Searching for New Communities: A 1968 Trip to Israel and its Radical Hope for Southwest Georgia

A voice announced to those assembled at the LaGuardia gate that the flight to Haifa was boarding. Their eyes met in excited anticipation. Among those flying to Israel that summer day–some for vacations, some to see family, some on religious pilgrimages– was a group of activists, eight men and women, six Black and two white.^[1] In some ways, they too were on a collective pilgrimage: They were in search of models of planned community. They were seeking fair economies, a new way to live together as children of God. Some of them identified as land reformers, concerned by capitalist exploitation, others as agriculturalists or communitarians, still others as footsoldiers of the Black freedom struggle. But all were united in their ambition to create a just, sustainable, beloved community.

To that end, they were heading to Israel to investigate models for agricultural cooperatives that might be implemented in the rural Deep South. Though a relatively small historical episode–the trip lasted only about two weeks, from June 23 to July 7, 1968–the expedition captures much of the Black freedom struggle in this period: its continued religiosity, its imaginative radicalism, its heady mixture of international idealism and local pragmatism.

Telling this story introduces complexity to important characters from the civil rights struggle who might otherwise seem frozen in time and reveals new relationships and connections that those individuals made in pursuit of change. While historical narratives tend to separate activist projects cleanly—separatist, southern, nonviolent, Christian, collectivist, not to mention Zionist or settler colonial—this interracial group of activists’ trip to Israel shows the openness of Black freedom movements of the 1960s, with historiographical implications for studies of the civil rights movement, southern religion, Black placemaking, and social activism.[2]

When our diverse midcentury travelers set off across the world in 1968, they were responding to a call. In his 1967 “Christmas Sermon for Peace,” Martin Luther King acknowledged some “deferred dreams” and “blasted hopes,” but told his hearers:

in spite of that …I still have a dream that one day war will come to an end, that men will beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks, that nations will no longer rise up against nations, neither will they study war any more. I still have a dream today that one day the lamb and the lion will lie down together and every man will sit under his own vine and fig tree and none shall be afraid. I still have a dream today that one day every valley shall be exalted and every mountain and hill will be made low, the rough places will be made smooth and the crooked places straight, and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together…It will be a glorious day, the morning stars will sing together, and the sons of God will shout for joy.[3]

Rooted in this sure teleological hope, King went on to describe his vision for a new phase of the Black freedom movement: nonviolent, international, comprehensive. White supremacy and violent resistance had proven the need to wage a revolutionary struggle for peace not only just for Black folks in the South but for all of God’s people in the world. “We have experimented with the meaning of nonviolence in our struggle for racial justice in the United States,” he explained, “but now the time has come for man to experiment with nonviolence in all areas of human conflict, and that means nonviolence on an international scale…if we are to have peace on earth, our loyalties must become ecumenical rather than sectional.”[4] Like King, the eight activists heading to Israel understood the necessity of practical, collaborative, ecumenical activism and bold moral imagination.^[5] They were heeding his “Edenic” call for a bolder, broader approach to addressing the besetting problems in American life .[6]

The Problem

In this case the problem was, primarily, Black land loss. At the same historical moment that mass protests for Black freedom were capturing national attention, a quiet catastrophe unfolded for Black Americans. Beginning in 1950, Black landowners lost more than half a million farms; only 45,000 remained in 1970. During the 1960s alone, the Black farm count in ten southern states dropped by 88 percent, from 132,000 to 16,000. While this is usually chalked up to some sort of “natural consequence,” be it innovations in agricultural science, technology, or voluntary Black migrations, in his definitive 2013 book Dispossession, Pete Daniel makes the case that federal programs also facilitated the drastic land loss by encouraging “capital intensive” farming and subsidizing new techniques which were limited to wealthy, almost exclusively white, farmers.^[7] Black land dispossession and the struggle of Black farmers were, Daniel shows, “intended consequences.” This is the lesson of the post-civil rights era across many sectors: as claims of racial parity increased, so did disparities in outcomes, hidden and compounded by the invisible hands of racial capitalism.

This seismic shift went largely unnoticed in the civil rights period, distracted as many were by more dramatic events. “What happened to African American farmers in the three decades from 1940 to 1974 can be measured both by their decline and by the fact that their departure went unremarked,” Daniels asserts.^[8] But the implications of Black land loss were staggering.

In the rural South, land was the primary means of wealth. Increasingly, civil rights proponents were realizing how flimsy political rights could be without subsequent economic rights. "It isn't enough to integrate lunch counters," Martin Luther King, Jr. said, in March 1968, "What does it profit a man to be able to eat at an integrated lunch counter if he doesn't earn enough money to buy a hamburger and a cup of coffee?"^[9] Though crucial for political participation, even voting rights were not enough. In fact, exercising the right to vote could lead to heightened economic precarity. In many places throughout the South, when Black Americans registered to vote they found themselves soon fired or evicted. Only when Black people owned land would they have economic independence, and only with economic independence could they assert their full social and political rights.

The desire to own land then stemmed from economic necessity as well as racial ideology. For years, the Nation of Islam had called for a “Black Zion,” “some good earth” on which Black people could pursue Allah’s righteousness and rule.[10] The same year as the Israel trip, for instance, Lawrence Guyot, Betty Shabazz, Amiri Bakara, Maulana Karenga, and Queen Mother Audley Moore gathered at the Black Government Convention to “free the land” and establish a Black Nation-State, the Republic of New Afrika, in the Deep South.[11] As Greta de Jong states in You Can’t Eat Freedom, many Black southerners “sought alternative solutions that fostered black autonomy and economic independence.”[12] In addition to separatist Zions, others found an answer in the cooperative model which allowed people to keep their plots while nurturing community and offering an alternative to capitalist exploitation. Cooperatives had long featured in the freedom struggle, as Robert Hunt Ferguson shows through the examples of the interracial Delta Cooperative Farm and Providence Farm in Jim Crow Mississippi. Like Ferguson, Jared Roll finds that radical labor and religious imperatives comingled powerfully in rural Missouri’s agrarian projects, as they did at Koinonia Farm in Georgia.[13] Monica White’s 2018 Freedom Farmers offers several compelling later examples, such as Fannie Lou Hamer’s Freedom Farm Cooperative, that reveal the “collective agency and community resilience of the black rural poor.”[14] Often left out of traditional civil rights narratives, Black rural folks correctly identified the links between economies, labor, land possession, and political rights. As Wendell Paris, an early Fellowship of Southern Cooperatives leader, simply put it: “The cooperative movement was an outgrowth of the civil rights movement.” [15]

Bob Swann, Fay Bennett, and the other activists flying to Israel shared this interest in cooperatives. But who were they? And what were they doing together, clustered around the boarding gate that June day?

 

The Cast

Though born to a prosperous white family in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, Bob Swann was always a radical. Having lived through the Great Depression, which he said, “woke me up like a kick in the pants,” Swann developed a deep skepticism of American economies and private property.^[16] Influenced by Bayard Rustin’s Quaker pacifism, Swann declared himself a conscientious objector during World War II and decamped to an intentional farming community in Burlington, Vermont. It was while imprisoned for avoiding the draft that Swann adopted what he would later call his “decentralism.” “There was a group of us,” Swann recalled, “40 COs, down in Ashland, Kentucky— and we put together a sort of post graduate course for ourselves on economics, with a heavy emphasis on the kinds of things that Gandhi was doing in India, things related to nonviolence and the peace movement.” After being released from prison, Bob and his wife Marjorie lived in several intentional communities. Then, in the early 1960s, Swann traveled South to Georgia to rebuild several churches burned in racist attacks. That was the start. “Having spent so much time in the South made me aware not only of the pervasive racial inequalities but also of the economic realities that blacks continued to face even after legal segregation ended,” Swann reflected. “I was determined to work for a more equitable solution to land ownership and economic security. Part of the answer seemed to lie in a land-reform program.”^[17] In 1967, he published “The Economics of Peace” in the Catholic Worker, which combined his financial practicality with his expansive religious idealism. Swann envisioned a “non-national,” cooperative effort “concerned with all of mankind, excluding none” to create a massive fund to finance peacemaking, to “bring justice through nonviolent means.”[18] This radical vision for a new earth had to take root somewhere, and Swann felt the South might be fertile soil.

