Freedom Farm Cooperative (Rulesville, Miss.)

Freedom Farm Cooperative was an agricultural cooperative in Sunflower County, Mississippi, founded by American civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer in 1969 as a rural economic development and political organizing project. With a farm and a pig-raising program as well as an affordable housing development and financing, and a host of supplemental programs, the Freedom Farm Cooperative sought to create the conditions of self-sufficiency for African American farmers that alleviated poverty and remove the economic precarity white landowners used to prevent African American farmers from exercising in the political rights. Hamer founded the project after she was fired and evicted, leaving her penniless, for registering to vote in 1962.