Food Sovereignty: A Right for All. Rome, Italy:
NGO/CSO Forum on Food Sovereignty.
Nicholson, P., Basque Farmer’s Union, EHNE International Organizing Committee, & La Via
Campesina. (2011). Food Sovereignty: Alliances and Transformation. In E. Holt-
Giménez (Ed.), Food Movements Unite! (pp. 9–19). Oakland, CA: Food First Books.
Obadele, I. A. (1972). The Struggle is for Land. The Black Scholar, 3(6), 24–36.
Obadele, I. A. (1974). The Struggle of the Republic of New Africa. The Black Scholar, 5(9), 32–
41.
Pallagst, K., Aber, J., Audirac, I., Cunningham-Sabot, E., Fol, S., Martinez-Fernandez, C., …
Wu, T. (Eds.). (2009). The Future of Shrinking Cities: Problems, Patterns, and Strategies
of Urban Transformation in a Global Context. Berkeley, CA: Institute of Urban and
Regional Development.
Peña, D. (2006, March 4). Farmers Feeding Families: Agroecology in South Central Los
Angeles. Keynote address presented at the National Association of Chicana and Chicano
Studies, Washington State University, Pullman Washington. Retrieved from
http://www.josealamillo.com/keynotespeech.pdf
Pothukuchi, K., Mohamed, R., & Gebben, D. A. (2008). Explaining Disparities in Food Safety
Compliance by Food Stores: Does Community Matter? Agriculture and Human Values,
25, 319–332.

191

Prentice, A. M. (2006). The Emerging Epidemic of Obesity in Developing Countries.
International Journal of Epidemiology, 35, 93–99.
Rahman, A. A. (2008). Marching Blind: The Rise and Fall of the Black Panther Party in Detroit.
In Liberated Territory (pp. 181–231). Durham and London: Duke University Press.
Roberts, W. (2008). Looking Beyond the Auto. Now, 28(13).
Robinson, C. (2000). Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. Chapel Hill
and London: University of North Carolina Press.
Rose, D. J. (2011). Captive Audience: Strategies for Acquiring Food in Two Detroit
Neighborhoods. Qualitative Health Research, 21(5), 642–651.
Sands, D. (2012, March 2). Detroit Bus Service Cuts Take Effect, Frustrated Riders Voice
Concerns. Huffington Post. Retrieved from
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/03/02/detroit-bus-service-riders_n_1317218.html
Satyanarayana, M., Battaglia, T. S., & Guillen, J. (2013, March 25). Detroit EFM Kevyn Orr
Extends “Sincere Olive Branch” to City Council. Detroit Free Press. Detroit, Michigan.
Retrieved from http://www.freep.com/article/20130325/NEWS01/130325014/Detroit-
EFM-Kevyn-Orr-arrives-at-city-hall-protesters-head-to-Cleveand
Sennefer, K. (2012, October 30). Personal Interview.
Shelley v. Kraemer, 334 U.S. 1 (1948).
Shiva, V. (1997). Biopiracy: The Plunder of Nature and Knowledge. Boston: South End Press.
Smith, L. T. (1999). Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. L: Zed
Books.
Sonebeyatta, Y. (1971). Ujamaa for Land and Power. The Black Scholar, 3(2), 13–20.

192

Steinmetz, G. (2010). Harrowed Landscapes: White Ruingazers in Namibia and Detroit and the
Cultivation of Memory. Visual Studies, 23(3), 211–237.
Sugrue, T. J. (2005). The Origins of Urban Crisis: Race and inequality in Postwar Detroit.
Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press.
The Office of Minority Health. (2012). Diabetes and African Americans. U.S. Department of
Health and Human Services. Retrieved from
http://minorityhealth.hhs.gov/templates/content.aspx?ID=3017
Thomas, J. M. (2013). Redevelopment and Race: Planning a Finer City in Postwar Dertoit.
Detroit, Michigan: Wayne State University.
Thompson, H. A. (1999). Rethinking the Politics of White Flight in the Postwar City: Detroit,
1945-1980. Journal of Urban History, 25(163), 163–198.
Thompson, H. A. (2001). Whose Detroit? Politics, Labor, and Race in a Modern American City.
Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press.
Thompson-Curtis, M. (2011, October 30). Personal Interview.
Thompson-Curtis, M. (2012, September 3). Personal interview.
Thompson-Curtis, M. (2014, February 7). A Conversation with Detroit Urban Farmers.
University of Michigan Detroit Center, Detroit, Michigan.
Tyner, J. (2006). Defend the Ghetto: SPace and teh Urban Politics of the Black Panther Party.
Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 96(1), 105–118.
United States Census Bureau. (2014). Detroit, MI State and County QuickFacts. Washington,
D.C.: U.S. Department of Commerce.
United States Department of Agriculture. (2013). Definitions of Food Security. United States
Department of Agriculture, Economic Research Service. Retrieved from

