Deepening Roots: Black Feminist Ecological Practices in the Civil Rights Era, 1940-1990
Date of Award
Fall 2022
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
African American Studies
First Advisor
Feimster, Crystal
Abstract
Abstract Deepening Roots: Black Feminist Ecological Practices in the Civil Rights Era, 1940-1990 Teona Mercedes Williams 2022 “Deepening Roots: Black Feminist Ecological Practices in the Civil Rights Era, 1940-1990,” foregrounds the histories of rural Black women in the twentieth century to challenge how we currently understand histories and activisms of Black Power, environmental justice, and Black feminism movements as discrete, mutually exclusive movements. One of the first in-depth studies of Black women’s environmental history, this dissertation argues that Black women challenged racial and sexual violence by building community gardens and land cooperatives, as well as deepening their practice of afro-botany to alleviate poverty, malnutrition, and hunger in their communities. Rural women’s ecological ideologies and practices would go on to shape the emergence of Black feminist thought in the 1970s and beyond. Black geographies, Black women’s history, and the environmental humanities through the method of rival geographies form the intellectual base of this research. This multidisciplinary approach underscores how Black women’s insurgent land uses provided counter models to landscapes of white supremacy in the Mississippi Delta. Drawing on archival documents from the National Council of Negro Women, Fannie Lou Hamer’s papers, June Jordan’s writings, and government documents from the U.S Department of Agriculture, this dissertation follows a network of rural Black women who levied critiques against industrial agriculture, environmental racism, and gender-based violence. My investment in Black feminist historiography is concerned with liberation, healing, and care amid structures of violence, white supremacy, ecological destruction, and patriarchy, which opens opportunities to understand and explain how government agencies sought to define – and often violate – Black womanhood through their reproductive, domestic, and productive labor capacities. Nonetheless, rural Black women's long engagement with the land, through both farming and gardening, nurtured a Black feminist ecological praxis that offered a powerful alternative to these violent structural forces. In the process, it uncovers and explores an intellectual plumb line from Fannie Lou Hamer to and through June Jordan to consider the roots and the fruits of community mutual aid.
Recommended Citation
Williams, Teona, "Deepening Roots: Black Feminist Ecological Practices in the Civil Rights Era, 1940-1990" (2022). Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations. 777.
https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/gsas_dissertations/777
