The Black History of Community Land Trusts: Creating Stability in an Unstable World
We started bringing people together to actually talk about the community, we talked about education and the kind of education we wanted. We talked about health and the type of health system we wanted… people could really plan their community,
The struggle for land has been a perpetual challenge for Black people in America, persistent, ever present and intensely critical to the success of our communities.
Africatown Community Land Trust’s mission to acquire, develop and steward land in Greater Seattle to empower the Black diaspora community is rooted in decades of that persistence and follows a Land Trust model created by Black community in the Southern United States at the height of the Civil Rights Era.
In the 1960’s the founders of America’s first community land trust, Shirley and Charles Sherrod, saw their friends and neighbors in Southwest Georgia face land-based discrimination that effected all aspects of their daily life. Black families living on white-owned land risked eviction if it was discovered that they had registered to vote or decided to send their children to integrated schools.
Both Mr. and Mrs. Sherrod were active in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, but felt called to go further and to create a safe, holistic community. “By 1969 we decided to create an organization that we would call New Communities, we decided the goal would be to buy land, hold it in trust and turn it over to local community development corporations.”
Over 500 families hoped to move into the community in its initial phase.
Images from new Communities Inc. (Source: Dawn Makarios, Joe Phfister)
“We started bringing people together to actually talk about the community, we talked about education and the kind of education we wanted. We talked about health and the type of health system we wanted… people could really plan their community,” Shirley Sherrod remembers.
New Communities Inc. received a grant from the US Office of Economic Opportunity to fund one year of planning for housing, education, business development and health infrastructure. Although future funding was undermined by local and state government, the land trust was able to secure loans to purchase 6,000 acres of land that they supported with sales from farming.
“Our goal was to not just get land in the Southwest Georgia area, but throughout the country. We were really thinking big,” Mrs. Sherrod recalls.
During ACLT’s 2022 conversation series featuring Mrs. Sherrod, President and CEO, K. Wkying Garrett reflected, “It really is a struggle for the land and it didn’t just start now. We’ve been struggling and there have been many different weapons and strategies and policies and practices used to dispossess us of our land.”
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. highlighted this history just months before he was assassinated in 1968. Recalling the circumstances of Black people post-emancipation he said, “At the very same time that America refused to give the Negro any land, through an act of congress our government was giving away millions of acres of land in the West and the Midwest, which meant it was willing to undergird its white peasants from Europe with an economic floor.” His speech went on to highlight the myriad ways that white landownership was supported by the government, while Black community was told to fend for itself.
Stories of barriers to Black landownership from the post-emancipation period are still being uncovered today. Published in 2024, a two-and-a-half year study conducted by the Center for Public Integrity in partnership with Mother Jones Magazine produced an in-depth report called 40 Acres and a Lie detailing the plight of Black people in the southwest who did receive land post-emancipation. Reviewing land deeds for over 1250 people they learned that they were all revoked after President Lincoln was assassinated and congress refused to make the land titles permanent under the new presidency of Andrew Johnson.
This is “generational wealth that wasn’t passed on. This forty acres land was on the coast – it’s expensive coastal real estate. We found gated communities, golf courses and restaurants, incredibly valuable lands. This is wealth that was not passed on… this is not a history lesson only. It’s the impact on people who are alive today,” explained Alexia Fernández Campbell from Center for Public Integrity.
As for New Communities Inc, the trust lost its initial land holdings in 1985 after repeated seasons of drought and being refused the necessary support from the USDA that surrounding white-owned farms received to sustain themselves. However, New Communities persisted in seeking justice and was the largest beneficiary in a class action, Supreme Court case against the USDA for its discrimination, allowing the purchase of an over 1,600 acre plot that was the former site of Georgia’s largest plantation.
As their work continues, the New Communities legacy lives on through a model that is necessary and relevant to struggles for land throughout the country. Africatown Community Land Trust is one of the over 300 land trusts rooted in this model, using land acquisition as the foundation for thriving communities.
Africatown Plaza Ground Opening, October 2024 (Image: The Elite Collective) “Land is the basis for wellbeing, for independence, for freedom and agency,” Garrett emphasized, a statement reflected in the careful and expansive approach that ACLT and the greater Africatown Seattle eco-system have taken to create the spaces and institutions necessary to support a breadth of community development and create a thriving Black future in Seattle.
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