Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
Welcome to Roots of the CLT, Chapter Three.
I'm John Davis, the producer and narrator for this presentation, commissioned by the
National CLT Network.
Previously, we examined key characteristics of the "classic" CLT and traced the history
behind the model's unique approach to ownership.
In Chapter Three, we're going to look at the history behind the next cluster of characteristics,
those related to the way a CLT is structured, organizationally.
There are three organizational characteristics that allow us to call a leased-land arrangement
a community land trust. They were introduced in Chapter One. Here they are again.
The people who did the most to add these organizational elements are pictured here. I'm going to
talk about who they were and how they influenced one another, working together in the 1960s
to lay the foundation for the modern-day CLT.
Bob Swann was probably the first to recognize that what was lacking in the land trusts pioneered
by Borsodi and others was an open membership. A land trust could be made stronger, he believed,
by involving more people in guiding and governing the organization, a group much larger than
the leaseholders living on a CLT's land.
As a young man, Swann was introduced to Bayard Rustin, then the Youth Secretary for the Fellowship
of Reconciliation. Rustin was later to become one of the most influential leaders and strategists
of the Civil Rights Movement. The 1963 March on Washington was Rustin's idea -- and
he served as its main organizer.
Under the influence of Rustin, Swann made a fateful decision while auditing courses
at the University of Ohio. He would resist induction into the armed forces. In 1942,
he was sentenced to five years in prison.
While in prison, Swann took a correspondence course about the small community. He was exposed
to the writings of Lewis Mumford and Ralph Borsodi, both of whom influenced his later
thinking. But the book that most impressed him was one written by the person who had
created the course he was taking: Arthur Morgan. After his time at TVA, Morgan had returned
to Ohio and started Community Service, Inc. to spread his ideas about decentralized economic
development. Swann began writing to Morgan while still in prison. Two years after his
release, he was offered a job at CSI. So he moved with his young family to Yellow Springs.
Bob soon realized, however, that the job promised by Morgan was office work, which didn't
interest him. He began building houses instead, earning his living as an itinerant carpenter
and small house designer.
A series of construction jobs sent the Swann family to Kalamazoo, Chicago, and Philadelphia.
Around 1960, they finally settled in Voluntown, Connecticut.
Both Bob and his wife, Marjorie, had become deeply involved with Peacemakers and the Committee
for Non-Violent Action, two of the first groups to use civil disobedience in opposing the
build-up of America's nuclear arsenal. Climbing the fence at a missile site outside of Omaha,
where Marj was arrested in 1959, was a typical action. The Swanns moved to Voluntown, in
part, so they could staff CNVA, organizing regular protests in nearby New London, where
the first submarines armed with nuclear weapons were being assembled.
In the fall of 1962, Bob traveled to Mississippi to supervise a Quaker-sponsored construction
crew re-building black churches that had been firebombed by southern racists.
During his time in the South, Swann came to realize that part of the oppression and insecurity
of African Americans was due to their limited access to land. He also heard that many black
farmers were being forced off the land in retaliation for registering to vote.
Swann's ruminations about the "land question" became more focused in 1965, when a friend
introduced him to Ralph Borsodi, who had just returned to the US after four years in India.
Swann was familiar with Borsodi's writings, which he had read in prison, and he had friends
at Bryn Gweled, the leased-land community inspired by Borsodi's School of Living.
But he had never met Borsodi in person.
Swann and Borsodi found that they shared many interests, especially a mutual admiration
for the work of Vinoba Bhave, the "Walking Saint of India."
After Gandhi's assassination in 1948, political leadership of his movement fell to Nehru.
Spiritual leadership fell to Vinoba Bhava.
Gandhi had spoken of the need for a "constructive program" to follow India's independence
from Britain. He had envisioned a decentralized economy, based on autonomous, self-reliant
villages. He had extolled the principle of "trusteeship," asserting that land and
other assets that individuals possessed beyond what they personally needed should be shared
with all, especially India's lower castes and rural poor.
Vinoba Bhave made Gandhi's vision his own. To call attention to the plight of the poor,
he began walking across India, asking rich landowners to donate some of their holdings.
Hundreds complied. The Land Gift program -- the "Boodan Movement" -- was born. At its
height, Bhave and his followers were collecting thousands of acreas every week and conveying
title to impoverished individuals. By 1954, 3 million acres had been re-distributed.
