Near the southern end of the AT, ATTTNT passes close to New Echota, the former capital of the Cherokee Nation—a huge area encompassing parts of today’s Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina and extending north to the Ohio River. In the 1830s, the state of Georgia defied Supreme Court rulings that gave rights to Indigenous people whenever those rights interfered with the conquest and possession of territory. President Andrew Jackson embodied the sentiments of the Monroe Doctrine and what would later be known as manifest destiny. He rose to prominence because of his campaigns as a leader of the Tennessee militia in the Creek War of 1813-14—a war that captured twenty-one million acres of Indigenous land in Alabama and Southern Georgia. An emboldened Georgia argued that it could ignore treaties and seize Indigenous land, and its treatment of Indigenous people was especially brutal. The Indian Removal Act of 1830, which ordered the westward relocation of Southern tribes to the new Louisiana territory, was a centerpiece of Jackson’s presidency. Indigenous nations protested the act as unconstitutional under both the US and Cherokee constitutions. While the first Supreme Court test, Cherokee Nation v. Georgia (1831) offered no relief, a ruling the next year, in Worcester v. Georgia (1832) upheld Cherokee sovereignty and confirmed that treaties between the Cherokees and the US were binding. Ignoring the ruling, Jackson proceeded with a forced relocation of the five tribes—the Cherokee, Seminole, Creek, Chickasaw, and Choctaw—to the current state of Oklahoma along a network of routes that collectively became known as the Trail of Tears.

Inheriting projects from Division of Subsistence Homesteads, the Federal Emergency Relief Association, and the Resettlement Administration, they acquired nearly 2 million acres for between 140-150 cooperative community projects in the South. And while there were 25,000 most white cooperatives together with supporting cooperative banks, only thirteen all-Black communities survived racist bigotry in the North and the South to serve 1,150 Black families on 92,000 acres of land. Although there were additional scattered projects on 70-80,000 acres of land across the South. In some ways, the FSA seemed to be bestowing on Blacks cooperative practices for which they had long developed a tradition. And while New Deal programs did alleviate some white poverty in the South, they did little to relieve the truly dire situation that they had helped to exacerbate for Blacks.

In the 1920s, polymath Benton MacKaye envisioned a line across the United States that would organize land around the Appalachian mountains. Although today understood mainly as a scenic hiking route, the Appalachian Trail was initially meant to reorient the transportation and industry of the entire Eastern seaboard around land as a psychic resource for the nation and its labor in the postwar period. Remarkably, this 2,200-mile linear formation at the center of what MacKaye called a “super national” forest was completed in about fourteen years, with a boost from the New Deal Civilian Conservation Corp.

As the ATTTNT reaches its terminus in Natchez, it passes by sites that conjure other cringeworthy episodes marking the failure of whites to even begin to redress the incalculable debt of reparations. One of these sites in downtown Natchez is Ravennaside, the former home of Mrs. Roane Fleming Byrnes—the tireless promoter of the Natchez Trace Parkway. White Mississippians, among them the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR), had long been campaigning for preserving or paving the Natchez Trace. In Ravennaside, Byrnes kept a map-filled “war room” for arm-twisting public officials and plying them with mint juleps. As the Trace Association president, she galvanized other NT enthusiasts, envisioning the NT as a monument to valorize the manifest destiny of westward expansion and the lives of Andrew Jackson and Meriwether Lewis while also recuperating the lost glory of the old South. Just at the moment that New Deal policies were exacerbating racism and bestowing token cooperative projects to Blacks who already had a long cooperative tradition, these whites were fighting for another history to launder that of the confederacy. These delusions aligned with those about celebrating the history of Indigenous people along the parkway. Similarly, Mrs. Byrnes was regarded as helpful in various charitable activities for Blacks in her community, but only in ways that did not disrupt the hierarchies of haves and have-nots reinforcing white myopia. In 1939, a year after the NT had managed to acquire some initial New Deal funding, the DAR refused to allow the famous contralto Marian Anderson to sing at their DC headquarters because of her race, a move that prompted Eleanor Roosevelt to cancel her membership. If proponents of a commemorative parkway with no urgent function managed to assemble over fifty thousand acres for the rights-of-way, can there be a movement to assemble state, federal, and municipal lands and even private parcels for conversion to reparations trust land? Many landowners have already designated sections of their land for conservation easements in exchange for tax breaks or other benefits. Additional small incentives may encourage fully relinquishing the land. A number of anti-capitalist investment consultants are also now helping investors to distribute rather than hoard their wealth, in landholding organs that include land trusts. Looking for another kind of resource and justice in the failures of capital and governance, the ATTTNT also develops protocols for assessing land that is exhausted, bankrupt, over-subsidized, or stagnant because of retiring farmers, debt, or disputes among property heirs.

