Date Time
Seminar to explore racial and food justice movements in New York
In the late 1960s, activist Fannie Lou Hamer purchased forty acres of land in the Mississippi Delta, launching the Freedom Farm Cooperative. Now, local community organizations, activists, students and researchers will meet April 19 to delve into the historical significance of the movement and spur conversations around the contemporary resurgence of food justice and sovereignty movements in rural and urban spaces.
The seminar, “A Pig and a Garden: Fannie Lou Hamer, Agricultural Cooperatives and the Black Freedom Movement,” will be led by Monica White, associate professor of environmental justice at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In her talk, White will expand on the historical narrative of the Black freedom struggle to embrace the work, roles and contributions of southern Black farmers and the organizations and cooperatives that they formed.
February 11, 2021
Carolyn Finney, author of “Black Faces White Spaces: Reimagining the Relationship of African Americans to the Great Outdoors,” and scholar-in-residence at the Franklin Environmental Center at Middlebury College, will give a lecture about her nationally recognized work to increase awareness of how privilege shapes who gets to inform and determine policy and action on environmental issues.
Finney is giving the Class of 1945 Lecture, part of the Cornell Botanic Gardens Lecture Series. Her talk will explore this moment of racial reckoning and the creative responses to environmental and social challenges that are emerging.
It is offered in partnership with Ithaca Children’s Garden, The Learning Farm, U.S. Fish and Wildlife, and the Finger Lakes Land Trust, and takes place virtually on Thursday, February 25, 2021, at 6 p.m. It is free and open to the public on Zoom; pre-registration required.