Agricultural attorney, Chalmette, Louisiana
Ebony Woodruff entered law school with plans to become a corporate attorney. As the daughter of a welder-electrician and a teacher, her initial goal was upward mobility. “It was really all about the money,” she said.
But her professors at Southern University Law Center in Baton Rouge, themselves first-generation attorneys, encouraged students to return to their communities and make a difference. Their words stuck with her after graduation.
Agricultural attorney, Chalmette, Louisiana
Ebony combined her passion for food and her concern for civil rights—and found her place fighting Black land loss. The term “land loss” sounds clinical but the reality is brutal: According to a study by economist Dania V. Francis, Black farmers in the United States lost 90 percent of their hard-earned land between 1910 and 1997. There are many reasons: state-sanctioned mob violence, harmful inheritance laws, and racial discrimination by banks and the federal government.
Ebony focused on one of those reasons: a legal nightmare called heirs’ property. When a landowner dies without a will in Louisiana, their property is divided among all their children, and then might ripple out to the grandchildren and beyond. As the ownership spreads thinner, it becomes easy for predatory developers to buy up shares and eventually force the land out of family hands.
Now she works with families that are trying to hold onto their land, while also raising awareness. “I’m like the little mosquito,” she says. “You hear it. It’s buzzing. It’s annoying. It’s biting you. You want to slap it, but you just can’t see it. If I’m nothing more than that, I have done my job in this struggle. Because we can’t go down silent. Someone has to tell the story.”
On the history and culture behind Black land loss:
“Oftentimes, when I talk about heirs’ property, people are like, ‘Well, why didn’t they just get a will?’ You have to take in historical context. Remember that enslaved people, it was forbidden legally for them to read and write.
“And Black people weren’t lawyers. You could not go to law school. And so even if there was a white attorney in your town that was sympathetic, if they had agreed to write you a will, they probably would have been run out of town.
“And then also culturally, when you look at a lot of African cultures and spirituality, this concept of owning land is very foreign. How do you own something that you did not create? People were more of stewards: ‘We took care of the land; the land took care of us by providing food and shelter and things of that nature.’ And so there were a lot of reasons why people did not have wills.
“There’s also some cultural taboos that I’ve experienced. In a lot of my previous positions, I’ve been in a position to go out in a community and offer free estate planning. I think as a culture, an American culture, we don’t want to get old. We definitely don’t want to think about death. But then also in communities of color, there’s this thing people think: ‘Oh, if I do a will, mysteriously I’ll die shortly thereafter. People will be out to get me.’ It’s all valid; I don’t want to knock it. But it’s leading to heirs’ property.
“That’s just agricultural land. But heirs’ property also impacts urban areas. A lot of the gentrification that you see in New Orleans is because a lot of the families in the city had heirs’ property. And so when Katrina hit, they weren’t eligible for disaster relief funds.
“Oftentimes in Black families, the family tree was written down in a Bible. It was just understood that once Grandma passed, Aunt Betty was going to be the one who would be living in the house and paying the property taxes and taking care of the house. And so it worked for generations. But when things like Katrina happened, then you find out that, oh, legally, you don’t own it on paper. All of that documentation remains in the name of the original landowner. And so the descendants five generations later, they don’t have anything to prove that they own the land.”
“I don’t choose to do this work. I’ve tried to run from it but it keeps coming back. I’m a Black woman from the South. If I don’t do it, who will?”
On being called to the work:
“When I was in law school and I was hearing these stories from my law professors and the work that they did during the civil-rights era, I wanted to do similar work. But there wasn’t much of that happening. And so when I found out about the discrimination that Black farmers were facing, it just felt like an opportunity for me to marry my passions of food and law and civil-rights work.
“Also, in doing research and learning about the history of this country—especially when I got into the ag work—and just realizing that the enslavement of my ancestors, it was all tied to food. A lot of those explorers went out because they were looking for spices. And they were looking for India, but stumbled upon the New World. The Indigenous people died off, whether they were killed or a lot of it was due to disease.
“A lot of soul food that people associate with Southern culture, a lot of those food crops are African. Coffee comes from Africa. Watermelon, red beans, rice: Some say Asia, some say Africa, who knows? But it was definitely being cultivated and grown in Africa. And so these people were skilled agriculturalists that were brought here.
“A lot of this Cajun cuisine that people talk about, a lot of that came with those people who had been enslaved. And so all of that just spoke to me for personal reasons and professional reasons. I feel blessed to do the work that I do, although I feel like it was meant to be. Again, I’m named after a tree and an herb.”
From John:
After our interview, Ebony suggested a two-hour drive to New Iberia for the photograph. We caravaned to a sugarcane field owned by June and Angie Provost. The Provosts, who were featured in the 1619 Project podcast, sued the U.S. Department of Agriculture over systemic racism against Black farmers. Now they have created a heritage center that hosts workshops, exhibits, and community events centered around sustainable agriculture and land stewardship.
I’d listened to Episode 5 of the 1619 Project, the one that featured June and Angie, and when Ebony called them on speaker phone to ask if it was OK to drive out there, I recognized their voices.
I’d never seen a mature sugarcane field before. And we were going to arrive toward the end of the day with just another 30 minutes of good sunlight. So as we drove past other cane fields on our way to the Provosts’ farm, I tried to see the way the rows were laid out, how tall the cane would be, and how the portrait might compose.
When we were done with Ebony’s portrait, I asked June and Angie if I could photograph them as well. They lost their farm about a decade ago and have slowly rebuilt their lives on the land outside of New Iberia with the help of the community. This fall will be their first harvest since losing everything.
To read the introduction to this series, follow this link.
Still Here: Stories from a fragile coast
To listen to our podcast, follow this link or find us on the platform of your choice.
A Peace of My Mind on Buzzsprout
Credits:
Interview and text: Barry Yeoman
Photos: John Noltner
Editing and production: summer interns Kate West, Sawyer Garrison, and Kaitlin Imai
Audio engineering: Razik Saifullah