Swann was not alone. A fifty-four-year-old white mother of three born in Springfield, Massachusetts, Fay Bennett (Watts) might initially appear an odd representative in this endeavor for Black land collectives in the American South. But Fay Bennett was known as the “Joan of Arc of Agricultural Workers.” In 1951, Bennett began working part time at the National Sharecroppers Fund (NSF), a group founded in 1937 to support the interracial Southern Tenant Farmers Union, and which worked in later years to improve the lives and working conditions of rural farm workers more generally. Bennett soon became the Executive Director, an influential post she held until in 1974. Her work with migrant labor led her to become deeply concerned with Black land dispossession in the South. Eventually, the “extraordinarily active” Bennett came to the attention of both the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations, who asked her to serve on the Department of Agriculture’s National Advisory Committee on Rural Areas Development.^[19] She helped farmers gain access to cooperative networks, funding, grants, and education. In Bob Swann’s words, she became “a seasoned veteran of many struggles for social justice in the South.”^[20]

 

 

Leonard Smith was integral to these efforts. Originally from Boynton Beach, Florida, Smith worked alongside Bennett at the NSF. As the southern Field Director, he bore responsibility for the administration of all projects in the South. He coordinated with local farmers and field workers and helped them work through the complex bureaucracies necessary to obtain grant money, secure land, and produce and market their goods. In this capacity, Smith interacted with U.S. senators and forgotten workers, filing reports all the while. He traveled often, to conferences and meetings in New York and Washington, D.C., and to cooperative sites in Mound Bayou, Mississippi, West Helena, Arkansas and Albany, Georgia.

Albany was Slater King’s hometown. King was born in 1927 into a very prominent family, and after graduating from Fisk University, he returned to Albany to become a real estate developer, businessman, and community leader.^[21]  He married Marion Townsend, a Valdosta, Georgia native and Spelman College graduate, in 1956. They worked together in the civil rights movement, enduring recriminations and violence.^[22] In 1961, Slater King became the vice president of the Albany Movement, gaining a reputation for bold action, staring down local white supremacists, filing lawsuits, and organizing in the community. He used his correspondence and connections to influential people like Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, W.E.B. DuBois, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X to bring national attention to the Albany struggle, calling for racial and economic justice.^[23] Even as the civil rights movement waned in Albany, King sought inventive solutions to systemic problems in housing, education, law, and land loss.

Slater King was joined in this work by Charles Sherrod, the first field secretary for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). A “catalytic agent,” Sherrod arrived in Albany in 1961 and galvanized the people who waged a mass direct-action assault on Jim Crow.^[24] After leading the Albany Movement in 1962, he and other SNCC workers expanded into the surrounding counties of Southwest Georgia, organizing local demonstrations and registering people to vote. Exhausted, Sherrod, an ordained minister, took a brief “movement sabbatical” at Union Theological Seminary in New York before returning to Southwest Georgia in 1966. Having been forced out of SNCC for his commitment to Christian interracialism, Sherrod founded the Southwest Georgia Project, which continued civil rights organizing and partnered with the Student Interracial Ministry to bring white seminarians to Southwest Georgia.[25] As David Cline has written, all of this amounted to “an ongoing, persistent attempt to realize the beloved community through interracial cooperation and a combined program of economic and political action and, importantly, religious faith.”[26] In this faithful work, Sherrod noticed the depth and complexity of issues facing rural Black Georgians, including displacement and a pervasive lack of access to resources, especially land. But if the land was held collectively, he concluded, individual risk might be mitigated. “With land,” he said, “a man holds in his hand the mechanism to control his destiny.”^[27] Sherrod began to dream out loud about a Black land collective with Slater King. In Alabama, Lewis Black and Albert Turner were doing the same.

 

Lewis Black joined the effort for land reform out of his involvement with the Hale County Improvement Association, which conducted “hellraising and street demonstrations,” as one resident put it, in Greensboro, Alabama in 1964.^[28] A committed civil rights activist, Black chaired the Alabama Council on Human Relations, running voter registration drives and seeking funding for anti-poverty programs in Hale County. Like Sherrod and Smith, Black noted the importance of land possession, economic independence and agriculture in the rural South.^[29] "They got tricks they been using for 100 years,” Black told the Southern Courier. And these tricks were evolving in the 1960s, as white supremacists found new ways to assert control and exhaust Black Americans. In 1966, Black lamented, "The morale is different, the movement is leaving Alabama. It gave Negroes a lot of promises and didn't fulfill them. Negroes are losing hope and going back to the old ways."^[30] Still, he and others in the Alabama Black Belt wanted “Freedom Now.”^[31] Racial equality would require new, imaginative solutions. One such solution was the Southwest Alabama Farming Cooperative Association (SWAFCA), where Black worked alongside Albert Turner.^[32]

A bricklayer and Alabama native, Turner registered voters and did community organizing for the Perry County Civil League in the 1960s. In 1965, he marched across the Edmund Pettus Bridge (see figure 3, pictured in a white cap, next to Bob Mants, right behind Hosea Williams and John Lewis). After his courage at Bloody Sunday, Turner took over as the Alabama state director of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

 

Turner was devoted to the Black Belt. “I’ve never thought about leaving,” he told interviewer Allen Tullos, “I’ve always liked it here and I always wanted to live here.” ^[33] But Turner also knew what needed to change. “The problem of resources in the Black Belt is a big one. The resources are not in the hands of the black community and the white community is not in a frame of mind to share.” At a SNCC workshop in Selma, which Lewis Black likely also attended, the NSF’s James Mays suggested an agricultural cooperative. Turner was intrigued. An inter-county farming cooperative would be a way to increase scale, foster economic resources and jobs, and prevent outmigration.^[34] What would become the Southwest Alabama Farmers Cooperative Association allowed farmers to share information and find markets for their products, and encouraged Black southerners to stay on their land.^[35] Following a large-scale membership campaign, the SWAFCA recruited 1,800 farm families, making it the largest cooperative in the Federation of Southern Cooperatives (FSC) at the time. They received almost $400,000 from an Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO) grant in 1967, despite Governor Lurleen Wallace’s veto and Selma Mayor Joe Smitherman’s howls.^[36] Turner would not stop until his friends and neighbors in Perry County, Alabama were really, truly free. To get them there, he was now heading across the world, along with seven other people committed to the same cause.

The trip came out of a conference Swann organized in 1966. Plans for the International Independence Institute, out of which an organization of the same name was formed, included Ralph Borsodi (the father of decentralism, now nearly 80, returned from India) and other intellectuals and activists, including Fay Bennett.[37] There, they discussed possibilities for collective, village-based production that relieved poverty and fostered community development apart from existing federal and capitalistic programs. At the same moment, veterans of the Black freedom struggle, like Slater and Marion King, Charles Sherrod, Lewis Black, and Albert Turner were confronting economic issues, seeking ways for rural Black Americans to sustain themselves and gain access to credit and land without being subject to the vicissitudes of white supremacists. Connected by personal relationships as well as institutions like the NSF and FSC, a generative conversation between these groups began. ^[38]

Over the next two years, these activists–from different organizations and backgrounds, with different goals, priorities, and religious beliefs–came together to address Black land dispossession. They were not ideologically rigid nor racially separatist. Though they did not always have perfect agreement, alignment, or even understanding, that did not prevent them from working together. Rather they extended good faith to one another and approached their shared mission with openness. Together, they envisioned communities, or villages, in rural areas, supported by some form of microfinance—without need for banking credit or federal programs—where individuals shared power and resources to increase democratic ownership of land and access to capital for farming and, later, industry. Even more ambitious than the agricultural cooperative, the group considered some sort of collective ownership of land, which in addition to protecting economic interests, might also further their social and theological goals of beloved community. But how to successfully implement such a project?

Bob Swann suggested considering various models in Israel. Since the 1901 Zionist Congress at Basel, the Jewish National Fund (JNF) had acquired land in Palestine for Jewish settlement. Promoting itself in its charter as the “Jewish People’s trustees of the land,” the JNF would buy tracts of land and then offer ninety-nine-year leases to settlers, never to be sold. This amounted to both a national enterprise and theological mission, a fulfillment of the levitical notion that “the land shall not be sold in perpetuity.”^[39] In addition to these long-term leases, Israeli agricultural settlements also intrigued Swann. He identified there “a kind of linkage of the macro approach and the micro approach.” As he explained, the JNF itself offered “the macro concept” while the individual settlements embodied “the micro concept.”[40] Could such a broad effort, with pooled planning resources and sources of credit, exist in America? And could it support democratically governed, community-run farms in the American South? Could the macro/micro approach be grafted into American soil? Bob Swann wanted to find out. Eventually, with funding from the NSF, the Aaron E. Norman Fund, and the JNF, Swann organized an exploratory research trip in the summer of 1968 to the Holy Land.^[41]

The Trip

The excitement and sense of purpose was such that the eight took several group photos from the New York terminal, clustered under an “Information” sign. Customary at the time, the group dressed up for the flight, clad in sportscoats and ties despite the long journey. Slater and Marion King stood in the group’s center, he with a knowing smirk and she smiling broadly, dressed in a plaid blazer. Lewis Black and Albert Turner stood to one side, both wearing dark blazers and ties, gazing steadily at the camera with tight smiles. On the other side, Bob Swann rested a hand on Slater’s bicep, leaning out from behind him, his hair shorn close. Beside Swann, Smith, in a suit, grins gamely, while Fay’s tight, white curls are visible over her coworker’s shoulder. Finally, Sherrod stands on the far left of the group, dressed sharply in all black with his signature oversized eyeglasses frames. Hardly ever without a big, gap-toothed smile, at this moment Sherrod’s expression is serious. Perhaps he was nervous about such a long flight. Perhaps he was anticipating all that they would encounter. Perhaps he was simply sensing the significance of the project of envisioning a new way.

