Black *Food History 2024

Hujambo!

Our work in the food system, building food sovereignty, is oriented around one simple core belief: food is a human right.

It almost feels too simple.

At its most basic level, food is what sustains us. It provides energy for our mind and body and is essential for our growth, repair, and maintenance. But take a moment to think about when you realized the power of food. What made it so memorable?

Growing up in a middle-class neighborhood, where I was one of just a few Black kids, I remember realizing it wasn’t “normal” to show up to school early for a government-issued breakfast. I remember the unifying power of peanut butter pie or caramel cake. I remember visiting friends and learning about their family traditions like headcheese and pasties. These memories are about more than taste. Our memories of food embody foundational emotional experiences that make us who we are today.

Food is sustenance; it’s culture, creativity, and belonging. Food is a human right. It is a basic unit that can unite humankind with one another and Mother Earth. Food is the entry point to reawakening people to who we are.

Our collective autonomy over the ability to nurture ourselves and one another is central to obtaining this right in full.

America’s early history stripped Black folks of land, decision-making power, and, effectively, this comprehensive right to food. Today, many forms of atonement are being trialed. Across the country, there is a growing movement of land funds that intend to use crowdfunding resources to return land to Black farmers. Locally, Washtenaw County reparations council prepares to address decades of harm to Black residents. Congress continues to consider the Justice for Black Farmers Act. This would direct the USDA to remedy the agency’s historic discrimination within federal farm assistance and lending programs.

It’s about food.

It’s about land.

It’s about representation, justice, and sovereignty.

Because everyone deserves a chance to grow.

Thank you for growing with us,

Julius

P.S.

This month, we’ll highlight Black farmers on social media and via. email. These highlights will culminate with a live panel discussing the right to food and their perspective on these social movements and solutions to land and food justice.

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Georgia Gilmore & The Club From Nowhere

By Julius Buzzard • February 18, 2026

During the Montgomery Bus Boycott, when formal fundraising was surveilled and criminalized, Georgia Gilmore organized something deceptively simple: a kitchen network . Known as The Club From Nowhere , Gilmore and other Black women sold pies, cakes, and home-cooked meals to quietly raise money for the movement. Their anonymity was protection. Their food was infrastructure. For over a year, as the boycott stretched on, these funds paid for carpools, gas, and daily survival. While history often centers on speeches and marches, Gilmore reminds us that revolutions are sustained behind the scenes by those who feed people, organize logistics, and keep the lights on. Her kitchen was a site of resistance. Her recipes were tools of liberation. At Growing Hope, we honor this lineage every time we invest in food entrepreneurs, incubator kitchens, and cooperative models. When food businesses are community-rooted, they do more than generate income; they fuel movements . Never underestimate what food can do. And never forget who has always been doing the work.

Fannie Lou Hamer & the Freedom Farm Cooperative

By Julius Buzzard • February 11, 2026

“If you have 400 quarts of greens and gumbo soup canned for the winter, nobody can push you around.” Fannie Lou Hamer said this not as a metaphor, but as a lived experience. In 1969, after being evicted from her plantation home for registering to vote, Hamer founded the Freedom Farm Cooperative in Sunflower County, Mississippi. The goal was simple and radical: Black families deserved land, food, housing, and economic independence, without having to ask permission. Freedom Farm grew vegetables, raised livestock, built homes, and supported cooperative ownership. It addressed hunger and poverty at their roots, refusing the lie that liberation could come without material security. Hamer understood what we still grapple with today: political rights mean little without food sovereignty . Voting doesn’t protect you from hunger. Legislation doesn’t replace land. Dignity requires access to the means of survival. This is why Growing Hope centers farming, education, and entrepreneurship together. Food sovereignty is not just about what’s on your plate; it’s about who controls the systems that decide who eats .

The Black Panther Party & Free Breakfast

By Julius Buzzard • February 4, 2026

In 1969, the Black Panther Party launched the Free Breakfast for Children Program , serving tens of thousands of children across the United States every single school day. Not as an act of charity, but as a declaration. The Panthers understood something the dominant systems refused to acknowledge: a hungry child cannot learn, organize, or imagine a future . Feeding children was a political act. It was protection. It was strategy. Volunteers cooked before dawn in church basements and community centers. Children were served breakfast while learning about Black history, self-determination, and collective responsibility. The state noticed and felt threatened. The FBI labeled the program “the greatest threat” to internal security, not because it was violent, but because it worked. And it worked so well that the U.S. government was forced to expand public school breakfast programs nationwide . Mutual aid didn’t just meet immediate needs; it reshaped public policy . This is food sovereignty in action: communities identifying harm, meeting their own needs with dignity, and building power in the process. At Growing Hope, we carry this legacy forward. When we insist on dignified access to food, when we support farmers markets as sites of connection and not extraction, when we center youth and Black leadership, we are walking a well-worn path. When communities feed themselves, systems change.

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