Food Sovereignty
Courtesy of The New York Public Library
Because food is fundamental to our existence, in a system predicated upon black disenfranchisement, food rebels like Booker T. Washington needed to develop sovereign nutritious food systems that supported the people they sought to help. Washington with the assistance of George Washington Carver wisely managed Tuskegee Institutes food system, and taught others as well, as a successful strategy for economic and political independence. For example, Tuskegee Institute in Alabama had two farms, Home Farm and Marshall Farm. Apparently, Marshall farm was off-campus. Carver describes Washington as a college president focused on the campus farm’s productivity in relationship to the needs of the school’s food system and finances. In a May 1898 letter Carver tells Washington, the campus has great “fruit tree possibilities.” Instead of purchasing new trees and vines each year, I plan on “budding, layering, [and] grafting” new fruit trees and vines from our gardens “which I expect to be second to none.” I am committed to “bending all our energies towards the saving of food on one hand, and the production on the other. . . . .” In August of 1898 Carver reported to Washington, the sweet potato crop has produced “an enormous yield.” Pumpkins and squashes did so well that “we have no place to store them so they are rotting very fast. I’m having them [picked] daily and used as fast as I can.
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