But many poor families quickly lost the small plots they had been given. Seeing this, Bhave
changed course. He now insisted that any gifts of land be donated to a local village trust,
which would lease the land to farmers. The Land Gift program became the Village Gift
program -- the "Gramdan Movement."
By the time Borsodi returned to America, more than 160,000 Gramdan villages had been established.
What Borsodi saw in the Gramdan Movement was an affirmation of his own ideas about rebuilding
rural economies on the basis of self-sufficient villages. Settling in Exeter, New Hampshire,
he created a new nonprofit to promote this model in other countries, including his own.
He appointed himself executive director and chairman of the board. Bob Swann was named
the Institute's "field director," with responsibility for making Gramdan a reality
in the United States.
Over the next 20 years, the Institute regularly changed its logo, location, and eventually
its name. In 1972, it moved to Boston and became the Institute for Community Economics.
All this talk about creating a "Gramdan Movement in America" remained fairly abstract,
however, until Swann began working with two brothers in Albany, Georgia.
C.B. King and Slater King were leaders of the Albany Movement, a campaign to eradicate
segregation in their corner of the South. The white city council vowed this would never
happen. The library was closed rather than to allow blacks to check out books. Nets were
cut off tennis courts rather than allow blacks to play. Protest marches resulted in mass
jailings. When Martin Luther King and Ralph Abernathy were invited to town by the Albany
Movement, they were tossed in jail as well.
The attorney to whom most of the jailed protesters turned was C.B. King. He was one of only three
African-American lawyers in the entire state at the time -- and the only one practicing
law in southwest Georgia.
When Albany's jails overflowed, hundreds of protesters were sent to jails in the surrounding
counties, where rural deputies were more likely to abuse black inmates. C.B. himself was assaulted
when visiting one of his clients.
His younger brother was the owner of a local business, selling real estate and insurance.
Slater King was elected vice president of the Albany Movement in 1961 and two years
later became the president: leading marches, convening mass meetings, and attempting to
negotiate with a recalcitrant city council.
This was not without risk to himself and his family. Slater King's wife, Marion, joined
other wives in bringing supplies to protesters who had been bussed to jails outside of Albany.
While visiting those jailed in the town of Camilla, she was beaten to the ground by two
policemen. She was six months pregnant at the time -- and lost her unborn baby.
Another key figure in the Albany struggle was Charles Sherrod, an organizer for the
Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, SNCC. He and his SNCC comrade, Cordell Reagon,
were the young Turks, nipping at the heels of their elders, constantly urging more militant
action. They stirred up the college students at Albany State. They occupied the whites-only
waiting room at the bus station. They trudged through the countryside, knocking on the doors
of farmers, migrants, and sharecroppers, doing voter registration.
Sherrod moved to Albany in 1961 and never left. Long after the Albany Movement had ebbed,
he kept doing grassroots organizing against segregated schools, segregated housing, and
other vestiges of Jim Crow. His work was supported by SNCC and, later, by the Southwest Georgia
Project, an organization that he founded and staffed along with his wife, Shirley.
Charles Sherrod experienced first-hand what Bob Swann had only heard rumors about, African-American
families being kicked out of their homes and losing their jobs because they had registered
to vote or raised their voices against segregation. He came to believe that owning land was one
of the only ways that African-Americans in the South would ever have the economic security
to demand their rights without harming their families.
The president of the Albany Movement gradually came to the same conclusion -- perhaps on
his own; perhaps through the prodding of Sherrod; or perhaps through his unlikely friendship
with Bob Swann.
I say "unlikely" because here was a black, college-educated businessman in the Deep South
and a white, self-educated homebuilder from the Midwest, forming a partnership -- and
becoming friends -- during a very turbulent time, while both were grappling with the same
question that Gandhi had posed: "What comes after all the marching and protests?
The bond of trust that quickly formed between these men was precipitated, I believe, by
two accidents of history, where their paths had previously converged.
The first convergence was Koinonia Farm, a Christian community founded near Albany in
1942 by the Reverend Clarence Jordan. Because of the racial mixing allowed at Koinonia and
because of Jordan's unpopular views on racial equality, local businesses began a 10-year
boycott in 1956, refusing to sell Koinonia needed supplies or to buy its products.
Homegrown terrorists tied to the Ku Klux *** took a more violent tack, firing guns into
Koinoina's buildings, torching its roadside stand, and demanding the farm be sold. Clarence
and his colleagues stayed put. They kept on farming. And Clarence kept on preaching a
gospel-based message opposed to racism, materialism, and militarism, which must have sounded downright
un-American to the ears of his Southern neighbors.
