National & World Affairs Leading the fight for food justice Leah Penniman, who has been farming since 1996 and co-founded Soul Fire Farm in Grafton, N.Y, in 2011, spoke in front of a packed audience at HDS’s Center for the Study of World Religions. Michael Naughton/HDS “We always begin by thanking our ancestors,” said Leah Penniman, a Black Kreyol farmer and food justice activist, at the start of her Sept. 17 talk, “Farming While Black: African Diasporic Wisdom for Farming and Food Justice,” at Harvard Divinity School’s Center for the Study of World Religions. Penniman called into the room the memory of her grandma’s grandma’s grandma, who, prior to being kidnapped from her home in West Africa, “made this really audacious and courageous decision to gather up the okra, the millet, the black rice, the molokhia, the sorghum and braid it into her hair.” “They knew that wherever they were going,” Penniman explained, “they believed there would be a future of tilling and reaping on the soil, and there would be some seed we all needed to inherit. That’s what our grandmothers did for us.” The questions of “how we got to the food system we have today” and […]

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