 

Arriving in Israel, the group settled into their lodgings and prepared to sightsee. The weather was quite warm. The women wore shift dresses, Marion shielding her eyes with chic round tortoiseshell sunglasses and Fay a bucket hat, while the men’s button ups had short sleeves. Several carried their airline-issued bags as they visited the sites. Slater King wore a Polaroid camera around his neck while Fay carried a slim camera in her hand, both capturing the otherworldly terrain, tightly organized settlements, and natural beauty. Some of the travelers kept diaries or took notes, which Fay Bennett would eventually compile into a formal report for the trip’s funding agencies, summarizing the trip and reflecting on the settlements’ viability in a southern context.

 

 

The group began their trip with a series of meetings. “During our two week stay,” Bennett explained, “we met officials of the JNF, Histadrut, the general labor federation, and various government agencies with whom we discussed programs and policies relating to rural people.”^[42]In Jerusalem, they convened with Jacob Tsur, the head of the JNF, with which Bob Swann made the initial connection, at the organization’s headquarters. Tsur provided background information for the various settlements and described the aims of the movement. Originally created in response to Anti-Semitism, the JNF stated its settlement aims unapologetically, in both political and religious terms. In Der Judenstaad, a founding document, Theodor Herzl wrote: “We shall give a home to our people, transplanting them carefully to better ground. Just as we wish to create new political and economic relations, so we shall preserve as sacred all of the past that is dear to our people’s hearts.”[43] The Zionist project may have stemmed from shared religion—the “historical affinity only through the faith of fathers”—but the meeting with the American activists emphasized the material aspects.[44]

Bennett would later write that, as Mr. Tsur pointed out, the JNF was mainly “concerned with land: buying and reclaiming land.” And as much as possible. Often, the JNF must “drain swamps and lakes, remove rocks from hillsides and terrace them, and plant trees on land that cannot be farmed,” Fay wrote, a very costly endeavor. It could be even more expensive if the terrain was harsh: “where the land is very rocky and reclamation is more difficult, the cost sometimes goes as high as $1,200 an acre.” Privately funded by Zionists around the world, the JNF took on this initial cost of clearing or “reclaiming” and then leased the land, with renewable contracts, “at nominal cost” to individuals and organizations. “In all cases,” Bennett recorded, “the JNF makes the final decision on who shall acquire the land.”^[45] Ben Shemesh, the planning director, also addressed the visiting group, explaining how the JNF had operated in land settlement in Palestine since 1901—long before the state of Israel even existed—and was now able to work with the Israeli government but also outside of it.[46]

Settling Palestine with Jewish people was a long-articulated goal of the JNF, and tellingly, one that seems to have given the travelers little pause in 1968. If anyone felt uneasy about such overt Zionism or the displacement of Arab Palestinians, they didn’t let on. In our current moment, this oversight is baffling, if not morally invalidating. And yet, history presses us both to resist anachronism and not to ventriloquize historical actors. The late 1960s were an inflection point both for the conflict in the Middle East and American understandings of it, but still, for the most part, Black activists did not directly associate Jews is Israel with white settler colonialism nor their own struggles for equality and liberation solely with those of Arab Palestinians.[47] As late as 1967, Dr. King and the Student Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) “vigorously denounced anti-Semitism” as “immoral” and called Israel’s “right to exist as a state in security…incontestable,” though their position did hold some nuance, namely that the Arab world was suffering with “imposed poverty” and that both Israel and “progressive” Arab nations should engage in “statesmanship” not “military measures nor a stubborn effort to reverse history.”[48] The exception was SNCC, by 1967 an organization that Charles Sherrod had already left.  Its statement on “The Middle-East Crisis,” noted that Israel mustn’t invoke the “tragedy” of the Holocaust in an effort “to take over Palestine, to commit some of the same atrocities against the native Arab inhabitants, and to completely dispossess the Arabs of their homes, land and livelihood.” Despite this strong statement though, and a round condemnation of Zionism as “the tool and foot-hold of British and American exploitation,” SNCC did not adopt a uniform position. This notable exception proves the rule, as SNCC’s stance “symbolized a new willingness among a minority of Afro-Americans who had been part of the interracial civil rights movement to break with their past” and publicly condemn Israel. [49] Our travelers in 1968 might have been looking for something new, but they resisted criticism and remained committed to interracial solutions.

Despite all the lofty transnational partnerships and the shared religious hopes for beloved imagined communities, practicalities dominated the trip’s discussions. Emerging from the JNF meeting, one member of the group summarized the takeaways matter-of-factly: “Soil tests are made; Land is surveyed and laid out in tracts; Land is reclaimed and developed so that farmers can work it; Land cannot be mortgaged; Leasehold interest can be mortgaged with consent of JNF.”^[50]

Next, the eight met with Zev Haring of the Histadrut, a sort of labor federation to which “practically the entire workforce of the nation belongs.” Haring explained the scale of the Histadrut: about 88 percent of wage workers and 60 percent of the total population were members, and affiliated cooperatives controlled much of Israel’s public sector services. Through its pension funds, the Histadrut had capital for investment, for loans, and even for the construction of low-income housing. It also offered insurance, sick benefits, and some educational and cultural programming. As they listened, the group marveled at the scale of the Histadrut’s benefits, as well as the sense of coordination between private agencies and labor federations with the Israeli government.^[51]

In addition to these visits with officials offering insight into the economic and political structure necessary to support the collectives, the group also toured around the countryside to observe the settlements themselves, Swann’s micro element. Despite the presence of some individual farms, these generally fell into three distinct categories: kibbutz, moshav, or moshav shitufi.

According to Fay’s notes, the kibbutz offered “total cooperative living and working” where “all property is owned in common–except for personal items such as clothing and books–and all work and other activities are planned and managed cooperatively.” The kibbutz was also “highly organized and democratic” where elected officers and committees carry out work on a rotation. The moshav, meaning “settlement” in Hebrew, had individual farm ownership but a cooperative structure for “buying, selling, processing, and bookkeeping and for educational, health, cultural, and social services.” The third type, a moshav shitufi, “combines features of moshav and kibbutz.” In this arrangement, individual farmers owned small parcels cultivated like the moshav while the larger community collectively owns and operates a much larger common tract, more like kibbutzim.

