JONESTOWN, Miss.—Standing on the site of the former Swan Lake Normal School for African Americans, Rev. Bennie Brown held up a gallon-sized Ziplock bag filled with purple-hull peas as he declared his plan for Coahoma County, Mississippi, to be the purple-hull pea capital of the world.
“This year, I have seven acres of purple-hull peas planted over there,” he said, gesturing to his left with his hand that was holding the bag of peas. Next year, he said he hopes to plant 25 acres of the peas.
Brown was talking to a group of about 30 people who were attending a tour of four Black-owned farms on June 19 in honor of Juneteenth. The Brown Family Farm was the second stop on the tour through four Mississippi Delta counties—Quitman, Coahoma, Tunica and Tallahatchie.
Formerly enslaved people built the St. James Missionary Baptist Church in 1868, joining 16 other Missionary Baptist churches in Quitman and Coahoma counties in forming the Swan Lake Missionary Baptist Association in 1870.
The Swan Lake Missionary Baptist Association bought 200 acres of farmland outside of Jonestown, Mississippi, in Coahoma County and 450 acres in Quitman County to help formerly enslaved farmers who were moving off the plantations find work. A special offering every Sunday at each of the churches collected members’ money to pay for the farmland. Farmers would come and rent land from the association, which would provide farm equipment like plant seeds, cotton gins, tractors and combiners.
“One of the things that Swan Lake offered was the opportunity for Black farmers who didn’t have any equipment or any other things with them but the knowledge of farming and offered them the opportunity to come here and begin to build wealth for their families,” Brown said. At one point, 15 families lived and worked on the Swan Lake Association land, and the association became the richest Baptist association in the country, the preacher said.
The Swan Lake Normal School, located near the St. James Missionary Baptist Church, opened in 1914 to teach formerly enslaved people and Black people of all ages how to read, write and do math.
Brown said the school and church were on the same street outside of Jonestown that once was filled with plantations. Back when enslaved people were working in plantations, some would walk up to 10 or 15 miles at night to practice African traditions, pray for liberation and learn stories from the Civil War at a church they called hush harbor, which is in the same location where St. James Missionary Baptist Church later opened its doors after the Civil War. Today, Brown is the pastor of the church.
“The church has always been the place of refuge for us as a people,” Brown said. “I don’t know why we have abandoned the church. Everybody thinking we’re going to make it without the church, but we’re not going to make it without the church.”
“Progressive” people, like Silas Kelley who formed the Delta Burial Corporation in 1927, from Mound Bayou, Mississippi, were “following patterns of building wealth” during Jim Crow, Brown said. Delta Burial was one of Mississippi’s first businesses whose ownership was only Black.
Kelley’s headstone rests on the land where the Swan Lake Normal School once sat, which is now represented by a Mississippi Department of Archives and History historic land marker in a garden of flowers in front of a brick wall with a cross design.
‘Land Meant Freedom’
Rev. Bennie Brown’s family moved to the association’s land in 1962 when his father was 57 years old. His father had never owned any property in his life, but was “multi-talented,” with skills including carpentry, shoemaking, hair cutting and electrician services. “He even sold a little corn whiskey,” Brown added with a smile as tourgoers laughed.
When his family moved to the farmland, 10 out of 14 Brown children still lived at home, including Bennie Brown. Four siblings had left Mississippi when they turned 18 and headed to places like Detroit, Michigan, and Chicago, Illinois, while the 10 remaining children in the Mississippi Delta dreamed of joining their siblings up north to live a life outside of farming.
Brown’s family grew cotton, soybeans, peanuts and sweet potatoes, and they raised cows and hogs. Most of the other nearby farmers also grew cotton along with other crops. He said the cotton the association farmers grew was second-best in the state, only falling short to Mound Bayou’s crop.
Growing up, his mother would can and freeze the food they grew for themselves to eat, and the family was mostly self-reliant—only traveling to the grocery store “in town” to buy sugar and flour.
