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When we lived in public housing my mom started a community garden to grow food to save money and to occupy the kids that lived there and the public housing authority came & pulled out all the plants and poured bleach into the ground to destroy it. Because gardens weren't allowed. https://twitter.com/historyofarmani/status/1290484329580130306
wrote about it here https://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/27/opinion/sunday/my-mothers-garden.html
Since this is blowing up I will add an addendum--my mom still gardens. I just made some cucumber gazpacho out of her cucumbers the other day. And this experience led to me getting the lucky job of starting a farmers market in Bed stuy when I first graduated college
NYC now has an incorporated community garden system in place but it was not always that way and its only recently that cities have not been actively hostile to community gardens in Black and Brown neighborhoods. Just Food and Green Guerillas used to do this work in NYC ...
This incident took place in Arlington, MA. But incidents like it happened and happen in cities across the US. Anyways, support community gardens in Black and Brown and poor neighborhoods and look sideways at police/city agencies that call them a nuisance
Oh last things I'll add, as I am revisiting this this morning. When we moved out of public housing to an apt in Davis sq, the new place had a concord grape vine growing under my window. Dream for a fatty like me. Landlord caught me eating off it and cut off all the grapes...
and stomped them into the ground. So. Individual landlords are trash, too! Also, many yrs later, on a dating app, I got into a fight with a white guy who tried to tell me all the farmers markets and gardens in NYC were the result of white transplants from the midwest 
im sheepish to even add but i also have a newsletter where i write about the intersection of blackness, culture and the archives. if you enjoyed the essay above you can subscribe here. ok, bye! overwhelmed! https://kaitlyngreenidge.substack.com/p/coming-soon?r=7dys0&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&utm_source=twitter
and heres an effort to help https://twitter.com/RevealObvious/status/1291457950003888128
