The Green Shantytown: Race, Racism and the Bountiful Backyard Garden

Professor Kate Brown, Thomas M. Siebel Distinguished Professor in History of Science at MIT, speaks on the history of Black communities' self-provisioning in Washington, DC.

 

In Washington, DC, congressional leaders in the 1920s pushed Black residents out of the central city to areas East of the Anacostia River. Their city leaders provided no infrastructure. Neighborhoods had no sewers, no piped water, no garbage pick-up, or paved surfaces. Residents made the most of structural racism. Where streets would be, they lined paths with fruit and nut trees. They kept chickens and pigs, feeding them organic garbage. They surrounded their houses with vegetable gardens, fertilized with composted kitchen scraps and night soil from backyard privies. They collected rainwater and filtered household water to keep their gardens hydrated. They set up their own shops, ran their own bus service, and created cooperatives to provide jobs for men and women. Pursuing this market-shy activity, Black neighborhoods East of the River thrived until the bulldozers arrived in the 1960s. Brown tells the story of the power of urban self-provisioning and the sustained attack to replace it with monocrop agriculture in the form of turf grass. 

 

Award-winning author of Tiny Gardens Everywhere: The Past, Present, and Future of the Self-Provisioning City (Norton 2026), Manual for Survival: A Chernobyl Guide to the Future (Norton 2019), and Plutopia: Nuclear Families in Atomic Cities and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters (Oxford 2013).

 

Organized by the Metro Atlanta Science Studies Seminar. 
 

For more information, contact Helen Anne Curry at hacurry@gatech.edu.