In 1934, Blacks and whites also joined forces to create the socialist-based Southern Tenant Farmer’s Union (STFU), another organization that along with one of its founders H. L. Mitchell, survived to influence the movements of the 1960s and 70s. They were especially active organizing strikes against evictions and white terror in counties along the Mississippi River in Mississippi and Arkansas. But the undertow of the Depression and the discriminatory distribution of resources to whites would soon challenge this separatists, self-help positions of Garveyites and NFCF members many of whom joined forces with the STFU. The STFU together with the Socialist Party of America and a Christian Socialist group led by Reinhold Neibuhr, also established cooperative interracial colonies in the same areas of the northern Mississippi Delta. With support from Quaker volunteers, Eleanor Roosevelt and other luminaries, they established Delta Farms (later renamed Rochdale) in 1936, near Hillsdale and Providence Farms, near Cruger, about an hour and half south in 1938. The STFU towns were interracial but segregated so as not to attract violence.

Cooperation Jackson, established in 2014 and included in the dossier accompanying this book, is a network of efforts that applies civil rights era activist forms to planetary concerns. Facing ongoing repression in the South, and inspired by Jackson’s activist history, Cooperation Jackson reoccupies the sovereignties of the Kush and the RNA capital El Malik. The contemporary Jackson-Kush plan works on multiple fronts. The Malcolm X Grassroots Movement (MXGM) and the New Afrikan People’s Organization (NAPO) partners with the FSC, the Southern Grassroots Economies Project, and the National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America (N’COBRA), among many others. They foster Black political power with assemblies and campaigns to place elected officials, they generate solidarity in a broad swath of the US, and they work to build a broad “Solidarity Economy.” Joining anti-neoliberal activist efforts around the world, the solidarity economy “describes a process promoting cooperative economics that promote social solidarity, mutual aid, reciprocity and generosity.” Extending their global reach, they liken regional formations like the Kush and Black Belt to regional cooperatives like the Mondragon Federation of Cooperative Enterprises, based in the Basque region of Spain and the Emilia Romagna region of Italy, both of which are also included in the dossier for this publication. Cooperation Jackson organizes gardens, a restaurant, community activities and education efforts among many other projects in the city of Jackson and its environs. It has also established the Jackson Human Rights Institute for training and organizing. Cooperation Jackson is a central case study for many who look to a horizon of change where the logics of capital are outflanked by a spectrum of cooperative forms and where white, right-wing politics no longer dominates the Southern US. Like Gar Alperowitz, critical theorist Bernard E. Harcourt cites Cooperation Jackson as evidence of an increase in cooperative forms. New York Times columnist and author Charles M. Blow, in both a book and a film, references Cooperation Jackson as one magnet for a reverse Black migration from the North to the South to create a voting bloc that reclaims electoral power for Black leadership.

In 1968, near Albany, Georgia, Slater King and Charles Sherrod established New Communities, Inc. (NCI),—the first community land trust. Situated near Koinonia and one of several Nation of Islam (NOI) farms established in Georgia and Alabama in the 1960s and ’70s, NCI was part of a remarkable cluster of community experiments. Its founders later claimed that the community land trust was a form based on Indigenous conceptions of land, moshavs, Mexico’s ejidos, the Gramdan movement, and Ujamaa. The claim reflected the milieu of the time and the solidarities between civil rights, Pan-African, Non-Aligned, and Tricontinental movements that might inspire similar planetary solidarities today. Community land trusts may offer a convenient land holding organ reparation land. Since they pool urban or rural land to be managed by a group of people, community land trusts are larger, more complex, and less digestible in gentrifying real estate processes. They can offer more cohesion and stability within communities threatened by dispossession. They have also recently become tools for auto-constructed or informal settlements to collectively reorganize their land for remediation and infrastructure building. There is currently a globally networked movement to create community land trusts around the world.

In addition to the communities associated with the Southern Tenant Farmers Union, other interracial Christian communities attempted to establish outposts in the South. Macedonia, Georgia (1936), Little River Farm, South Carolina (1940); and Koinonia, Georgia (1942) were among these. These joined other intentional communities started between the 1930s to 1950s that were practicing communalism, often colored by religion. They joined communal projects of the Catholic Worker Movement founded in the 1930s, like Tivoli, New York; Sunrise Community, Michigan, (1933) organized by a Jewish group; Celo Community, North Carolina (1937); the Quaker community of Vale, Ohio (1940); Hutterite communities like Zion’s Order, Missouri (1952), the Mennonite community Reba Place, in Evanston Illinois (1957). A number of communities inspired by the writings of Georgist community theorist Ralph Borsodi in the 1930s and 40s were also sometimes associated, and they included Baylard, Bryn Gweled, and Tanguy Homesteads in Pennsylvania, Van Houten Fields and Skyview Acres in New York, May Valley Cooperative Community in Washington State and Melbourne Village in Florida.

