Major funding for backstory is provided by an anonymous donor, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation.

From Virginia Humanities, this is backstory.

Welcome to backstory, the show that explains the history behind today's headlines. I'm Joanne Freeman.

I'm Nathan Connolly.

And I'm Ed Ayers.

If you're new to the podcast, we're all historians, along with our colleague, Ryan Bello, and each week we explore a different topic in American history.

Today, we'll talk about plantations and how these spaces engage with the past. And we're going to start in southwest Georgia, where Shirley Sherrod has worked for 50 years to create a sustainable community for African American farmers.

I've been telling farmers for years. You can't make it out there on your farm by yourself anymore. You've got to work with your brothers and sisters in the area.

Sherrod's a co-founder of an organization called New Communities in Albany, Georgia. She helped assemble the collective of Black farmers back in the late 1960s.

At the time, she was organizing for the Civil Rights Movement, and she started to notice a pattern.

What we realized as we were encouraging people to register to vote, many of those individuals who were living on land owned by white people would be asked to leave.

There were so many individuals who were at the mercy of the farmers who employed them. So we could have a mass meeting and have a family show up.

Sand they've been asked to leave the farm, and we would have to work to try to find places for them to go. So that's what prompted the whole idea of trying to create a community.

Once New Communities got rolling, there was some immediate intense pushback from white landowners in the area.

Those early meetings sometimes shots would be fired at the building, sometimes with some of us in them.

Despite this hostility, Sherrod and New Communities thrived in the 1970s. They grew peanuts, corn, soybeans, and sold cure meats like ham and sausage.

We had a major operation there where we could sell products while we were also growing peanuts and other crops.

But we experienced routes in the latter part of the 70s. We tried to apply for an emergency loan like all farmers were doing.

And when we went to the local office, the guy said, you'll get a loan here over my dead body.

The group eventually faced foreclosure and lost their land in 1985.

Years went by and Sherrod worked for other agricultural groups in the region. But in the late 1990s, she received word of a class action lawsuit against the USDA.

It was called Pigford V. Glickman. The plaintiffs were black farmers who were denied loans from the USDA because of racial discrimination.

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