Jubilee Justice: Working Where Land, Race, Money and Spirit Connect
What do race, climate justice, generational wealth and rice have in common? Just about everything, according to Konda Mason, founder and president of nonprofit Jubilee Justice.
“I come from a lot of love and a lot of activism,” says Mason. “I believe activism is a form of love, of loving something so much you can't stand seeing it hurting, so you jump in to do something about it.”
Photo @Jubilee Justice
That’s exactly what Mason is doing with Jubilee Justice, an organization that aims to seed rural justice and to end rural racism. Black farmers live and work on the front lines of the climate crisis—and also bear the brunt of racial inequalities stemming from the past and continuing in the present. Mason and her team are working to heal and transform the wounds suffered by the people and the land through reparative genealogy and regenerative agriculture.
As a child Mason would visit her grandparents small farm. Even then she recognized the significance that piece of land had for her family. Mason says, “Honestly, we were food secure because of that farm. My grandparents and parents went together to buy seeds and to buy livestock and to keep everything going, and we all survived around that.”
And she never forgot that, she wanted to be a farmer when she grew up. No matter where she lived, she tried to have a garden, to grow food, eventually also earning a certificate in permaculture. So when Mason found herself in a moment of transition, having passed the company she’d been building to someone else, a new food- and farming-focused program was a natural next step.
“The seeds literally and figuratively were planted from the very beginning,” Mason says.
Rural areas: the forgotten front lines
With the ubiquity of smartphones and social media, viral videos can drive our perception of what racism looks like and where it’s prevalent.
“The kinds of injustice that happen in urban America are seen by everybody,” Mason says, pointing to George Floyd’s death in Minneapolis, recorded on a phone. “Within seconds you get a video and it goes viral and everybody knows.”
Meanwhile, in less populated areas, those kinds of events can go unrecorded and often fly more under the radar, Mason says, allowing them to be even more widespread. She continued, “So our hope with the work that we do is to shine a light on it and to do our part, just our little part to make a difference—and to bring about a little justice for black farmers.”
In the 20th century, Black farmers in the United States lost roughly 90% of their farmland—$326 billion worth of acreage, according to the first study to quantify the present-day value of that loss.
“Imagine over 200 years of enslavement in this country, generation after generation of being enslaved. You're free, but you have nothing. No ownership. What do you do? How do you even get started?” asks Mason.
She says in order for Black farmers to move forward they had to come together. After the Civil War, and by 1910, Black farmers amassed more than 16 million acres; by 1920, they’d acquired more than 20 million. Mason says, “They were the farmers of America. They fed America.”
So how, after building up more than 20 million acres of farmland, have Black farmers lost more than 90% of it?
“What happened was a systematic collusion to take the land from these people, to take their land and they did it in so many different ways,” says Mason.
According to the American Bar Association, “In addition to theft by state-sanctioned violence, intimidation, and lynching, Black farmers also lost land due to discrimination by banks and financial institutions; through the denial of access to federal farm benefits by local administrators who funneled those benefits to white farm owners; through forced partition sales brought about by predatory third parties; through government misuse of eminent domain, including many cases in which Black landowners were compensated well below market value; through discriminatory tax assessments and non-competitive tax sales; and through longstanding, coordinated discrimination by U.S. Department of Agriculture agents who wield power and control over access to credit and essential resources.”
“If you want to know about what happened economically to Black people in America, you have to know about black land loss because that was the generational wealth that has been taken,” says Mason. “Still to this day, 30,000 acres a year are being confiscated from Black folk, so we are here to try to close that gap. It has everything to do with our mission.”
This history is what brought Mason and Jubilee Justice to the Black Farmers’ Rice Project.
Photo @Jubilee Justice
Why rice?
“The African people in their homelands were farmers, ingenious farmers, particularly rice. Because they were intentionally targeted as Europeans came to West Africa and saw the systems of rice being done in the highlands, the lowlands, the wetlands, the dry lands,” says Mason. “They knew that they needed it to feed this new world. Rice is what fueled the economy before cotton.”
At a women’s conference, Mason connected with her friend, Caryl Levine, the co-founder of Lotus Foods. Levine shared that she and her husband, fellow co-founder, Ken Lee, were working to establish a supply chain of rice from U.S. producers, utilizing the System of Rice Intensification (SRI), a process that uses fewer resources to produce increased yields.
“When she said that I immediately said, ‘What about black farmers?’” says Mason. “What if you chose Black farmers to be at the forefront of an innovation that needs to happen for the world, as opposed to, typically, being at the back end of anything new and good?”
Levine loved the idea, and that conversation served as the catalyst for the Black Farmers’ Rice Project.
Levine and Lee had access to the technical assistance they needed, through Cornell University’s SRI International Network and Resources Center, and Mason thought of a recent conversation she’d had with attorney and nonprofit founder Jillian Hishaw. She knew through Hishaw—one of the most trusted advocates for Black farmers—that she could create a pipeline of farmers for this project.
The final puzzle piece fell into place when Elisabeth Keller offered her family’s former 3,600-acre plantation in Alexandria, La., for the project. Mason says, “She had been praying to heal the harm that had happened on that land.”
Now here was an opportunity to make right by people, too.
“Community is at the core of our soul, really,” says Mason, who lives on the plantation and has now gathered a cohort of farmers in Louisiana, Mississippi, Georgia, North Carolina and South Carolina. “How we treat each other is at the core. That is why as we treat each other better, we're going to treat this planet better.”
Photo @Jubilee Justice
The climate-community connection
SRI can be beneficial in and of itself—its no-till regenerative approach uses fewer resources while producing better yields. But those improved yields and the connection to a specialty market are important pieces to redistributing wealth and ownership where systemic harm and age-old discriminatory practices have been the rule for Black farmers in the past. At the same time, sustainable farming methods are a tool for fighting the climate crisis.
“One is impacted by the other,” says Mason. “There's not a climate issue that does not have a social-injustice issue connected to it. What we're doing is right in the center of both those extreme crises that we're in today. We're just trying to do our little bitty part to address it.”
For Jubilee Justice, that means providing integrated capital financing of below market loans, grants, recoverable grants, technical assistance and social capital to BIPOC farmers through the sister organization, Potlikker Capital, Mason co-founded with Mark Watson.
As an agriculturally centered endeavor, it’s inherently slow to evolve, progressing season by season. But this year, an exciting step was taken with the opening of the Jubilee Justice Specialty Foods and Rice Mill. For farmers who’ve historically been marginalized and discriminated against, taking out the “middle man” in the production process gives them even more ownership over the process. Organized as a co-op, the farmers will now be vertically integrated from seed to market.
“Everybody's waiting for the rice,” she says. For Mason, that has been the most exciting step so far—but it’s just a step to the next one, and she’s already on to it.
Mason says she loves connecting to and communicating with supporters—and points people to info@JubileeJustice.org for more about the Black Farmers’ Rice Project and Jubilee Justice.
Photo @Jubilee Justice