Homecoming: The Story of African-American Farmers - Hardcover

Gilbert, Charlene; Eli, Quinn

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0807009628 ISBN 13: 9780807009628

Publisher: Beacon Pr, 2000

Synopsis

A photographic essay which offers a striking and moving tribute to African-American farmers. This is the companion book to Gilbert's PBS documentary, HOMECOMING.

Homecoming traces the history of black farmers from Reconstruction to the present, as they struggle to survive today. Homecoming pays tribute not only to the devastating losses they have suffered throughout the century, but also to the legacy of hope that endures in the story of African-Americans working the land.

"Revisiting the unbearable hardships encountered by my great-grandparents, grandparents, and parents as they sought to survive the inhuman sharecropping system of the post-Civil War South—a system in many ways more brutal than slavery—my heart breaks again. But reading Homecoming's account of our ancestors' determined humility, obdurate courage, and fierce pride in and love of the land, my heart is healed. I see why there is such a thing as ancestor worship. I could not love my sharecropping ancestors more if I had created them myself. That black Southerners still love nature and revere the earth is the legacy of a people whose innate elegance and dignity was always expressed in essentials." —Alice Walker

"An extraordinary gift. . . . A moving, lyrical, and important history: a tale of land, labor, love, and loss." —Farah Jasmine Griffin

"Moving, highly informative, and valuable." —Barbara Neely, author of Blanche Cleans Up

About this title

About the Author

Charlene Gilbert is a professor of film at the State University of New York.

From Booklist

Gilbert, an independent filmmaker, began a personal documentary film of her family's farming roots and ended by documenting the historical importance of land and farming for African Americans. Through photographs, historic accounts, and current-day recollections, Gilbert and Eli trace the history of the connection between former slaves and their desire for land ownership to the unfulfilled promise of 40 acres and a mule during Reconstruction. By 1890, the corrupt system of sharecropping was so pervasive that 90 percent of black farmers were sharecroppers. Farming figured as a major element in the historic debate between Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. DuBois about whether black people should stay and farm the land or challenge discrimination and move into new arenas. Eli and Gilbert connect the continuing struggle for black farmers to acquire and hold onto farmland to the recent Supreme Court decision granting them restitution from discriminatory banking practices. This book, a companion to the PBS documentary of the same name, is an important tribute to the significance of land to a people who had worked it as slaves. Vanessa Bush
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About this edition

• Publisher: Beacon Pr
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0807009628
• ISBN 13: 9780807009628
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 193