Brea Baker on the Legacy of Stolen Farmland in America
February 03, 2025 | Source: Civil Eats | by Iris Crawford
Brea Baker remembers spending a lot of time in her grandparents’ New Jersey home with piles of paper everywhere. Her grandfather, Alfred Baker, worked to ensure the family was never tricked out of anything rightfully theirs, considering the precarity of Black land ownership in the American South. Her grandfather stressed the importance of keeping a paper trail, such as receipts for property taxes and deed records to prove ownership.
Baker was an undergrad at Yale in 2015 when the Black Lives Matter movement—just two years into its existence—started to grow. She began to ask herself, and her grandfather, more questions about her family’s story and their relationship to land, and saw how that history connected to her student activism.
Then, in 2019, her grandfather passed away. She was left with half-opened conversations, but they created enough of a blueprint for her to begin piecing together the Baker family’s multigenerational farming legacy through historical research. Her findings led her to write her debut book, Rooted: The American Legacy of Land Theft and the Modern Movement for Black Land Ownership, in which she lays out the violent expulsion of Black farmers and landowners across the American South.