Sandra Hall Cummings is the great-granddaughter of Anna Charleston. Charleston was born a slave in 1861 but accumulated 335 acres of land outside of Madison, Ga., before her death. Much of the land is still owned by Cummings and other descendants of Charleston.
Amadou Diop is an outreach liaison with the U.S. Forest Service, in Atlanta. Originally from Senegal, Diop now travels across the Southeast United States helping to build trust and give technical assistance on forestry issues, especially focusing on limited-resource and historically underserved communities. The Forest Service is an agency of the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
Dee Dotson was born in 1923 and has farmed the same property near Louisville, Miss., for 51 years. Dotson is known within his community as a valuable source of fresh produce. “His customers call him [and sometimes] harvest directly from his garden,” says Frank Taylor, Dotson’s nephew.
Evan Milligan is a law fellow at the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, Ala. He stands before a wall of jars filled with soil from Alabama lynching sites — part of EJI’s Community Remembrance Project. Many of those lynched were farmers. Milligan works to help overturn convictions of minors and advocate for the poor.
Shirley Sherrod was born in Baker County, Ga., in 1948. Sherrod wanted to leave the South, but after her father’s murder by a white farmer in 1965 she stayed to fight for the rights of disenfranchised black farmers. She is executive director of the Southwest Georgia Project for Community Education Inc. and co-founder of the New Communities land trust, near Albany.
Frank Taylor is a fifth-generation farmer in Mississippi. Taylor is president of the Winston County Self Help Cooperative, based in Louisville, Miss. He grows timber and hopes his children take over once he retires. “This is already in the plans for my oldest daughter to inherit this…,” Taylor says. “When I come back 200 years later, it better be in our family.”
Gwen Jones West co-owns a farm in Statesboro, Ga., with her cousin Sandra Hall Cummings. After tumultuous experiences keeping the land in their family, Jones West now teaches younger people about the importance of property retention. “For us to be able to continue to hold onto the land that has passed down through generations is significant,” she says. “We have to talk to this new generation about generational wealth and growth.”