In the Mississippi Delta, Black farmers are becoming a tiny minority in a region whose wealth was built with their labour. But they aren’t giving up without a fight. They are all too familiar with having to help themselves.
“I think our superpower is our struggle,” fourth-generation farmer Robert Miller says of the grit born of decades of adversity. “You get used to finding the small wins to celebrate. You get used to finding the joy in everything.”
It’s an ethos that drives many of the remaining Black-operated farms in the Delta, which now number fewer than 1,000, according to the 2022 Census of Agriculture. By way of comparison, in 1950 Black farmers ran nearly 62,000 farms, almost three-quarters of the region’s total. Most were tenants and sharecroppers working land they didn’t own, and the census then counted each sharecropper’s plot as a separate farm.
Robert Miller is a fourth-generation Black farmer, a vanishing breed in Mississippi.
For generations, they made the cotton-rich Mississippi Delta one of the country’s most profitable agricultural regions, working these lands first as enslaved labour and then exploited as sharecroppers indebted to white landowners after the Civil War. Slowly, against terrible odds, Black men and women began buying up and tilling their own farms.
The land was always more than just a means of making a living. During the civil-rights movement, Black farmers and landowners in Mississippi sheltered activists from around the country who came to challenge discriminatory voting laws and segregation. They opened their homes for clandestine meetings and helped transport the visitors under the cover of darkness, often under surveillance and at great personal risk. When police arrested those activists, Black landowners posted their bail using their land as collateral. These selfless acts helped bring down Jim Crow laws in America.
But as agriculture became increasingly mechanized, the racial divide deepened. Cotton harvesters and tractors reduced the demand for field labour, while new irrigation systems, modern equipment and pesticides made farming increasingly dependent on large capital investments. Wealthy white farmers were more likely to take risks and absorb those costs. Black farmers were increasingly pushed out.
With the midterm elections approaching, Mr. Miller plans to vote as he always does, because generations before him fought and died to exercise that right. But he isn’t counting on politicians to help Black farmers like him.
“I’m not dumb. I read books and know my history, and this country has not worked in my favour since I been transported over here,” he says, referring to the cargo holds of slave ships. “And it ain’t gonna start now.”
Today, the Mississippi Delta remains rich with potential. Vast fields of cotton and soybean still stretch across the alluvial plain and into the horizon. What has changed is who can afford to farm these fertile lands and who has a claim to their future.