FREEDOM'S SEEDS: Freedom Farmers

First paragraph: Reverend Wendell Paris is currently assistant pastor at the New Hope Baptist Church of Jackson, Mississippi. He and his brother George, and George’s wife Alice, were all activists and organizers in the civil rights movement in Alabama and were early leaders of the Federation of Southern Cooperatives (FSC). I was honored to meet him at the FSC training center in Epes, Alabama, and subsequently to interview him. Like his mentor, Fannie Lou Hamer—the legendary civil rights leader of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party—Rev. Paris is deeply committed both to Black civil rights and to farming as a strategy to freedom....