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Black Earth: A Family’s Journey from Enslavement to Reclamation

Civil Eats

When the owner of the land where Byron was sharecropping died, he willed Byron at least 10 acres. Grover established a peach orchard in 1935, and cultivated grain and raised livestock until the late 1970s. It really is modern-day sharecropping. He found work there as a sharecropper, on a farm down present-day Lickskillet Road.

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California Will Help BIPOC Collective Cultivate Land Access for Underserved Farmers

Civil Eats

Orchards and other perennials, for example, make more sense when you own your own land because they can take a while to mature. Still, “it’s difficult to unbuild how land was used to punish us for 400 years,” Mack says, referring to the deep scars left by a history of enslavement and sharecropping.