 

 

Over their weeks in Israel, the American delegation “visited and observed the operations of farming communities representative of each type.”^[52] Overall, they found the settlements “impressive.” In particular, Fay recorded that the group admired the settlements’ “sound business procedures,” their efficient bookkeeping and accounting, and their careful record of expenditures and income for each farmer. “All three kinds of cooperatives,” she noted, “attached great importance to accurate record keeping.” If an operation was losing money, they knew quickly, and could then either reform or shutter it. This could be replicated, she advised. More difficult to approximate in the American setting would be the broad support offered by the government and the Histadrut. With robust support from the NSF, grants, and charitable donations as a source of credit, could that somehow be created back home? As the group walked and drove through the desert landscape, they wrestled with these big questions of political and moral economy.^[53]

 

 

On Tuesday June 26, the group visited “the oldest, biggest and most successful kibbutz in Israel” located about a mile south of Rehovot in Central Israel. The Givat Brenner community, which was founded by immigrants from Eastern Europe in 1928, boasted both industrial and agricultural production. On lined yellow paper with blue ink, one group member dutifully recorded that at the time of the visit, the settlement had 1,800 acres, 1,600 residents—350 of them children—and was worth around 6 million dollars.^[54] The entry included detailed descriptions of the sophisticated farming and industrial operations at the kibbutz. The community grew 200 acres of cotton, beets, wheat, hay, and peanuts. They raised 600 head of cattle and produced 170 tons of poultry. They had a successful canning operation which handled 20,000 tons during the height of the season. While much of the kibbutz’s product was sold in Israel, they also exported to Europe, even sending jam to the British army during World War II. The kibbutz had a carpentry unit and a foundry–a metal shop specializing in irrigation equipment–which, the diarist excitedly noted, had recently contracted to do work in Asia and Africa. The Givat Brenner community also had a “110 bed resort hotel, large community center, restaurant.” Everyone worked diligently, not for compensation but as a “badge of prestige in the community.”^[55]

In addition to the impressive farming and industrial production, the group observed the social and communal arrangements. Since work was done in groups, kibbutz members had to get along with one another, a process ensured by a mandatory visit period before joining. “A new couple or family,” the diarist stated, “must be two years on probation.” Once admitted, most people remained for the long-term, as “it takes a “⅔ vote to put them out.” There were rare exceptions. “If a member is charged with stealing or other crime,” the diarist recorded, they would be “defended by the best lawyer available.” If found guilty, “he is punished or put out of the kibbutz afterward.” Less serious conflicts would be handled internally and communally. The community elected administrative officers each year who moderated any disagreements or issues at a weekly meeting, and they could themselves be called into question and “recalled” at the will of the whole. For Black, Turner and Sherrod this likely seemed familiar, as SNCC and the SWFCA had similarly collective decision-making processes and were known for their long community discussions. As Slater King later reflected, “that did impress me in Israel…that they’re interested in people rather than these formulas.”[56]

Less familiar were the kibbutz’s family arrangements. Children were reared communally, in large nurseries with dedicated teachers, while parents “work the field each day [and] after work pick up their children to pray with them and to give them love.” Meanwhile it was the responsibility of the “community [to] give them discipline.” “The Israelis declare,” the group’s notes read, “that this makes for the closest and strongest ties between the children and the parents–Because the Disciplinarian parent is viewed as an ogre by the child in other communities.”[57]

Leaving Givat Brenner, the activists discussed these familial arrangements. Slater and Marion thought of their young children back at home in Albany, Charles Sherrod of his newborn daughter.^[58] Would they be willing to put their kids in a communal nursery during the day? Probably not. It had only been six years since a pregnant Marion had been beaten unconscious by a Georgia police officer resulting in a stillbirth. In a racist society, you had to hold your babies close. The group also talked about how kibbutz life would re-shape relationships. Reflecting on these conversations one person wrote, “We must ask: what do the parents do with this greater period of spare time? Does this make the wife more carefree in reference to the Husband[?] Doesn’t she feel less as a responsible person? What are they really taught? What values are taught to them? What stories?” [59]

The other kibbutzim and moshavim they toured offered different models for development and raised other complicated questions. One kibbutz boasted a teacher’s college and publishing house; some had cultural events such as “Dancing, singing, violin, Drama…movies, lecture hall, photography.” In some ways, the group found the work, schedule, and community life appealing, but concerns lingered. Black southerners would be understandably wary of ceding all home or land ownership, of seeing their children sparingly and having them disciplined communally as some communities did. And what about working long hours? As the informative entries trailed off, the diarist wondered: “How can we do this? What ingredients motivate people?”^[60] Most of the trip included such serious, specific considerations for a possible collective in Southwest Georgia.

But they also took time to visit notable sights in the Holy Land and have some fun. They visited temples and sepulchers, places with theological significance for many of the group.^[61] Though he had grown up in the Black Protestant church, Slater King took some time to visit a local Bahá’i temple. As he wandered its gardens and shrines, something stirred deep within his religious imagination. When he got back to the room, he shared his thoughts and experiences with Marion, who had stayed back ill, and they talked long about the mystical connections of the divine to all people.

The same day the group went to the Brenner community, they explored the city of Rehovot where they “took a tour of a wine cellar.” The owner brought grape vines from abroad and planted them in the desert along with the hopes that “people from abroad would love to have wine from the Holy Land.” “Plus,” the entry explained, “this would give new settlers motive to come.”^[62] It all felt experimental and ambitious, even when practical.

As the group headed to the airport, they chatted excitedly, inspired by what they had seen. They had observed a real sense of collective interest and work in the various communities. They understood more clearly the high cost of procuring land. The historical and political contexts were undoubtedly different. But witnessing the establishment of productive communities despite a long history of oppression in Israel, they were able to imagine the possibility of a new epoch in the American South, one of flourishing. They could almost see the Promised Land at last. As the plane touched down on American soil, they shook hands, exchanged warm embraces, and got to work.

The Outcome

A few weeks after their return home, the group issued a formal report on their trip. They stated that “the Israeli experience bears considerable relevance to our own work for the economic development in the rural South.” They were convinced that the JNF model could be reproduced to address Black land loss.^[63] “Foreclosure and loss of land,” Fay Bennett wrote, “has been the Achilles’ heel of Southern black people through the years.” But large-scale land procurement and settlement, as they had seen in Israel, offered a way to sustainable “political growth and security for black people in the South.”^[64] The report concluded: “We believe that a structure based upon a similar principle is needed to make possible the acquisition of tract of contiguous land in the rural South on which to resettle displaced sharecroppers and tenant farmers and to make possible the development of communities with a viable economic base.”[65]

The next action step, they decided, should be to convene with other “key members of local and southwide organizations.”^[66] On July 27, 1968, they held an invitation-only meeting that, in addition to the original traveling delegation, included sixteen leaders and stakeholders such as Jesse Jackson, Constance Curry, Charles Prejean, Andrew Young, and John Lewis.^[67] After sharing what they’d seen and experienced abroad, the group expressed their desire to move forward with a moshav shitivi style settlement in Southwest Georgia. It would be, as Swann told those assembled, “a program for land reform, primarily aimed at relocating black families on land which they either never had a chance to own, or which had been stolen and expropriated in one way or another from them,” countering decades of Black land loss. They would seek to institute the “methods of land purchase and leaseholds, partially adopted from the Jewish National Fund practices in Israel.”^[68] Therefore, the group had resolved to begin “setting up an independent structure to buy, hold and lease land, in perpetuity, to individuals and cooperatives for agricultural, industrial and other economic and social purpose to make possible their earning a living, producing for their own needs and for the larger society, finding creative expression for their skills and talents, educating their children and enjoying all the rights, benefits, and responsibilities of free citizens.” They would “tap” existing government agencies and programs, as well as seek private support as they created a space for “the settlers who would practice the governing of their own lives.”^[69] Brimming with hope, Swann proclaimed that this model might spur a “southwide movement.”^[70] Those listening agreed, excitement palpable. They designated a planning committee.

With this broad vision and support, New Communities, Inc. (NCI) was incorporated in late summer, 1968. It would be the first of hopefully many moshav shitivi in the Deep South. According to its bylaws, NCI existed:

To aid and advance the improvement of agriculture and horticulture and industrial arts and the promotion of social welfare by acquiring, by purchase, lease, gift or otherwise, and the disposing of (when no longer necessary or desirable) interests in real or personal property within and without the State of Georgia with a view to the creation of new communities for poor, distressed, underprivileged, disadvantaged or dispossessed persons, who will be permitted to lease such property from this organization or otherwise occupy the same and to live, work and learn in such communities, thereby contributing to their own educational, social and economic advancement and that of the larger communities in which such persons shall reside.^[71]

New Communities’ fundamental mission was economic autonomy as a means of Black liberation, not simply in individual solvency but collective dignity. “For the first time in their memory,” one later report stated, “black people can say this is our land to build and make prosper, and to hold in trust for future generations.”[72] Shirley Sherrod, Charles’ wife, agreed, remembering, “Our goal was to try to acquire land so that we would never lose it…we were really trying to look at how to get this land and hold it forever, for everyone’s use.”[73]

Holding land would create wealth for Black people and form a base from which to develop political independence and loving community. In addition to countering Black land loss and erosion of rights, the New Community might also serve as a model of the possible in a redeemed world. All things were being made new, or could be, depending on the theological priors both interpersonally and environmentally. One later report stated that “The ultimate ecological message” of NCI “is to bring people into harmony with their environment—their material as well as their social environment.”[74] The lofty mission set, the group took their places.

Slater King was elected president. Father A.J. McKnight, a Louisiana priest who helped found the Southern Cooperative Education Fund, was named vice president. Fay Bennett served as secretary, using the NSF’s networks to drum up organizational support nationally while Bob Swann took on the role of “national coordinator” involved especially in fundraising. Leonard Smith became the organization’s treasurer.

