Priscilla McCutcheon’s research while affiliated with University of Kentucky and other places

This article examines the food politics of the National Council of Negro Women (NCNW), a prominent Black women’s organization, founded in 1935. I argue that the council used an intimate knowledge of themselves, Black women, and the South to transgress a hostile landscape and protect themselves and Black people. I make this argument by examining the words of their founder Mary McLeod Bethune, their 1960s activism, their hunger campaign, and other historical documents. For NCNW, respectability was not meant to silence their voices, but rather to allow them a thin veil of protection not given to Black women. First, I detail the history of the organization, its emphasis on making Black women a part of the U.S. democracy, and their work to end hunger. Second, I conceptually explore Black women’s inward and outward gaze, which includes some Black women’s strategic use of respectability politics to uphold moral values and their grounded knowledge of the South, its land and its people. Third, I consider how NCNW used their inward and outward gaze to make change and end hunger among Black people in the South. Finally, I conclude with thoughts on how we might understand the current political organizing power of Black women within a model for which NCNW created much of the groundwork.

This article uses Black liberation theology (BLIBT) as a framework to theorize “the spirit” in the alternative food and sustainable agriculture movement. While BLIBT was formally named by theologian James Cone, it was born of the struggles of Black people in the United States who believed that God called Black people to be free, and God called Black preachers to preach Black liberation. I argue that Black liberation is a grounded vantage point to understand how some Black people might find freedom through food and agriculture. In the first potion of the paper, I make a claim for the importance of studying spirituality in agrarian and food spaces, whether or not a researcher is spiritually inclined. In the second portion of the paper, I delve deeper into Cone’s articulation of BLIBT, and explore how we might begin to theorize it as an agrarian mandate including: a call for an urgent food source, liberation of the individual Black body, community ownership of land, the spirit of Black religious spaces, an emphasis on land reparations, and the freedom to dream. I conclude with a call for why an attention to BLIBT is called for in our present moment.

First paragraphs: Landmark: 1. An object or feature of a landscape . . . that is easily seen and recognized from a distance, especially one that enables someone to establish their location. Synonyms: mark, indicator, guiding light, signal, beacon, lodestar. 2. An event or discovery marking an important stage or turning point in something. Synonyms: milestone, watershed . . . major achievement. (“Landmark,” n.d., para. 1 & 4) Dr. Monica White’s Freedom Farmers: Agricultural Resistance and the Black Freedom Movement stands literally as a landmark, ushering in a new era of community-based scholarship with and for agrarian justice. From here on out, scholars, activists, practitioners have a lodestar from which to research, practice, and advocate for food, farm, and racial justice: Dr. White’s framework of “collective agency and com­munity resilience” (CACR). Food studies scholars from across and beyond academic disciplines are in strong consensus as to the importance of this pivotal book—a manuscript that draws upon and advances rural sociology, history, agri-food studies, Black history, cooperative economics, and more. In this set of reflections on Freedom Farmers, McCutcheon lauds how the work is a “love letter” to past, present, and future Black farmers, and the powerful pedagogical potential of such celebration. Reese recounts how the book excavates the erased histories of Black women leaders and farmers, showing us how to “re/see the world” through this powerful lens. Babb calls the text a gift that “flips the script” to provide informative and inspirational narratives of food justice and food sovereignty in action. Hall commends how the book “pushes us to participate in the remaking of our communities with honesty, resilience, solidarity, and love.” Sarmiento notes how, even as the book critiques structural racism, it offers a generous, affirmative vision of resistance and agency. Wilson concurs that the book opens radical possibilities for hope, particularly in the classroom. I would also point readers to Cynthia Greenlee’s (2018) Civil Eats interview with Dr. White, which highlights how the book sheds light on the over­looked role of Black farmers in the Civil Rights movement, resurgence of Black agriculture and scholarship on it, and the ongoing necessity of affirming collective agency in the fight against racism at large. . . .

In this article, we reflect on the need for, and geography of, embodied cross-racial talk in the current political context. We reflect on our 2015 article ‘Kitchen Table Reflexivity: Negotiating Positionality through Everyday Talk’ to question whether we were too optimistic in our advocacy of the kitchen table as a space for racial reconciliation through interracial dialogue. We draw on our own experiences to explore multiple tables at which we may or may not both be present. In conclusion, we encourage everyone to do the hard work of determining which tables are the right ones for them to be present at to have the hard, but necessary, conversations about race and racialization in our contemporary society.

This paper examines Fannie Lou Hamer's Freedom Farms, a 1969 farming cooperative in Sunflower County, Mississippi. Specifically, this paper interrogates how Hamer's identity as a Black southern woman influences her formulation and daily activities at Freedom Farms. Theoretically, this paper situates Hamer as an expert agrarian labourer and knowledge producer who exists within a history of Black women who have always been utilised for their agrarian knowledge, but given little credit. Hamer's knowledge is a part of her body. This paper argues that Freedom Farms is a Black radical geography operating at three scales: the body, the farm and the southern agrarian landscape. This paper utilises Hamer's speeches, interviews and other archival documents to understand Hamer's efforts. Hamer's agrarian landscape is wrought with pain, but also the insistence in the economic opportunity that exists for Black people in agrarian spaces.

