An interview with black farmer and food justice activist Raqueeb Bey
Not all farmers live and work in a rural area. When we think of farmers, we often picture them in a setting of endless fields on the countryside. However, things are moving in the big cities, where poor communities are all too often confronted with limited access to fresh produce, a phenomenon known as “food deserts” in the media. Food justice activists are actively working on changing this and urban farms are uniting communities in the cities. We talked to Raqueeb Bey, founder and ex director of Black Urban Farmers Pittsburgh.
Urban farming is not just a trend, it is a way to bring green into the cities and, in some cases, to unite marginalized communities and work towards equality and equal access to fresh food. Women in Ag Magazine talked to food justice activist Karen Washington, who runs a black-owned farm in New York, in a previous article. This time, we talked to Pittsburgh native Raqueeb Bey.
Black Urban Gardeners & Farmers
“Karen Washington is my hero”, Raqueeb starts our talk. “She is a beautiful person, I follow her lead and have so much respect for her.”
Raqueeb is an urban farmer, an agriculturalist and a food justice advocate. She started Black Urban Farmers Pittsburgh nearly a decade ago, with the goal of combating the disparity black farmers face in the city and in the US. Working on plots that once were crammed with buildings, Raqueeb and her community bring nature back to the city. “We can grow food anywhere, if given a chance we’ll grow it on the moon!”
The Black Urban Gardeners & Farmers of Pittsburgh Co-Op is a network of different black growers. Some of them have their own gardens and farms in various parts of western Pennsylvania and Pittsburgh, but collectively, the initiative has its own farm in Homewood, a predominantly black neighbourhood in the east side of Pittsburgh, called the Homewood Historical Farm. “We currently have close to one acre (0.4 ha, red.), but we are in the process of acquiring more lots and should grow towards 1.5 acre (0.6 ha, red.)”, Raqueeb says.
The farm sits on what used to be a blighted lot: a lot where a building used to stand and that was left untended after the building was removed. The idea came from Raqueeb’s work with the City of Pittsburgh that started a program called “Adopt A Lot”. “The Grow Pittsburgh project, under the leadership op executive director Denele Hughson, did a survey in 2014 and found that there were 21.000 blighted lots in the city of Pittsburgh”, Raqueeb explains. “With Adopt A Lot, you can turn a blighted lot into a green space. It can be through creating a garden, beautifying your neighbourhood, putting in some flowers or just picking up litter. This initiative reduced the number of blighted lots in our community.” The farm boasts a greenhouse of 30 x 40 ft. (9 x 12 meters, red.), twelve raised beds, twelve bee hives, pollinator gardens and ten fruit trees. “And we’re expanding! We are going to add three raised beds soon.” The farm doesn’t only grow food for the community, it also serves an educational role by teaching youth how to grow food.
From father to daughter
Raqueeb grew up in the Lower Hill District in Pittsburgh. “People call it uptown now, but when I grew up it was called Soho. It still is Soho to the indigenous people of that land”, she comments. “My parents had a Pittsburgh brownstone house with a back yard where my father kept fig trees and a garden where he grew food. Occasionally, I would help him. Later, my mom put me in girl scouts, where we had to do a lot of hands on work to earn our badges: arts and crafts, talent work or social justice work. That’s probably where it started.”
Raqueeb’s dad, James Jackson, was a child of the depression. “He grew up very poor”, Raqueeb says. When he got out of poverty, James built a pantry attached to the family home’s kitchen. “To stock up on food, since he didn’t have enough food growing up.”
“My parents taught me the value of voluntary work and helping other people”
“One day, I was putting canned food and dry food in paper bags”, Raqueeb recalls. “There was a soup kitchen in our street. My dad asked what I was doing and I said ‘I’m getting food for the poor’. To which he said to my mom ‘does she know that we are poor?’ (laughs)”
“My parents taught me the value of voluntary work and helping other people.” After moving out and to another state for a while, Raqueeb came back to her native Pittsburgh to take care of her father in the 00’s.
“I noticed an organisation, called Western Pennsylvania Conservancy, had built a community garden on Fifth Avenue, where my parents lived. A lot of our elders had plots there and so did my parents, but my pops was too sick to take care of it. He asked me to go pull some weeds, and so I did. I went out on a Saturday morning and started pulling what I thought were weeds, and people were like ‘woa, stop what you’re doing’ because I was really pulling up food (laughs).” Raqueeb didn’t know a lot about growing food, but she learned as she worked. The next year, she became a volunteer community garden manager. “The job was simple: I distributed plots and helped people with disputes.”
