In the United States, there is a growing number of black activists and congregations organizing for food sovereignty. What motivates them is a shared belief that food sovereignty, and by extension the control of land, is a precondition of futures free of anti-black racism. Said another way, they cannot conceptualize the beloved community without food sovereignty and land tenure.

Unfortunately, African American Christian ethics has been slow to engage food sovereignty and land tenure when theorizing a just society. Consequently, the food scarcity threatening black communities continues to go unaddressed by religious scholars. Moreover, the absence of food and land in black ethical discourse has confined our religious and political hopes. Thus, this dissertation aims to reintroduce food sovereignty into the black Christian imagination by retelling the narratives of black agrarian movements, retracing the symbolic and material importance of land, and by employing ethnographic research. This project will foreground the relationship between food, black suffering, land tenure and freedom within black ethical discourse.

Using anti-black racism and womanist ethics as theoretical interlocutors, this project investigates three case studies – two past, one present – to trouble the norms that motivate black Americans’ social, religious, and political practices. These cases are Fannie Lou Hamer’s Freedom Farm Cooperative, the Republic of New Africa, and the Black Church Food Security Network in Baltimore, MD. These cases demonstrate the ways African Americans have reclaimed the importance of land, and how that reclamation has translated into various forms of political engagement, community building, and the construction of particularized moral ecologies. Lastly, this project aims to construct a black ethic of land that guides and encourages black churches to embrace food sovereignty as a mundane and ordinary practice of Christian faith.