As Koinonia's troubles mounted, a steady stream of visitors provided encouragement
and support.
C.B. King, Slater King, and their wives, came regularly to Koinonia for weekend dinners.
Bob and Marj Swann joined a parade of pacifists who traveled to Koinonia to bear witness and
offer aid. For several years, Bob served as the national chairman of Friends of Koininia,
a network organized to raise money for Koinonia and to sell its pecans in the face of the
on-going boycott by local businesses.
We don't know whether the Swanns' visits coincided with those of the Kings, but there
was clearly a Koinonia connection, with Clarence in the middle, creating common ground.
What we do know is that Bob and Slater were among the 15 trusted advisors summoned to
Americus in 1968 by Clarence and his friend, Millard Fuller, to discuss a new direction
for Koinonia.
These discussions resulted in the creation of a self-help housing program for low-income
families, named Koinonia Partners that became the forerunner of Habitat for Humanity. Swann
and King emerged from that same meeting and got busy planning an innovation of their own
that was to become the forerunner for all the CLTs that followed. Two different movements,
sprouting from the same Koinonia seedbed.
Another chance convergence may help to explain the ease that Bob and Slater found in each
other's company. At least 20 years prior to their first meeting, when the Swanns were
living in Yellow Springs, Marjorie began attending meetings of a local group affiliated with
CORE. There, she met an Antioch undergraduate who was majoring in music and education. They
became life-long friends. When Bob and Marj wanted a night out, they sometimes hired her
as a babysitter. This student was Coretta Scott, who later married a reverend from Atlanta,
a cousin of the Kings in Albany.
Meanwhile, another woman was to have a more direct influence on the budding partnership
between Bob Swann and Slater King. She was Fay Bennett, for 18 years the executive director
of the National Sharecroppers Fund. NSF was dedicated to improving living conditions of
the rural poor. So fierce was Fay Bennett's advocacy for these vulnerable people that
the Chairman of her board named her the "Joan of Ark of Agricultural Workers."
Bennett's gravest concern was for black sharecroppers in the South who were being
pushed off the land in growing numbers. In the 1960s, the National Sharecroppers Fund
expanded its programing to include the construction of affordable housing and the creation of
agricultural cooperatives, two strategies for combatting rural displacement.
In 1966, Bennett attended a conference organized by Borsodi and Swann, discussing the Gramdan
model of rural development. She was intrigued and later joined the board of Borsodi's
Institute.
In 1968, her organization provided most of the funding for an American delegation to
travel to Israel to learn about cooperative agricultural communities, established on leased
land. Eight people made the month-long trip to Israel, including the four pictured here.
They were drawn to the moshav, a mixed model that combined individual homesteads, agricultural
cooperatives, and ground leasing. They returned to the United States, convinced this model
had potential for empowering African-Americans in the rural South.
They introduced this idea at a meeting in Atlanta the month after their return. It was
well received. A planning committee was formed to create a blueprint for a leasehold model
of rural development. A year later, the committee approved a set of bylaws drafted by C.B. King.
The name they chose for their new nonprofit was New Communities Inc.
Slater King was elected president and the search for land began. New Communities took
an option on an old plantation outside of Albany. But, as they started looking for the
million dollars they would need to close the deal, they had a terrible setback: Slater
King was killed in a car accident.
The board decided to press on. Charles Sherrod was asked to become the new president. He
packed his bags, kissed his wife Shirley goodbye, and headed to New York City, where Fay Bennett
and Bob Swann were ready to help with the search for financing.
New Communities managed to close on its option on January 9, 1970, coming into possession
of 3,000 acres of farmland and over 2000 acres of woodland -- at the time, the largest tract
of land owned by African-Americans in the United States.
The story of New Communities became the basis for the first book about CLTs, published in
1972. The authors confessed that the model they described existed "only in prototype,"
yet they spelled out the key components of ownership and organization that characterize
CLTs today. In particular, they drew upon the experiences of Koinonia Farm, the Albany
Movement, and the civil rights struggle to argue that a radical innovation like the CLT
was going to need a base of support much broader than the people living on the land if it was
going to succeed.
By 1972, therefore, two of the three components of the "classic" CLT had been put in place,
at least conceptually. It would be another decade, however, before they were fully realized
in a new generation of CLTs that added operational features all their own.
We'll take up that story in the next chapter.