In those days, “land meant freedom,” Brown said—freedom for Black people to grow their own food and have financial success for their families. And that’s how his family built wealth. Within seven years of the Brown family starting its farm, the family had made enough money to build and operate a grocery store, a gas station, a pool hall and a café.
The first man in his family to graduate from college, Brown earned his degree from Virginia State University after serving in the military because he said he did not want to live in Mississippi. While living in Virginia, he visited his parents, who were starting to show signs of age, in the Mississippi Delta. He decided to move back home when he realized that they would now need help running the farm.
For the past 40 years, Brown said the children of the generation who bought farms on that land in the Delta have leased their land to white farmers. Up until four years ago, the land next to where Brown spoke on June 19 was covered in kudzu. He is now set on growing purple hull peas and butterbeans.
“My idea is to return farming … back into the hands of the people, just like it was,” Brown said, describing how he wanted Black people to move to the farmland and start growing their crops.
He explained that he was dedicating himself to training the next generation of farmers how to produce food and “help sustain their community.” If enough farmers work together on the 650 acres of land, the preacher excitedly suggested, they could potentially feed the whole county.
“We’ve got to do this for ourselves,” Brown said. “Nobody is coming through. Not anybody’s coming through for us but us.”
A Bland Family Farm
The Bland family began hosting educational events, farm tours and community gatherings in 2025, including a Juneteenth farm tour, which was a little smaller last year, family farmer Robert Miller said. On what turned out to be a hot and sunny Juneteenth in 2026, about 30 Mississippians rode on two buses that traveled throughout the rural north Mississippi Delta. Attendees could either hop on a bus in Tunica or Clarksdale.
Miller, husband of fourth-generation Bland family farmer Christl Bland-Miller, shared many facts about the farms and the crops growing in the Delta fields on the Clarkdale bus in the ride between stops.
“Mound Bayou, which was known as the all-Black African American town, they had the most, I believe, expensive cotton gin at the time,” he said on the bus. “So if you wanted to get a premium price for your cotton, you would drive it all the way to Mound Bayou, and they would stamp it. So that way you had the best cotton that was coming from this area. So that’s why cotton was king in this area for a long time. Now, cotton is not king so much because it costs so much to get into cotton production.”
The price of cotton is high, so many beginning farmers do not choose cotton to start out, Miller explained. Growing soybeans is a safe option because you do not need irrigation to water it, which makes it easier to start planting, he added.
As the buses headed to Tunica County along Highway 61, Miller pointed out various crops growing in the fields and also noted the 40 windmills spread across the acres that two farmers owned. The 184.5 MW Delta Wind Farm started in 2024 when one farmer bought 29 windmills and another bought 11. Amazon is buying power from the facility to support its data centers in the area, Canary Media reported in June 2024.
The buses arrived at the Bland Family Farm in Tunica, Mississippi, shortly after seeing the windmills.
Before tractors existed, “hands and mules” worked to pick crops from the fields, third-generation farmer Wayne Bland said while standing in the shade under a tent located next to his fields of rice plants. A Bland Family Farm mostly grows rice these days and has special levees in the fields to keep water in the ground for rice to grow.
When Wayne Bland turned 6, he had to join his older siblings in chopping cotton for eight to 10 hours every day, as every Bland child started working on the farm by the time they reached that age. The reason that school is only in session for nine months out of the year is because the South was an agrarian society composed of many farmers who needed their children to work in the fields during harvest season, he explained.
“Most kids looked forward to getting out of school. I was one of those that wished school was year-round. Give me 12 months of school,” the farmer told Juneteenth event attendees.
Wayne Bland’s grandparents Robert Bland and Mahalia Bland bought 80 acres of land in Tunica, Mississippi, from Green River Lumber Company and started a small-scale operation to support their family of eight children in 1928. During that time, Tunica County was 86% Black and had 5,000 Black farmers who made up 90% of the farmer population. But Black farmers lived on less than 20 or 30% of the land, Wayne Bland said. Now the rate is one Black farmer for every 100 white farmers in the county.
