Red Emma’s

Find out more, including a peek at the Table of Contents and the Introduction by Food First ED Eric Holt-Giménez: https://foodfirst.org/land-justice-re-imagining-land-food-and-the-commons/About the Panelists:

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Tracy Lloyd McCurty is a mother, activist, and attorney committed to advancing the resistance strategies of Southern Black Agrarians to ensure collective rise and liberation.  With over fifteen years of experience working on a range of legal issues disparately impacting the Global African community, Tracy's most cherished work has been in service of multigenerational African American farm families and cooperatives living on the land in the rural South. Tracy is the Co-Founder and Executive Director of the Black Belt Justice Center, a legal nonprofit dedicated to the preservation and regeneration of African American farmlands and land-based livelihoods through effective legal representation, advocacy, and community education.  Tracy's work to protect the Black family land commons is inspired by the liberatory imaginations of her great, great grandmother, the Combahee River Colony, the Freedom Quilting Bee, and the Emergency Land Fund.  Owusu Bandele, PhD is professor emeritus at the Southern University Agricultural Research and Extension Center (SUAREC) and co-founder of the Southeastern African American Farmers Organic Network  (SAAFON) along with the late Cynthia Hayes. Dr. Bandele has conducted organic production workshops throughout the Southeast and the Caribbean. Through his work with SAAFON and SUAREC he has provided organic training that led to organic certification of over 40 farmers in the Southeas, most of whom were African Americans. During the 1990s, Bandele and his wife, Efuru, established the Food For Thought Farm in Louisiana, a certified organic operation. Bandele has also served on the National Organic Standards Board. He is a native of Baltimore, and during the 1970s, the Bandeles established and provided leadership for the Timbuktu Cultural/Educational Center.here in Baltimore.Richael Faithful (they/them/theirs) is a multi-disciplinary folk healer and spiritual activist rooted in the Black tradition of conjure.

Faithful supports national and local activists of all backgrounds, particularly leaders in the Movement for Black Lives. They are known for creating spaces to help activist identify and process trauma and invest into healing justice movements.

Their work has been featured in national publications, including in Colorlines, The Root, Everyday Feminism, Huff Post, among others. They also publish their own words in several books and law review articles.

Before formal shamanic initiation, Richael was a healing-oriented community organizer and peoples’ lawyer.Kirtrina M. Baxter, M.A. is a dedicated mother, drummer, urban farmer, food justice activist and community organizer. As an Afroecologist, she has a passion for preserving & creating cultural agrarian traditions through art, cooking & nutrition, growing food, seedkeeping, and collective organizing. Kirtrina is currently the community organizer for the Garden Justice Legal Initiative–a program of the Public Interest Law Center of Philadelphia. She works with gardeners around the city, assisting them in gaining access to land and other resources. In this capacity, she also organizes Soil Generation, a diverse body of urban agriculture advocates, environmental & food justice activists who work within a racial and economic justice framework to help inform policy and provide community education and support to gardeners in the city.

Though certified in permaculture, Kirtrina identifies with agroecology as a more politically informed way to practice her land work.Before moving back to Philadelphia in 2012, Kirtrina co-founded the Ithaca Youth Farm Project, and the Congo Square Market in Ithaca, NY. She is currently the farm manager and a board member at Urban Creators, a board member of Mill Creek Farm, a member of the Black Dirt Farm Collective, The Seedkeepers Collective, and the National Black Food and Justice Alliance. In 2008, she received her M.A from Union Institute and University in Cultural Studies.Blain Snipstal co-manages Black Dirt Farm, a small-scale ecological vegetable, seed keeping, and livestock farm. He is part of the Black Dirt Farm Collective, which is the organizing body that facilitates agroecological, political, and cultural trainings at Black Dirt Farm and throughout the Chesapeake Bay region. Black Dirt Farm is also a member of the Seed Keepers Collective, which is a regional collective of farmers and activists of color focused on keeping heritage and traditional seed varieties and their stories alive. In 2013, he began to support various organizations and community groups as an agroecological technician throughout the country. In 2015, he was part of the political coordination that organized the first campesino-a-campesino agroecology encounter hosted by the Farmworkers Association of Florida and the Rural Coalition in Florida. Between 2012 and 2015, representing the Rural Coalition, he was part of the international youth collective of La Via Campesina.