There are deep racial and economic food disparities in every community in this country. Yet, with all the many ways communities come together to try to address these disparities, they usually miss a fundamental component. Inequity is by its very nature, historic, and flows from generations of policies, institutional actions, and individual decisions that have privileged some people at the expense of others. Although there is excellent scholarship on structural inequality and the inequities that result from it, as well as powerful oral traditions and lived testimony of its impacts, most of this history is hidden to the average person and largely absent from public dialogues. Critical histories, the ones that highlight stories of oppression and resistance, of privilege and power, do not live in our history textbooks (or if they do, they are far too simplified and sanitized to provide real complexity and meaning). Nor are they prominent in the mainstream media or in our public monuments or commemorations. In their absence, we do not collectively develop the references and critical thinking skills needed to make sense of the deep inequality in our community and to develop the new institutional forms and power relationships necessary to come together and work towards a more equitable future. In so many ways, our collective “not-knowing” has consequences.
Local History Matters
Creating new histories is the first step in a process of truth and reconciliation that is needed in every place in America, and at every level of governance and community life. New public narratives and counternarratives need to be sought out, unveiled, and discussed. To share these histories is both a process of reckoning with the past and of reorienting how we think about change. As we seek true food justice and more equitable food systems, it is necessary to tell different stories about how we got here, and to wrestle deeply with the legacy of colonialism, white supremacy, and a food system that relies on the exploitation of workers, animals, and the earth. In this endeavor, it is important to recognize that inequality is a relationship, whereby some people are systemically advantaged and others disadvantaged over the course of generations. However, a person or a community cannot be defined solely in terms of victimhood or deprivation, and so this narrative highlight the acts of individual and collective resistance, contribution, and humanity of groups that have been historically marginalized.
With that in mind, the values of a local critical history are worth acknowledging. While we are all influenced by broad political, economic, and cultural systems, we all live locally. Hence, a local history has the ability to highlight the significance of individual and institutional actors and key moments of agency. A local history also illustrates how macro-level forces are both shaped and reshaped by community-level factors, such as community-based organizations, individual networks, and interpersonal connections. Further, putting this history into a local context builds a new set of resonant shared narratives. When history is grounded in the land, neighborhoods, institutions, and people we know, it deepens our attention and emotional response.
Insight Beyond Durham
While this is a story about Durham, most places in the U.S. will have similar experiences of the core themes shared within. We intend this history to travel widely across Durham, but also want it to spark conversations and commitments for other communities to follow suit and do their own critical investigations of how we got here. We also recognize that no historical account is ever complete, and hope that this work will be expanded upon and added to in the years to come. Lastly, we ask all who may read this, who are we as history makers? And what legacy are we leaving for the next generation? There are no easy answers, but there is power in the asking.
This snapshot of Durham's Food History, completed in 2020, was developed as part of the Durham Food Justice Project. This report was researched and written by historian Melissa Norton.
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While Durham County was still largely farmland, the first decades of the 1900s saw incredible urban growth as the city’s population swelled from less than 7,000 in 1900 to more than 60,000 in 1940. The rapidly expanding city came of age during the Jim Crow era (1896-1964), a time defined by a racial caste system shaped by both laws and social customs. The term Jim Crow comes from a popularized caricature of Black people performed by white actors in blackface in the 1800s. In North Carolina, a series of laws were adopted that dictated racial segregation of nearly all sites of life, including schools, transportation, and public facilitates.
At the turn of the 20th century, more than half of the US population were farmers or lived in rural communities. Even in 1920, farmers comprised 50% of the population in Durham County outside the city core. Nearly half of those were tenant farmers. Of Black farmers, approximately 25% owned their own farms. Dramatic changes occur in the food system in the shift from small farms to industrial agriculture. The year 1920 was the peak of Black landownership and number of Black farmers in this country, but through both legal and coercive means, those numbers dropped dramatically in the following decades.
The patterns of dispossession and exclusion in Durham’s rural areas had their urban counterparts. Racial discrimination by institutions at the federal, state, and local level, combined with individual prejudice, ensured that homeownership, access to capital, and neighborhood-level investments in the city would favor white people throughout the 20th century. These policies and practices had deep implications for food security. From 1900-1964, social relations in Durham were rigidly shaped by Jim Crow laws and customs, which dictated segregation of schools, transportation, eateries, and public facilities, and outlawed interracial marriage.
In the wake of urban renewal and the building of NC Highway 147, a continued cycle of disinvestment afflicted the central city from the 1970s through the 1990s. Many people who could leave, did. The result was a pattern of both white flight and substantial Black middle-class flight to the quickly expanding suburbs. In their wake, community institutions and businesses such as banks and grocery stores also disappeared. These closures left significant parts of the city underbanked and lacking access to food. At the same time, a huge economic shift was taking place in Durham, whereby the unionized, well-paying factory jobs that had employed Durham’s working class for generations began to leave town for good.
In the 21st century, a new set of dynamics in the increasingly urbanized Durham landscape present new challenges for food justice. What is often described as ‘gentrification’ is the latest in the legacy of involuntary displacement of people of color in Durham dating back to the Eno and Occoneechi. Indeed, the colonial worldview and the “frontier” mythology pervade how gentrification is talked about in many spaces. Words and phrases such as “urban pioneers” and “trailblazers” to describe the predominantly white and wealthier newcomers in historically disinvested areas described as “burgeoning,” “up and coming,” or even the “wild wild west.” This language pervades the popular press, real estate advertisements, and colloquial conversations, particularly among those with race and class privilege.