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 ...

n the Jim Crow era, the United States Department of Agriculture imposed a variety of policies that caused African American farmers to lose farmland as well as systematically rejected their loan applications to buy land.[1] This (among other federal government policies that disadvantaged African Americans) forced many into sharecropping or other low-wage jobs, or to leave the area altogether, moving north or west in search of job opportunities.[1] In the Mississippi Delta where Fannie Lou Hamer founded her project, African American farmers lost approximately 12 million acres of land, including six million between 1950 and 1964, shortly before Hamer launched her effort.[1]