Acclaimed author Alice Walker’s (2011) short story “The Welcome Table,” set during the Civil Rights Movement, is a fictional tale of a Black woman who ventures into a white church in the rural South. As the white churchgoers wrestle with how to handle this unwelcomed Black visitor to the church, the women in the church take matters into their own hands, physically throwing the Black woman out of the church. On the doorsteps of the church, the Black woman looks into the distance, sees Jesus and begins to walk with Jesus as he passes by the church. Walker (2011) writes “she [the woman] did not know where they were going; someplace wonderful; she suspected. The ground was like clouds under their feet, and she felt she could walk forever without becoming the least bit tired” (location 974). The story ends with the woman’s lifeless body being found on the road in the Black section of the town. Those who saw the Black woman skipping happily down the road assumed she was talking to herself, and suspected she walked herself to death. Walker’s fictional account of the welcome table helps reveal the complexity of what seems to be a straightforward concept in the Black Christian Church. The welcome table is not a utopian space, where all who come to it experience peace and joy. It may or may not be within the church, as the Black woman in Walker’s story did not find it in the place she suspected. While it is oftentimes assumed the welcome table is found in the afterlife or in heaven, the welcome table is also an earthly and tangible space that many fight to find and have a seat at. My goal in this essay is to take seriously the spiritual geography of Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church (Mother Emanuel) in Charleston, South Carolina. Henderson (1993) defines spiritual geography as the way in which humans “organize reality to account for the disparity between the known and the unknown” (470). Spiritual geography largely considers how individuals utilize their internal motivations to rationalize and actively transform the landscape. In this essay, I consider the spiritual geography of the individual along with the spiritual geography of Mother Emanuel. On June 17, 2015, a white gunman walked into Mother Emanuel, sat for Wednesday prayer service, waited until those in attendance bowed their heads to pray, and opened fire on them. Nine Black churchgoers were murdered that night: Depayne Middleton Doctor, Cynthia Hurd, Susie Jackson, Ethel Jackson, The Rev. Clementa Pinckney, Tywanza Sanders, The Rev. Dr. Daniel Simmons, Sr., Shoronda Coleman-Singleton, and Myra Thomson. In the aftermath of such a horrific tragedy, there were a myriad of explanations about what happened. Few took seriously how Black liberation and the fight for social justice are crucial to understanding the spiritual geography of Mother Emanuel, a church whose members have always fought to secure liberation for Black people. In the first portion of the essay, I explore the spiritual geography of the individual and of the church. I argue the church’s spiritual geography is one built on prayer, planning and protest. It is one where individual salvation is directly tied to liberation for the oppressed. In the second portion of this essay, I delve into the interrelationship between the spiritual geography of Mother Emanuel and the landscape outside of the church walls, a landscape where white supremacy is painfully visible. Since its inception, Mother Emanuel has stood in stark contrast and outright opposition to the glaring celebration of the Confederacy in Charleston and across South Carolina’s landscape. Third, I return to Walker’s conceptualization of the “Welcome Table,” and begin to disentangle what a welcome table, in the image of the nine massacred at Emanuel A.M.E, would look like. The “spirit” is largely understood to be individual and difficult to surmise to the outside observer. Members of Mother Emanuel utilize the spirit in discursive, material, and transformative ways. Individual prayer is essential to the spiritual geography of Mother Emanuel, consistent with Black liberation theology in which the individual must be liberated before the community can be. In Parable of...

This paper is an analysis of the spatial distribution of housing vacancies in Detroit in four census years: 1980, 1990, 2000, and 2010. Our analysis is largely grounded in the contexts of race and class. We use both cartographic and statistical methods to illustrate the distribution of vacancies at the census tract level and to model the conditions that contribute to vacancy rates. A cartographic analysis of the spatial distribution of housing vacancies over time in Detroit indicates that a weak general pattern of outward diffusion occurred from 2000 to 2010. A regression analysis indicates there is a structural pattern of race and class characteristics at the tract level, as measured respectively by percent White—tied to the potential for White flight—and by unemployment rates—tied to financial factors of housing abandonment, that are good predictors of housing vacancy rates over fairly long time periods. Other good predictors are a tract’s percentage of rental housing and, to a lesser degree, the age of a tract’s population.

William Bunge's Fitzgerald: Portrait of a Revolution, initially published in 1971, is an enthralling verbal and visual account of the historical and geographical development of a one-square-mile neighborhood in Detroit. The original analysis of the Fitzgerald neighborhood was based on intensive field-based research conducted in a theoretical context of race and racism. The research reported here maintains that context but updates Fitzgerald's account of the neighborhood's built environment through a spatial analysis that uses parcel-by-parcel data generated in Google Earth and Google Street View instead of data collected in the field. Current spatial patterns of deterioration in the built environment are similar to those described in Fitzgerald, but positive sites are also apparent and often colocated with negative ones.