Now they just needed the land. In late October 1968, members of the “Acquisition Committee of the Land-Trust Program”–Smith, King and Sherrod (Black and Turner were absent)—toured a 2,000 acre farm in Randolph County, twenty-eight miles west of Albany and eight miles east of Culbert, close to the Alabama line. According to Leonard’s report to Fay, the plot was “situated near a network of good roads” with “soil of a sandy loam with a light clay base…easy to cultivate.” Though they recommended that it “be purchased outright as soon as possible, and be developed as a model of the land trust program,” the Randolph County purchase fell through.^[75] Slater, a realtor, soon located another promising plot–this time almost 5,000 acres in Lee County, Georgia known as Featherfield Farm. In early December 1968, Bennett sent Smith down to take a look at the plot. His report upon inspecting the land, presumably favorable, was presented at a meeting of the temporary Board of Directors.^[76] With backing from the NSF, which secured a one-year option on the $1,080,000 mortgage, the land was theirs. Soon, they had an OEO planning grant and the promise of more to come.

In 1969, New Communities officially became the first community land trust in the United States, and, at that time, the largest Black owned collective farm in the United States. By 1970, they had acquired 5,735 acres. “Farm operations are underway,” an NCI memo reported, describing the cultivation of vegetables, soybeans, grapes, corn, watermelons, pecans, peanuts, and cotton.^[77] The farm raised cattle and pigs, and even established a sausage making factory, smokehouse, and market. Around ten families came to settle at New Communities, and they established a daycare, primary schools, and cultural events.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

For nearly two decades, they cared for each other and cared for the land. "It was a group of people coming together really with the same ideals, the same hopes and dreams for their children," Bummi Anderson, a child raised at New Communities later reflected. "We grew up having this sense of pride in who we were as African Americans." But that pride also came from tending the land. "You know when you're talking about land for African Americans, for anybody, land is power. Land is equity. Land is wealth."^[78] This is exactly what the group had discovered in Israel, and it was just as true in Southwest Georgia. Everyone involved looked back at this moment–the founding of New Communities–as a formative one, an apotheosis of a sort of heady hopefulness when a new way seemed possible.

 

The Aftermath

According to Swann’s biographer Stephanie Mills, working on New Communities was a “high point of Bob’s life.” “The group work, the intellectual creativity, the wide-ranging effort to procure the money first to option the land and then obtain the mortgages, the constant rallying of support for the project,” Mills writes, all energized Swann–even “the flurry of interstate travel to ferry checks drawn in New York to Albany, Georgia in order to meet a deadline with increasingly reluctant sellers and the various attorneys involved.” It would also go on to shape the rest of his career, life and legacy. In helping New Communities come up with its financing and organization, Swann figured out how to “structure community responsibility and participation into the agreement under which the land was held.” This would form the basis of the Community Land Trust, a model that Swann would replicate in his life-long quest for a more equitable social and economic system which he pursued until his death in 2003.^[79]

For Fay Bennett, too, the founding of New Communities represented a high point in her work for just agricultural labor in the United States. Though she only served as NCI’s secretary until 1969, she continued to work with the organization until her retirement in 1974. She wrote in 1969 of her “deep commitment to the principles and purposes of New Communities in which I have participated from the very beginning.”^[80]

Sadly, Slater King, so instrumental in ushering in a new South and in bringing visionaries together, did not see the full fruition of his work. In March of 1969, he died in a car accident in Dawson. He was just 41. Along with her devastated children, Marion mourned the loss of her husband, her confidante and friend. But she also kept at the work they’d begun together. She served as a secretary at New Communities, keeping meeting minutes and handling the community’s correspondence. This included updates to the NSF, and in particular, to Leonard Smith. In corresponding, the two developed a relationship and married in 1971. Leonard moved to Albany where he and Marion lived together and raised their family, the memory of Slater always strong.^[81]

Lewis Black and Albert Turner returned to Alabama and continued to work with the SWAFCA, which implemented many of the same techniques as New Communities. While not much is known about Lewis Black after this, Albert Turner continued to innovate in production, pioneering the use of gasohol in the 1970s. Turner also kept fighting for Black access to the ballot, work which brought him to the attention of then U.S. Attorney Jeff Sessions, who accused him and two others–known as the Marion Three–of vote tampering. After a tense three-week trial held in Selma, defense attorney James L. Chestnut Jr. successfully convinced a jury of seven Black and five white members to acquit the Marion Three of all charges. Finally in 1988, after seven tries, Turner was elected to the Perry County Commission, the culmination of a life of service to the community he loved. He died twelve years later in 2000.^[82]

As for Charles Sherrod, he stayed at New Communities. After taking over the presidency upon Slater’s death, Sherrod worked tirelessly–managing the planting schedule and budgets, running long community meetings, traveling to raise money in New York, or Washington D.C., raising his two children alongside his wife, Shirley Miller Sherrod, applying for federal grants, trying to get Black candidates onto the Agricultural Stabilization and Conservation Service. There were issues. As one report stated: “Ideals and goals are beautiful, but practice makes imperfect.”[83] Put even more bluntly, New Communities “survived, struggling from problem to problem, crisis to crisis.”[84] Still, listening to the whir of the tractors, the yelps of screaming children playing in the fields, the sound of men and women cooking and laughing and praying, Sherrod felt at home. This had been his life’s work and though it was a struggle, always, he was thankful for the community, for the land, and for what he had witnessed in Israel all those years ago. “All power comes from the land,” he often said, “and absolute power comes from God.”^[85]

Then, in the early 1980s, much of the Black Belt experienced a devastating drought. Many farmers, Black and white, applied to the Farmers Home Administration for debt relief and money for irrigation. When Sherrod first walked into his local office seeking relief, though, the answer echoed what he had heard years before in many a Jim Crow courthouse: “over my dead body.”^[86] Applying to state and federal agencies resulted in obfuscation and lengthy delays; debts piled up insurmountably. Any relief funds were “meager.” Finally, in 1985, Prudential foreclosed on the remaining acres, an event Bob Swann called “heartbreaking.”[87] The land, the dream of New Communities, the seed planted all those years ago in Israel, was gone. Charles Sherrod mourned. He joined the Albany City Council and began preaching and serving as a prison hospice chaplain. But then, after hearing about the 1999 Pigford v. Glickman case, which found the US Department of Agriculture had racially discriminated against Black farmers, he and his wife Shirley filed a claim in a second round. “We’d never known that the white farmers had received relief during the drought that had been denied to us,” Shirley recalled in her memoir, “we didn’t know that the plantations around us had received loans.” They were “heartsick” but also “vindicated.”^[88] In 2009, they won their case and received a settlement. It wasn’t a New Community yet, it wasn’t the long-envisioned Promised Land, but it was at least a stream in the wilderness.

Conclusion

It would be easy to see this trip to Israel as an eccentric episode in a litany of odd outtakes from the late 1960s. Indeed, the vision that the eight cultivated abroad of coalescing land and power and community in the deep South seems to have mostly failed. Black land loss continues, as does large agribusiness, late capitalism, white supremacy, and disintegrating rural communities. And yet, this integrated adventure to the Holy Land in 1968 offers a reminder of the religious, economic, and social radicalism—as well as contingency—of the moment.

Armed with cynicism and hindsight, it can seem obvious now: the limitations of electoral politics, the wiliness of white supremacy, the fixed-ness of American capitalism. The freedom struggle, as it’s taught, is reduced to the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act, to seats on a bus or access to an identical water fountain. And while those are certainly important laws and changes, they do not reflect the religious and revolutionary aims at the heart of the freedom struggle: to abolish systems of oppression and usher in nothing less than a new way of being in America, a new way of being in the world. The struggle emerges at once intensely local, grounded and rooted in the Black Belt, in Black communities and spaces, but also transnational both in inspiration and in scope.

Not to say that the activists were impractical. They understood the need for flexible, cooperative coalitions for change. Among those who traveled to Israel, there was not perfect alignment. The NSF and Independence Institute did not adopt all the racial politics of SNCC and the SCLC. There were noticeable differences in class. Some groups were more separatist, others more integrationist. Some were explicitly Christian, others avowedly not. Some would have advocated the use of defensive violence; others were declared pacifists. This is to say nothing of the ideological commitments of the various funding agencies, including the Zionist JNF. But all these disparate individuals and groups understood that they had at least one common goal: the preservation of land and community in the Deep South. And yet, as we can see, this practicality did not limit their aims, which remained economically, ecologically, and socially radical. The trip to Israel, then, this historical snapshot, broadens our understandings of the Black freedom struggle, its scopes and its schisms. In it, we see bold desire for economic and social reform, vibrant interracial and even transnational partnerships, and an inventive southern religious imagination for placemaking.

