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This chapter analyses the theoretical and applied contributions to Black agriculture of three influential African American intellectuals of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Booker T. Washington built institutions, developed agricultural extension services, and organized conferences for Black farmers. George Washington Carver produced, systematized, and disseminated scientific agricultural knowledge. W. E. B. Du Bois focused on strengthening Black communities by advocating agricultural cooperatives as an economic and political strategy. While the three had different – and sometimes controversial – approaches, all saw agriculture as a strategy of resistance and community building. Through a historical analysis of these thinkers’ ideas about Black agriculture, this chapter offers fresh perspectives on classical African American intellectual traditions. This history challenges contemporary ideas that community agriculture is new, unearthing Black intellectual contributions to current conversations about sustainable, organic, and local food, as well as food security and food sovereignty. In doing so, it offers a historical precedent and framework for contemporary food justice movements for enacting the connection between agriculture and freedom.

Chapter 3 examines the most important institution that Weatherford guided in his life, the Blue Ridge Assembly (a YMCA summer conference center in Black Mountain, N.C.) and the efforts he made there to improve race relations. Under Weatherford’s guidance in the 1910s and 1920s, the facility hosted African American speakers (among them George Washington Carver, Mary McLeod Bethune, and Robert Russa Moton) and students. These guests always endured some form of segregation during their stays, but their presence and interaction with whites are notable because such events were extremely rare at the time. Indeed, up until 1930 Blue Ridge was one of the few places in the South where such visits could occur and where the topic of race could be discussed. This chapter looks closely at the context of the South at the time, the limits to the programs at Blue Ridge, and why Weatherford did not push harder against segregation. It also illuminates the influence of this institution on a growing number of white liberals of the next era and how this place sowed the seeds of their activism. Finally, it explores the changing procedures Weatherford and Blue Ridge employed in handling racial issues.

This chapter gives a case study of Booker T. Washington’s turn of the twentieth-century attempts to transform the African American diet. He micromanaged the dining plan for students and teachers at the Tuskegee Institute, advocating for their right to consume beef and wheat, high-status food items that served as symbols of Americanization. Washington also encouraged the cultivation of performatively middle-class food practices both for the benefit of observers intent on gauging the status of black acculturation as well as for the private benefit of his students, whose bodies he hoped these foods would benefit. Washington drew inspiration from white domestic scientists and the latest nutritional information of his day, but he subsumed the importance of following conventional dietary wisdom to the importance of black self-sufficiency.

“Imagination,” a word evidently central to the vocation and sensibility of English Romantic poets, is likewise invoked often as a defining term in American literary history. But what are the theological implications of this crucial category, beginning with Coleridge’s seminal statements about it? How might the human faculty of imagination—often but doubtfully associated with an abstractly ethereal quality of mind—bear upon concrete facts of the world humans experience? And how, in the light of philosophic perspectives, together with Wendell Berry’s provocative reflections on “imagination in place,” might Imagination be understood as integral with the phenomenology of place? Such questions are addressed here by means of themes bearing on the Earthiness of Imagination, the Contemplative Reach of Imagination, and Numinous Layers of Place as Palimpsest. Literary texts analyzed to develop these themes include Whitman’s verse and works by two contemporary writers—poet Marilyn Nelson and novelist Alfred Véa.

This chapter details aspects of Fisk University, Stillman Institute, and Tuskegee Institute that Althea Brown and Alonzo Edmiston adapted for religious education from 1918 to 1919. It analyzes each missionary’s experiences at one of these campuses between 1892 and 1904 to show the academic roots of their perspectives on art, folklore, finance, local politics, and sustainable agriculture. Details of the consequences of colonial taxation and forced labor help explain why the Edmistons’ plans for the Luebo Agricultural College failed the following year. Descriptions of the student body suggest that the legacy of the college reflected its balance of classical and industrial education even when its agricultural goals went unmet.