Gardening and farming is a learning process, she found out. “That first season, I came home with thirty tomato plants I got. When I put them on the porch, my pops laughed while my friend Bwadiya said ‘what the hell did you buy all these tomato plants for?’ I didn’t know that one plant would yield so many tomatoes! We had so many of them that year we couldn’t even give them away…”
Community farming
Unfortunately, the community garden had to close around 2003 to the loss of access to water for watering the plants. Raqueeb, who had discovered a passion for gardening, started helping the neighbourhood barber, Harry Orlando, in his small garden. After his passing following a tornado that levelled a lot of the buildings, Raqueeb found her way to the Landslide Community Farm. “They started a community farm where Mr. Harry’s barber shop used to be. I knew one of the volunteers, since we did social justice work together. She was the only black person in this organisation at the time.” Raqueeb asked her friend for one raised bed so that she and her friend could teach their children how to farm. “It was twelve adults and seventeen children”, she remembers.
“Now, even though Landslide Community Farm started the community garden with Mr. Harry’s widow’s permission, since they were mostly white in a predominantly black neighbourhood, the community elders were uncomfortable with them. That meant that their community outreach wasn’t that great.” And that’s where Raqueeb and her friends came in: in 2011, they started an organisation for children called Mama Africa’s Green Scouts or, as she affectionately calls it, “Mags”. “The idea was simple: to teach black children gardening skills, farming skills, green sustainability and, most importantly, how to be responsible in their community.” Raqueeb’s initiative got some resistance from the elders at first, but after she joined the board of the community garden and started working on the community outreach, attracting more black and brown people, that resistance softened. “I already had some experience as an activist and my daughter had done intern work at Grow Pittsburgh, so I knew a lot of folks. Slowly but surely, people started to come around, helping out.”
More black people at the table
As Raqueeb started to get invited to boards and meetings around 2011-2012, she noticed that she was more often than not the only black person at the table. “We were being left out of grants and our children were being taught by people who didn’t look like us.” Hearing the same story from other black growers too, Raqueeb and her friends decided to start their own urban farm. “To fight these disparities.”
Today, Raqueeb doesn’t go to meetings anymore. After a sabbatical last year, she decided to focus on the farm work. “The Pittsburgh Food Policy Council, where I was the only black person at the meetings when I first started going, is mostly black people now, elders and respected in their community. Their new E.D. is also black now, her name is Zinna Scott and she is definitely a mentor of mine. She is affectionately known as Mama Z. The executive director of Grow Pittsburgh is black. Things have changed and we aren’t left out of grants anymore, but there’s always challenges to fight. However, I don’t have to go to those meetings anymore because we paved the way. Our motto at the Black Urban Farmers and Farmers of Pittsburgh is ‘We grow food, minds and leaders.’”.
“I am against gentrification because it’s inequable, unfair, it lacks community engagement”
Internalized racism and gentrification
“My fight today is not about getting a seat at the table anymore, we have our own table”, Raqueeb says. Her fight now is about what she consistently calls white supremacy – and not racism – and internalised racism. “I say ‘white supremacy’ instead of racism because it encompasses everything, even the effect it has on black people who start thinking like white supremacists. An example: when a slave here in America would run away, another slave would run to the slave holder and tell them. Black organisations like the Black Panther had black people inside as spies for the government.”
To Raqueeb, gentrification is an intrinsic consequence of white supremacy. “It’s people who look like us, from this neighbourhood, who bring the gentrifiers in to colonize our land”, she says. “And I’m not against redevelopment, redevelopment is progressive: I am against gentrification because it’s inequable, unfair, it lacks community engagement”, she explains, citing examples of situations where a black city council member would try to take a black woman’s – Ebony Evans (affectionately called Farm Girl Eb) – farm from her. “This is a black woman who feels entitled to this farm that has distributed thousands of pounds of food to the community for free, who has taught children how to grow food, about food security and health and wellness.”
Urban farms like the above mentioned, Raqueeb says, play a crucial role in their neighbourhoods, especially the more impoverished ones. “Statistics show that when you put a community farm in a neighbourhood, especially a neighbourhood like ourselves, it reduces the crime rate by 48%. It also remediates the soil. Here in Pittsburgh, the lots we used once had houses on them that were full of lead.” This makes the gentrification process even more infuriating to Raqueeb, who has put in a lot of work to sanitize the soils in her community. “We put in all that work to remediate the soil and then here comes a gentrifier – a colonizer – who looks like us, to take that soil away from us and profit from our work. That’s entitlement.”
This article was published in the summer issue of Women in Ag Magazine.