In the 1960s, Bob Swann, Fay Bennett, Leonard Smith, Slater King, Marion King, Albert Turner, Lewis Black, and Charles Sherrod also encountered an epoch in history where the ground seemed to shift from beneath them. From a shape-shifting white supremacy post-civil rights to seismic demographic and agricultural changes, from shocking political violence to American declension in Vietnam, trust in the old ways was eroding. But instead of despairing, or employing stale strategies to affect change, these activists attempted a new way of reconfiguring reality all the way down. They partnered together across divergent organizations with different tactical and theological views. They reframed American economic issues in global terms and borrowed transnational approaches to reform. They sought nothing less than to abolish the existing framework of land ownership and racial caste and replace it with sustainable communities of care. The trip to Israel stands as an act of radical political, social, and moral curiosity. Instead of becoming cynical or despondent in confronting the very real injustices bearing down, these diverse activists courageously insisted on what could yet be. They demonstrated a willingness to abolish old ways and old systems, not to be replaced with dust and ashes, but to usher in justice and beloved community.

In an interview years later, Albert Turner explained this radical, even sacred, hope. “Now this is hard and most people call it radical, but new life doesn’t come until the old order passes,” he said. “In the Bible they use the phrase that old wine bags could not hold new wine…In society our people cannot accept the fad that there is nothing new coming until the old gets out of the way or dies. They feel that there is some miracle way that the old and the new can coexist. It has never been that way. New life or new birth comes only through the process of removing the old.”^[89]

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^[1] Beginning in the summer of 1968, air travel in Israel or on Israeli airlines became harrowing. A 1970 New York Times article, “The Airline War,” described an “Arab terrorist campaign against airline service to Israel,” noting at least ten incidents of hijacking flights or other acts of terrorism in less than two years. The first of these attacks came just two weeks after this group returned. “The Airline War,” New York Times, March 1, 1970.

[2] See Angel David Nieves and Leslie M. Alexander, eds.,“We Shall Independent Be”: African American Placemaking and the Struggle to Claim Space in the United States (Denver: University Press of Colorado, 2008).

[3] Martin Luther King, Jr., “A Christmas Sermon On Peace,” in The Trumpet of Conscience (Boston: Beacon Press, 2010),67-80.

[4] King, “A Christmas Sermon On Peace.” Religion’s role in the early civil rights struggle is well-known: James Lawson’s Christian nonviolence, the kneel-in movement, Abraham Joshua Heschel’s praying feet in Selma. But religion remained important in the late 1960s. Even as movements fractured and expanded, religion often animated radical calls for Black power, for an end to war, and for economic justice through fair wages and land.

^[5] Just weeks later, activists would clash violently with police while protesting outside of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. This incident, along with other incidents in urban areas involving destruction, division, and national politics, tend to drive historical narratives, understandably. But radical politics does not always look like public protest. This trip to Israel, occurring concurrently, offers a different view of radical politics: the hidden, small work of building and creating a better world.

[6] Bradford T. Stull describes this as King’s “placeless…Edenic vision,” a theologically informed “desire for the garden,” for God’s presence with all people and a redeemed creation. Bradford T. Stull, Amid the Fall, Dreaming of Eden: DuBois, King, Malcolm X, and Emancipatory Composition (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999), 118-119.

^[7] Pete Daniel, Dispossession: Discrimination Against African American Farmers in the Age of Civil Rights (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013), xi.

^[8] Daniel, Dispossession, 6.

^[9] Michael K. Honey, Going Down Jericho Road: The Memphis Strike, Martin Luther King’s Last Campaign (New York: W.W. Norton Press, 2008).

[10] E. U. Essien-Udom, Black Nationalism: A Search for an Identity in America (University of Chicago Press, 1962), 251.

[11] Edward Onaci, Free the Land: The Republic of New Afrika and the Pursuit of a Black Nation-State (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020), 1-2.

[12] Greta de Jong, You Can’t Eat Freedom: Southerners and Social Justice After the Civil Rights Movement (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016), 14.

[13] Robert Hunt Ferguson, Remaking the Rural South: Interracialism, Christian Socialism, and Cooperative Farming in Jim Crow Mississippi (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2018); Jared Roll, Spirit of Rebellion: Labor and Religion in the New Cotton South (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2010).

[14] Monica M. White, Freedom Farmers (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018), 71. White examines Freedom Farm Cooperative, North Bolivar County Farmers Cooperative, Federation of Southern Cooperatives and the Detroit Black Community Food Security Network as case studies for Black collective agency and community resilience. While these efforts differed—some in the South, others up North, some separatist, others religious—they comprise radical alternative visions for organizing society. See also Onaci, Free the Land; Greta de Jong, A Different Day: African American Struggles for Justice in Rural Louisiana, 1900-1970 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002); Susan Youngblood Ashmore, Carry it On: The War on Poverty and the Civil Rights Movement in Alabama, 1964-1972 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2008).

[15] Monica White, Freedom Farmers, 97.

^[16] Stephanie Mills, On Gandhi’s Path: Bob Swann’s Work for Peace and Community Economics (Gabriola Island: New Society Publishers, 2010), 22.

^[17] Robert Swann, “Peace, Civil Rights, and the Search for Community: An Autobiography,” The Schumacher Center for a New Economics, February 1998, https://centerforneweconomics.org/publications/peace-civil-rights-and-the-search-for-community-an-autobiography/#Chapter%2020.

[18] Robert Swann, “The Economics of Peace,” The Catholic Worker 33, no. 4 (January 1967). Later, Dorothy Day would write of Swann’s ideas approvingly. Mills, On Gandhi’s Path, 106.

^[19] “Fay Bennett Watts, 88; Helped Rural Poor” New York Times, December 29, 2002; Daniel, Dispossession, 53.

^[20] “Fay Bennett,” The Schumacher Center for a New Economics, accessed May 26, 2022, https://centerforneweconomics.org/people/fay-bennett/.

^[21] His father, Clennon King, founded the first NAACP chapter in the city; his brother, attorney C. B. King, would be the first Black person to run for federal office post-Reconstruction; and his brother Preston King, an accomplished academic and philosopher, was exiled after he avoided the draft in 1961.

^[22] An especially horrific episode occurred in Mitchell County, Georgia in 1962. Along with her three young children and two other women, a seven-months pregnant Marion had gone to the county jail to visit some young people who were being held for participating in Albany’s civil rights demonstrations. In a sworn statement, Marion would later recall that when they arrived, police officers began yelling contradictory instructions at the women “in angry and nasty tones,” laced with “profuse profanity.” Thinking that Marion was talking back to him, an officer kicked her repeatedly. One of the women begged him to stop, saying, “Don’t kick her, she’s pregnant,” to which he replied, “I don’t give a damn if she is.” Another officer then “struck” her “across the face,” causing her to black out. Coming to, Marion could hear “my children screaming.” Back in Albany, she was treated for “contusions of the face suffered from the blow and the abrasions of the right elbow and right knee suffered from the subsequent fall.” Her condition was serious enough that she was “placed under sedation and put to bed for observation.” A few weeks later, the baby she was carrying was stillborn. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was stunned by the barbarism, calling the incident a “terrible thing.” Though often remembered only for this horrific incident as the “woman who lost her child leading the civil rights movement,” Marion King kept in the struggle. Following the trip to Israel, she earned her law degree in the 1970s from Mercer University in Macon, Georgia and worked as an assistant attorney for the City of Atlanta. “Statement of Marion King,” Folder 1, Slater King Papers (Wisconsin Historical Society Archive, Madison); Mary Sterner Lawson, “Slater King,” New Georgia Encyclopedia, last modified August 27, 2020, https://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/articles/history-archaeology/slater-king-1927-1969/.

^[23] See Lawson, "Slater King."

^[24] Slater King, “The Bloody Battleground of Albany,” correspondence, 1964, Slater King Papers (Wisconsin Historical Society Archive, Madison). Charles Sherrod was born into poverty outside of Petersburg, in a “speck” of a place out in Surry County, Virginia. While attending Virginia Union University, where he studied sociology and earned a master’s in theology, Sherrod began to get involved in desegregation movements in Richmond. This activism brought Sherrod to the attention of Ella Baker who was then planning a meeting to organize the nascent student movements emerging throughout the American South. After participating in the founding of SNCC at Shaw University in 1960, Baker sent Sherrod to Southwest Georgia.(See Ansley Quiros, God With Us: Lived Theology and the Freedom Struggle in Americus, Georgia, 1942-1976 Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018, 82-88).

