When Danielle Whitehead decided to do archival research about Black farmers in the greater Belleville area, she was shocked to find that there was next to nothing in the Belleville Area Museum’s archives on the topic.
That discovery led her to dive deeper, and she’ll give a lecture on the topic of Black farmers during the next installment of BAM’s lecture series Aug. 27.
Whitehead is a Belleville area resident and fine artist. She says she focuses on folk lore, especially African American folk lore, and uses archival research as part of her practice.
“A lot of African American history stems from agriculture,” she says. “My dad and my mom were involved in a lot of gardening, and they grew up in the 1960’s with a lot of people from down south who had community gardens around the community of Ecorse and Inkster. I grew up hearing stories about these farmers.”
She says many people don’t realize that in the 1940s and 50’s, there was farmland in Inkster where her father grew up.
Because her father had grown up around farming, he knew the importance of growing your own food and Whitehead says she grew up with a backyard garden and fruit trees.
“We fed the people in the neighborhood, too, the kids especially. My friends would come over and we would eat. It was a community thing to do,” Whitehead says.
One of the few African American farming families in the greater Belleville area that did make it into the records is the Harris family, after which Harris Park in Van Buren Township is named.
Whitehead says she believes they owned and farmed about 40 acres at one point, traveling to the Van Buren Township area during the Reconstruction period after the Civil War. She says they probably also had some Native American blood.
“On their census records, they [get recorded] as either mulatto, Black, or white,” because most members of the family were so light skinned they could “pass” as white, Whitehead says.
When she became interested in the topic, Whitehead says she began hearing stories about farmers in Belleville and Sumpter Township from a number of people.
“I would hear them not just from family members but from random people I would have conversations with,” including a ride share driver, she says.
“I was sitting in the car, and he talked to me about his two aunts, and he remembered how the air was so different here, and how it smelled so fresh,” Whitehead says. “He told me about riding on the tractors with his family and enjoying that.”
Many of the people telling her these stories had warm, positive memories, while others “talked about some of the racial experiences they had of not dealing with such a friendly community” at times, she says.
After hearing all these stories, it was baffling to Whitehead that there wasn’t more archival material on the topic.
“I would hear, not just from my parents, from community members, random people that I would have conversations with, and then I didn’t see anything reflected in the archives, and that was a slap in the face because it showed how my history had been erased,” Whitehead said. “These stories weren’t being properly stored or taken care of, and there needed to be something done.”
BAM’s curator, Mary Utz, says she was happy to open the archives to Whitehead for her research and was supportive of Whitehead’s plan for a project that might include oral histories with people who remember Black farmers in western Wayne County.
Since she had an opening in August for the lecture series, Utz suggested that Whitehead also give a lecture on the topic.
Utz says that the museum has several long-running programs including the March quilt show and a holiday festival of trees. The other long-running program is the lecture series once a month April through October.
Whitehead’s upcoming lecture, titled, “The Importance of Black Farmers in Wayne County,” takes place at 6 p.m. Aug. 27, preceded by free pizza at 5:30 p.m.
For more information, email [email protected] or call 697-1944.