The Federation of Southern Cooperatives and the Late 20th-Century Dream of an Anti-Plantation Future in the Rural South

The 1960s was a decade of tectonic realignment in the US South. The collapse of legalized Jim Crow, it also represented the final unravelling of the old sharecropping labor system. Yet beneath this social and economic maelstrom, the plantation remained the primary site of agricultural production in the region. Yet now it had been transformed into a fossil-fuel dependent enterprise, a fact which people associated with the Federation of Southern Cooperatives (a grassroots movement across the rural South, formally established in Atlanta in 1967) were keenly alert to. This paper will map the increasingly ecological orientation of the Federation during the 1970s and 1980s, as they attempted to document the new forms of deathliness, injustice and inequality associated with the fossil-fuel plantation, as well as its connection to the wider American food system and ongoing imperial domination across the globe.

Next, I describe some of the Federation’s infrastructural projects during those years, in which attempts were made to materially re-organize the Southern landscape in an effort to overcome the many legacies of centuries of plantation agriculture. Particular focus is given to the Federation’s early embrace of solar technology (prompted by the OPEC crisis of 1973 and culminating in a ‘Sun Day’ festival at their Rural Training Center in western Alabama in 1978) and the principles of what is today known as ‘agroecology’ (including a soil repair project in Mashulaville (MS), large-scale composting and experimentation with greenhouse technology). I use these examples to demonstrate that, by the mid-1970s, the Federation and its constituencies were imagining a post-plantation world in which economic and ecological justice were increasingly inseparable. Thus, the paper ends with a bold argument: that this coalition of Black agriculturalists and cooperators, spread across the rural South, represent an alternative genealogy of the Green New Deal.