[25] See David P. Cline, From Reconciliation to Revolution: The Student Interracial Ministry, Liberal Christianity, and the Civil Rights Movement (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016).

[26] Cline, From Reconciliation to Revolution, 91.

^[27] “New Communities Formed in Southwest Georgia,” SNCC Digital Archive, https://snccdigital.org/events/new-communities-formed-in-southwest-georgia/.

^[28] Edward M. Rudd, “Race Complicates Black Belt Anti-Poverty Campaigns,” The Southern Courier 1, no. 14, (1965).

^[29] In 1966, Black coordinated a state-wide effort alongside SNCC, SCLC, the Alabama Council on Human Rights and the National Sharecroppers Fund to increase Black representation on local agricultural boards, though that effort yielded little.

^[30] “No Negroes Elected to New ASCS County Committees,” The Southern Courier 2, no. 41 (1966).

^[31] Rudd, “Race Complicates Black Belt Anti-Poverty Campaigns.”

^[32]Daniel, Dispossession, 127. For more on the rural struggle in Alabama during this period, see Ashmore, Carry It On.

^[33] Turner was from Perry County, Alabama, just outside of the town of Marion. His father, a farmer, owned 111 acres, imbuing the value of land ownership in Turner from a young age. Albert was a natural leader, and, by his own admission something of a “rebel,” leading several cafeteria boycotts in college. After graduating from Alabama A&M, Turner, a self-described “studious person,” made a bold career decision that “through everybody for a loop.” He became a bricklayer. “I just didn’t want to face the system and I thought that I could avoid it by being a bricklayer,” Turner recalled, “I thought I could go out there and lay some bricks and come home and go to bed at night and not be bothered.” Allen Tullos, “Rebel With a Cause: Albert Turner, Sr. (1936-2000),” Southern Change s22, no. 2, (2000): 24-26. See also Albert Turner, video interview, University Libraries, Washington University in St. Luis, http://repository.wustl.edu/concern/videos/5q47rq45g; “Albert Turner is Dead at 64,” New York Times, April 15, 2000, A 13. This work invited many confrontations with white supremacists in Perry County. In February of 1965 he was arrested for a “breach of peace,” and he was assaulted the following month marching across the Edmund Pettus Bridge, in the famous event known as Bloody Sunday.” Individuals Active in Civil Disturbances, Vol. 2.,” Alabama Photographs and Pictures Collection, Alabama Department of Archives & History, https://digital.archives.alabama.gov/digital/collection/photo/id/1746.

^[34] “We are trying to organize a ten-county farmer co-op where we will do truck farming on a very large scale,” Turner wrote to Hosea Williams of the SCLC in January 1967, after a meeting with representatives from federal and state agencies, including Mays and the NSF. In describing what would become the Southwest Alabama Farmers Cooperative Association (SWAFCA), Turner stated: “We have about one thousand farmers involved…. We are dealing with the heart of this problem here in the black belt now. We plan to hire those farmers that have been evicted and we feel we could improve the total income of the Negro tremendously.” Albert Turner to Hosea Williams, January 14, 1967, “Report on Activities in the State of Alabama, January 23 1967,” Civil Rights Movement Archive, https://www.crmvet.org/docs/670123_sclc_al_rpt.pdf.

^[35] Farmers now were “making $95 a ton where they used to make $60 a ton” on their cucumber crop, Turner reported. “OEO Funds Southwest Alabama Cooperative,” SNCC Digital Archive, https://snccdigital.org/events/oeo-funds-southwest-alabama-farmers-cooperative-association/; See also Bruce J. Reynolds, Black Farmers in America, 1865-2000: The Pursuit of Independent Farming and the Role of Cooperatives, Rural Business Service Research Report, United States Department of Agriculture, October 2002, https://www.rd.usda.gov/files/RR194.pdf; Hasan Kwame Jeffries, Bloody Lowndes: Civil Rights and Black Power in Alabama’s Black Belt (New York: New York University Press, 2009).

^[36] Vetoes and protestations were not the worst white supremacists could do, Turner knew. About a year before the trip, Turner led the “mule train” processional that carried slain Dr. King’s body through Atlanta to be laid to rest. Rosalind Bentley, “Atlanta’s 4-Mile Goodbye to King,” Atlanta Journal Constitution, April 1, 2018, https://specials.myajc.com/mlk-funeral/. See Ashmore, Carry it On.

[37] Decentralism is the notion that individual rights and liberties should be elevated and liberated from centralized structures like industry (especially joint stock corporations), the state, and society. He emphasized different ways of individuals economically relating and creating value, particularly in local and regional communities. See Ralph Borsodi, “A Decentralist Manifesto,” 1958; https://cooperative-individualism.org/borsodi-ralph_a-decentralist-manifesto-1958.htm.

^[38] This cast of characters ended up going together to Israel in 1968 due to relational and institutional networks, some decades old, of radicals–pacifists, ministers, civil rights organizers, and social reformers. Fay Bennett and Bob Swann had collaborated through the Independence Institute. Bennett and Leonard Smith worked for the National Sharecroppers Fund (NSF), which supported the SWAFCA, bringing them together with Albert Turner and Lewis Black. Turner and Smith were also together on the Advisory Board of the Southern Rural Research Project. “Southern Rural Research Project, First Annual Report, May, 1968,” Civil Rights Movement Archive, https://www.crmvet.org/docs/6805_srrp_rpt.pdf. Through the SCLC, Turner knew Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who in turn, was friends with Slater King, of the Albany Movement and Charles Sherrod, of SNCC. Sherrod and King were friends from the Movement in Georgia. Black, Turner, and Sherrod were all close acquaintances of John Lewis. Slater King first came into contact with Bob Swann through Koinonia Farm, an interracial Christian farming community founded in 1942 by Clarence and Florence Jordan. They were in the same pacifist communitarian circles, and Swann had chaired the Friends of Koinonia group in the mid-1950s. He knew King from their work to destroy segregation in Southwest Georgia. At different moments in the mid-1960s, Jordan invited both men to Koinonia, perhaps on occasion at the same time. Then, in 1965, Swann’s Committee on Nonviolent Action (CNVA) organized a protest march from Quebec to Guantanamo. They made it is as far as Albany, Georgia, where they were halted when local police arrested them, assuming them to be white civil rights workers. This incident brought Bob Swann in direct contact with Slater King. The men began a “close working relationship.” Swann, “Peace, Civil Rights, and the Search for Community,”, Chapter 19. In 1968, King collaborated with Erick Hansch, a “Swiss polymath retired electrician” who worked with Swann on land trusts and agricultural development. Mills, On Gandhi’s Path, 96-97. The circles were small, in some ways; the funding structures tend to overlap, as do the institutions and citations.

^[39] Leviticus 25:23; Theodor Herzl, The Jewish State (New York: Dover, 1988), https://www.gutenberg.org/files/25282/25282-h/25282-h.htm#The_Jewish_State.

[40] Slater King, Robert Swann and Gar Alperovitz, “Rural Development: Rich Land for Poor,” September 1968, The Schumacher Center for a New Economics, https://centerforneweconomics.org/publications/rural-development-rich-land-for-poor/.

^[41] See “Agricultural Cooperatives in Israel,” & Branches: A Gardener’s Guide to the Origins and Evolution of the Community Land Trust, accessed May 26, 2022, https Roots://cltroots.org/the-guide/foreign-born-pioneers-precedents/leased-land-cooperatives; Dan Leon, “The Jewish National Fund: How the Land was ‘Redeemed,’” Palestine-Israel Journal of Politics, Economics, and Culture 12/13, no. 4 (2005). The Aaron Norman Fund also supported the Southern Rural Research Project.

^[42] Fay Bennett, Report of Trip to Israel, Folder LR000393_02_054_058, Series II, National Sharecroppers Fund Collection (Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State University, Detroit); hereinafter cited as NSF Collection.

[43] Theodor Herzl, The Jewish State.

[44] Theodor Herzl, The Jewish State.

^[45] Fay Bennett, Report of Trip to Israel, NSF Collection.