193

http://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/food-nutrition-assistance/food-security-in-the-
us/definitions-of-food-security.aspx#.UtMDYbTCkcu
Vergara, C. (1999). American Ruins. New York: Monacelli Press.
Ward, S. M. (2011). Introduction: The Making of a Revolutionist. In S. M. Ward (Ed.), Pages
from a Black Radical’s Notebook: A James Boggs Reader. Detroit, Michigan: Wayne
State University.
White, M. (2010). Shouldering Responsibility for the Delivery of Human RIghts: A Case Study
of the D-Town Farmers of Detroit. Race/Ethnicity, 3(2), 189–211.
White, M. (2011a). D-Town Farm: African American Resistance to Food Insecurity and the
Transformation of Detroit. Environmental Practice, 13(4), 406–416.
White, M. (2011b). Sisters of the Soil: Urban Gardening as Resistance in Detroit. Race/Ethnicity,
5(1), 13–27.
Widick, B. J. (1972). Detroit: City of Race and Class Violence. Chicago: Quadrangle Books.
Wilkerson, I. (2010). The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration.
New York: Random House.
Wilson, S. (2009). Research is Ceremony: Indigenous Research Methods. Black Point, Nova
Scotia: Fernwood Publishing Company.
Wood, E. M. (2002). The Origin of Capitalism: A longer View. London: Verso.
Woods, C. (1998). Development Arrested: The Blues and Plantation Power in the Mississippi
Delta. London and New York: Verso.
World Health Organization. (n.d.). Food Security. World Health Organization. Retrieved from
http://www.who.int/trade/glossary/story028/en/
Yakini, M. (2012, August 28). Personal interview.

194

Yakini, M. (2014, February 7). A Conversation with Urban Farmers. University of Michigan
Detroit Center, Detroit, Michigan.
Young, C., & Wheeler, L. (1994). Hard Stuff: The Autobiography of Mayor Coleman Young.
New York: Viking.
Zenk, S. N., Schultz, A. J., Israel, B. A., James, S. A., Bao, S., & Mark L. Wilson. (2006). Fruit
and Vegetable Access Differs by Community Racial Composition and Socioeconomic
Position in Detroit, Michigan. Ethnicity and Disease, 16, 275–280.
Zenk, S. N., Schultz, A. J., Israel, B. A., James, S. A., Bao, S., & Wilson, M. L. (2005).
Neighborhood Racial Composition, Neighborhood Poverty, and the Spatial Accessibility
of Supermarkets in Metropolitan Detroit. American Journal of Public Health, 95(4), 660–
667.

Abstract (if available)

Linked assets

University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

Conceptually similar

PDF

The color line and the class struggle: the Mexican Revolution and convergences of radical internationalism, 1910-1946

PDF

The revolution will come home: gendered violence and transformative organizing from the Philippines to the U.S.

PDF

Towards a politics of perfect disorder: carceral geographies, queer criminality, and other ways to be

PDF

Managing marginalization from Watts to Rodney King: the struggle over policing and social control in Los Angeles, 1965-1992

PDF

Colonial brews: café and power in the Américas

PDF

Fearing inflation, inflating fears: the end of full employment and the rise of the carceral state

PDF

Conditions of belonging: life, historical preservation and tourism development in the making of Pelourinho-Maciel, Salvador da Bahia, 1965-1985

PDF

Episodes in the life of a place: regional racial formation in Los Angeles's San Gabriel Valley

PDF

To survive and thrive: food, justice, and citified sovereignty in South L.A.

PDF

The geography of Black commerce and culture: Los Angeles, California, and beyond

PDF

Window Seat: examining public space, politics, and social identity through urban public transportation

PDF

Passing notes in class: listening to pedagogical improvisations in jazz history

PDF

From Citrus Belt to Inland Empire: race, place, and mobility in Southern California, 1880-2000

PDF

Urban growth and narrative identity in Los Angeles fiction

PDF

Modeling open space acquisition in Boulder, Colorado

PDF

Food is the medium: food movements, social justice and the communication ecology approach

PDF

Flights of the imagination: Black American travelers journey toward "Africa" in Ghana and Bahia, Brazil

PDF

Essays on congestion, agglomeration, and urban spatial structure

PDF

Consuming landscape, consuming machine: state, capital, and outdoor advertising in Los Angeles

PDF

Shades of conflict and conviviality: negotiating intercultural living and integration in Los Angeles's globalizing multi-ethnic spaces

Asset Metadata

Creator Quizar, Jessi (author)

Core Title Who cares for Detroit? Urban agriculture, Black self-determination, and struggles over urban space

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program American Studies and Ethnicity

Publication Date 07/17/2014

Defense Date 05/13/2014

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag African American social movements,African Americans,Detroit,grassroots social movements,OAI-PMH Harvest,urban agriculture,urban development

Format application/pdf (imt)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Gilmore, Ruth Wilson (committee chair), Pulido, Laura (committee member)

Creator Email jquizar@gmail.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c3-445309

Unique identifier UC11287061

Identifier etd-QuizarJess-2716.pdf (filename),usctheses-c3-445309 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-QuizarJess-2716.pdf

Dmrecord 445309

Document Type Dissertation

Format application/pdf (imt)

Rights Quizar, Jessi

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 2810, 3434 South Grand Avenue, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, California 90089-2810, USA