We Can’t Grow Food on All This Concrete: The Land Question, Agrarianism, and Black Nationalist Thought in the Late 1960s and 1970s

The "land question" was a major concern for African American theorists and activists in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Attempts to identify a territorial base for the construction of an autonomous black community or nation reflected one of the period's defining political developments: the rebirth of black nationalism and pan-Africanism. By 1970 much of the new "pan-African nationalist" intelligentsia--from the former Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee leader Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture) and the Malcolm X Liberation University director Owusu Sadaukai to the artist-activist Amiri Baraka and the Black Panther officer Eldridge Cleaver to lesser-known figures such as the writer Ann F. Cook and the economist Robert S. Browne--linked the major questions of freedom and self-determination to the issue of land tenure. Here, Rickford examines how pastoralism came to rival urbanism as the critical terrain of pan-African nationalist imagination during the early to mid-1970s--the heyday and denouement of the black power era--when more than 70 percent of African Americans lived in cities.