[46] Since the 1880s, Jews emigrating to Palestine, securing land, and settling had represented a political goal for Zionists, one supported by the British government and private philanthropists. While Palestinian Arabs rejected this settlement as a movement, individuals nevertheless were willing to sell parcels of land. This began when Palestine was under the control of the Ottoman Empire and continued under the British Mandate following World War I, provoking more unified opposition from Palestinians which continued after the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948. (See: Kenneth W. Stein, ‘The Jewish National Fund: Land Purchase Methods and Priorities, 1924-1939’, Middle Eastern Studies, (April 1984), vol. 20, no. 4, pp.190-205; Kenneth W. Stein, The Land Question in Palestine, 1917-1939 (University of North Carolina Press, 1984); Anita Shapira, Land and Power: The Zionist Resort to Force 1881-1948, (Oxford University Press, 1992).

[47] As Clayborne Carson writes, “There is little evidence that anti-Jewish sentiments amongst Blacks increased substantially during the late 1960s.” Clayborne Carson, “Blacks and Jews in the Civil Rights Movement,” in Jews in Black Perspective: A Dialogue, ed. Joseph R. Washington, Jr. (London: Associated University Presses, 1984).

[48] Martin Luther King Jr. and the Student Christian Leadership Conference, “The Middle East Question,” September 1967, in King, “In a Single Garment of Destiny”: A Global Vision of Justice, ed. Lewis V. Baldwin (Boston: Beacon Press, 2012), 182-183.

[49] As Nathan Glazer has contended, the so-called “Grand Alliance” of Black and Jewish Americans pressing for civil rights did not fully fracture until the 1970s. SNCC, “The Middle East Crisis,” August 15, 1967,The Civil Rights Movement Archive, https://www.crmvet.org/docs/670815_sncc_palestine.pdf. Encouraging neutrality, SNCC worker Fred Meely said: “We Black people neither need [nor] deserve the wrath of Arab or Jew, for we are even denied access to this debate that may well affect the future of all mankind.” “The Chicken or the Egg of the Middle East,” Afraamerican News for You, July 1967 in Carson, “Blacks and Jews in the Civil Rights Movement,” 123. Just as H. Rap Brown and James Forman succeeded in SNCC adopting an anti-Israel policy, the organization disintegrated, for a brief moment “the only major black organization to take a stand against Israel in the Middle-East dispute.” Carson, Blacks and Jews in the Civil Rights Movement,”126. A more comprehensive exploration of the changes in the political, financial, and racial relationship between Black liberation movements and Jews in the late 1960s is an area ripe for new study.

^[50] Handwritten notes, Folder 25 005, Box 1, Slater King Papers (John Hope and Aurelia E. Franklin Library, Fisk University, Nashville; hereinafter cited as JHAF). There are several pages of unattributed, handwritten notes in this file, seemingly written by two different travelers. Years later, Slater King would make another statement revealing his overarching pragmatism regarding the JNF. In a panel describing land trusts he remarked, “if persons who are skilled in management and credit and have other expertise will give their assistant, much as they have done in Israel, where they’ve been very successful in lending this sort of thing to African countries, without attempting to impose very ideological concepts on them.” He seems to imply that common goals and resources can and should be shared and accepted despite known ideological differences, as long as they are not required. King, Swann, and Alperovitz, “Rural Development.”

^[51] Bennett, Report of Trip to Israel, NSF Collection.

^[52] Bennett, Report of Trip to Israel, NSF Collection.

^[53] Bennett, Report of Trip to Israel, NSF Collection.

^[54] Box 1, Folder 25 005, Slater King Papers (JHAF).

^[55] Handwritten notes, Box 1, Folder 25 005, Slater King Papers (JHAF).

[56] King, Swann, and Alperovitz, “Rural Development.”

[57] Box 1, Folder 25 005, Slater King Papers (JHAF).

^[58] See also Amanda Andrews, “Children of Civil Rights Activist Seek Justice Decades Later,” Georgia Public Broadcasting, September 15, 2021, https://www.gpb.org/news/2021/09/15/children-of-civil-rights-activist-seek-justice-decades-later.

[59] Box 1, Folder 25 005, Slater King Papers (JHAF).

^[60] Box 1, Folder 25 005, Slater King Papers (JHAF).

^[61] Author’s Interview with Jonathan King, June 7, 2022. Interestingly, this conversation seems to have inspired her to convert to the Bahai faith later in life after Slater’s death.

^[62] Box 1, Folder 25 005, Slater King Papers (JHAF)

^[63] Bennett, Report of Trip to Israel, NSF Collection.

^[64] Fay Bennett, “Report to Aaron E. Norman Fund on Israeli Trip to Study Rural and Economic Development,” July 1968, Schumacher Center for a New Economics, https://centerforneweconomics.org/publications/report-to-aaron-e-norman-fund-on-israeli-trip-to-study-rural-and-economic-development/.

[65] Bennett, “Report to Aaron E. Norman Fund.” There was still some ambiguity about the particulars. As Slater King said in September 1968, “I’m not addicted to, I mean, any one program that I’d have to have, but anyone that is able to give poor people land where they can not be run off as easily to help make the sort of decisions in their community that they should be able to make in reference to control over their lives, I’m for that system. So as to the specifics of how that is worked out, I cannot say exactly.” King, Swann, and Alperovitz, “Rural Development.”

^[66] Bob Swann (Leonard Smith copied) to Harlan Joye, June 4, 1970, NSF Collection

^[67] The full list of leaders and stakeholders includes Paul Anthony, Randolph Blackwell, Clay L. Cochran, William Channell, Donald A. Jelinek, C. B. King, Robert Mantz, James Mays, the Rev. A. J. McKnight, C.S.P., Al Ulmer, and Marian E. Wright. Bennett, “Report to Aaron E. Norman Fund.”

^[68] Bob Swann (Leonard Smith copied) to Harlan Joye, June 4, 1970, NSF Collection.

^[69] Bennett, “Report to Aaron E. Norman Fund.”

^[70] Bob Swann (Leonard Smith copied) to Harlan Joye, June 4, 1970, NSF Collection.

^[71] Shimon Gottschalk, “Planning for a Rural New-Town in Southwest Georgia: A preliminary Prospectus, March 1969, The Florence Heller Graduate School for Advanced Studies in Social Welfare, Brandeis University, Series II, Folder LR000393_02_054_051, NSF Collection.

[72] Shimon S. Gottschalk, “Planning Radical Change at the Grass Roots: The Story of New Communities Inc.,” Journal of Sociology and Social Welfare4, no. 7 (1977): 986, http://doi.org/10.15453/0191-5096.1216.

[73] Susannah Patton, “A Path to Independence: Shirley Sherrod on Racial Justice and the Value of Land,” Enterprise, April 22, 2024, https://www.enterprisecommunity.org/blog/path-independence-shirley-sherrod-racial-justice-and-value-land.

[74] Gottschalk, “Planning Radical Change,” 986.

^[75] Memo to Fay Bennett from Leonard Smith, Slater King, and Charles Sherrod, November 1, 1968, Folder LR000393_02_056_003, Series II, NSF Collection.

^[76] Leonard Smith to Fay Bennett, December 11, 1968, Folder LR000393_02_056_003, Series II, NSF Collection.

^[77] “New Communities: An Introduction” September 4, 1970; Farm Summary, Oct 1971, Folder: LR000393_02_055_037, NSF Collection.

^[78] Debbie Elliott, “5 Decades Later, New Communities Land Trust Still Helps Black Farmers,” Morning Edition, NPR, October 3, 2019, https://www.npr.org/2019/10/03/766706906/5-decades-later-communities-land-trust-still-helps-black-farmers.

^[79] Mills, On Gandhi’s Path, 98-99.

^[80] Fay Bennett to Charles Sherrod, September 15, 1969, Folder: LR000393_02_056_010, NSF Collection.

^[81] Leonard and Marion may have actually first met on the trip to Israel.

^[82] Keith S. Hébert, “Albert Turner Sr.,” The Civil Rights Movement, Encyclopedia of Alabama, September 17, 2021, http://www.encyclopediaofalabama.org/article/h-4288.

[83] Gottschalk, “Planning Radical Change” 987.

[84] Gottschalk, “Planning Radical Change” 987.

^[85] Arc of Justice: The Rise, Fall and Rebirth of a Beloved Community, directed by Hilary S. Cohen and Mark Lipman (Open Studio Productions, 2016).

^[86] Shirley Sherrod with Catherine Whitney, Courage to Hope: How I Stood Up to the Politics of Fear (New York: Atria Books, 2012), 93.

[87] Mills, On Gandhi’s Path, 100,16.

^[88] Sherrod, Courage to Hope, 122-123.

^[89] Tullos, “Rebel with a Cause,” 24-26.