The Union Army established places of refuge for freed slaves during the war. Notable among these was a swath of land along the eastern coast reserved as reparation land under General Sherman's Field Order No. 15 until the post-war government reneged on the deal and gave the land back to planters. Davis Bend, near Vicksburg on the Mississippi River was also the site of a Black community that eventually migrated to the Mississippi Delta area to found the independent Black town of Mound Bayou in 1887.

For the Souther Student Organizing Committee, Myles Horton from Highlander Folk School, Ella Baker, Anne Braden, Bob Moses, and Todd Gitlin from Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) were guiding forces. Anne Braden had long been trying organize white students, and she though SSOC should accept Black leadership and serve as an arm of SNCC. She saw SSOC as a continuation of a longer history of interracial collaboration around Populist labor organizing. She had gotten Bob Zellner, a white southerner a campus organizers, the first white staff position at SNCC. Zellner was among the first cohorts to face violence in Mississippi or get arrested in Albany. Both white and Blacks were wary and SSOC partnership. The whites were concerned that SNCC’s radical positions might have it difficult to approach more conservative whites. Bob Moses of SNCC, was concerned that Blacks might lose the “the first thing that we’ve ever had that belongs to us.” Other Blacks in the movement thought that whites should work separately on their own white community. While claiming to be tentative about the perceived radicalism is SNCC,  SSOC did join forces with SDS, a group that was more rigidly ideological, because they hoped it that the nationally established intellectually sophisticated organization would lend them weight.

After passage of the Civil Right Act and the Voting Rights Act in 1964 and 1965, cooperatives were emerging all over the South as a way to organize the next phase of activism after the Civil Rights Movement. In 1967, 22 such coops from 10 states joined to create the Federation of Southern Cooperatives to be a clearinghouse for education, training, marketing, research, finance, collective knowledge, and technical expertise, to provide member services like insurance and health care, and to be an advocate for Black farmers and rural cooperatives. With funding from the Office of Economic Opportunity and guidance from National Sharecropper Fund, the Southern Regional Council, and the Cooperative League of the USA, they established an central office in Atlanta to serve the region. Later, the Federation moved its headquarters to Epes, Alabama where it created a Rural Training Center. By 1970, there were over 100 member coops. The Federation of Southern Cooperatives is still in operation today representing over 10,000 Black farmers in the South. Twenty of the coops listed in the original articles of incorporation from 1967 are mapped here.

The National Sharecroppers Fund was a outgrowth of the Southern Tenant Farmers Union. Started in 1937, it led labor, training, land justice initiatives for decades, becoming especially active during the Civil Rights Movement and the cooperative movement that followed. NSF joined other moderate incrementalist, interracial organizations that avoided direct action but provided an infrastructure of field directors and offices convening, educating, providing technical expertise, and liaising between the various organizations, government agencies and funding sources. The NSF had an office in New York City as well as field offices in the region, and together with other private organizations like the Southern Regional Council or the Cooperative League they supported the work of the cooperative movement and took the place of a government agencies that should have existed.

The Trail of Tears segment of the ATTTNT reassesses land surrounding the Tennessee River that was acquired by the TVA during the New Deal. The TVA was responsible for land dispossession in the region, and its dam-building model was exported to developing countries around the world with environmentally disastrous effects. Still, environmental advocates reference the TVA because it represents the political will to acquire a nearly three-hundred-thousand-acre watershed for a publicly owned utility with thousands of employees and millions of customers.

After the war, freedmen towns and other Black communities and or family compounds located in the Black Belt—a crescent of fertile land stretching from Virginia to Texas. For a few years from 1865 to 1872, the Freedman’s Bureau helped former slaves buy land and establish educational institutions. Many of the 4.4 million former slaves necessarily organized land and work cooperatively for protection and pooled resources. Many of these locations are unmarked and unrecorded, although contemporary researchers are beginning to map southern states thickly populated with freedmen towns.

Mt. Beulah was a conference center in an abandoned HBCU that hosted countless planning meetings for the civil rights movement.

Robert S. Browne, a global economist who had written an influential article on Black separatism, established the Black Economic Research Center (BERC) in 1969 in New York City and the Emergency Land Fund (ELF) in 1971 with offices throughout the South. Replacing white expertise with Black expertise, Browne, Jesse Morris, founder of the Poor People's Corporation, and Joe Brooks, former planner for the Republic of New Afrika, together with a consortium of Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBUCs) provided cogent surveys of Black land loss and future plans for land retention and reparations. Reaching back to Reconstruction, they exposed failed federal land policies, tax traps, discriminatory lending by government agencies, and the legal tricks that whites used to force partition sales on heirs property—property owned by multiple descendants. They developed pilot projects and disseminated information in a newspaper called *Forty Acres and a Mule.* ELF merged with Federation of Southern Cooperatives in 1985.