In 1928, the Blands needed their land to provide everything they ate, splitting it between crops and livestock. They also had many fruit trees and a garden at their homestead. They made many of their own groceries that are typically sold in stores presently, like cornmeal and molasses.
Most of Robert and Mahalia Bland’s children moved north to work in industries outside of farming. But James “Jerry” Bland, Jr. decided to stay. He and his wife, Caldonia Bland, bought 45 acres in 1952, paying $115 an acre. The operation expanded to 1,200 acres by 1980, growing cotton, wheat, soybeans and grain. They had 12 kids, including Wayne Bland.
By the 1990s, the Bland family farm transitioned from cotton to rice as the main crop it grew.
“Of course, we still always had more soybeans, but rice was the money-making crop and still is to some extent even though prices are low today. So, my two brothers, James and Edgar, they were two of the first to grow rice,” Wayne said.
While none of the land was irrigated when Jerry Bland, Jr. died in 1998, about 60 to 70% of the farmland is irrigated now, showing how technology has quickly advanced in farming, Wayne Bland said. Irrigation is essential in the hot, dry summer months, he explained.
A Bland Family Farm now has over 3,000 acres of rice and soybeans scattered throughout the north Mississippi Delta, which the third and fourth generations of the Bland family run alongside their spouses.
‘We Want to Own It’
Dorfus Young reached over a metal fence and rubbed his hand on the muzzle of his black goat, Joe, whom he has raised since the animal was a kid. Eventgoers laughed and murmured words of gleeful surprise when they saw the goat.
“Anybody want to pet him?” Young asked the tour’s attendees. Several people eagerly agreed and took their turns giving the friendly goat some attention. Joe poked his muzzle through the square-shaped holes in the fence and licked a couple people’s hands while they pet him.
When the Young family bought its farm in Clarksdale, Mississippi, the 22 acres of land was “all cotton,” he said. Today, it features the family home with a large porch and an indoor area full of tables for gathering, an outdoor stage area, crops, chickens, goats, bees for producing honey, a pond with catfish and crappie, a compost bin, gardens, storage sheds, picnic tables, and a fire pit. Young’s father hand-made all of the structures with wood stained a reddish brown color. Trees that the family grew when they moved onto the land provide shade. All of these components contribute to the family’s ability to be fully self-sustained, Young said.
“We don’t want to just be the workers of the land. We want to own it so that we can actually get the benefits for ourselves,” he said.
The family is now aiming to show people how they can create their own farms and gardens, whether on a larger scale or a backyard operation, Young added.
Many crops, like onions, ginger, cabbage turmeric, potatoes and tomatoes, grew in canvas grow bags. Some crops even grew in an old kitchen sink, while onions sprouted in an old wooden bed placed outside next to the grow bags. Another area of the farm featured carrots, cilantro, eggplant and watermelon grown in a garden bed surrounded by cinderblocks.
“We have this area set up to attract butterflies and things like that to pollinate,” Young explained while pointing at an area of plants.
The family sells its crops and also relies on them for food. The Young Family Farm also makes and sells wine, and they offered event goers tastings of their fruit flavored wine, which included strawberry, raspberry, cranberry, blueberry and elderberry.
‘Food That Can Help Heal Your Body’
Wearing a gray apron that says “Eat Local” under an image of Mississippi, Julie Diaz of Clarksdale Cooks pulled the top off of a silver pot, revealing a couple dozen plates that each had a small fritter made of zucchini, bell pepper and egg, offering the treats to those present. She had cooked the fritters earlier that morning using fresh-picked vegetables and eggs laid from chickens at Start 2 Finish Farms in Marks, Mississippi.
“I do cooking classes and events and demos and things like that trying to use and promote the people growing food here in the Mississippi Delta,” Diaz told attendees. “I really try to use as much local food as possible, and so this time of year is great because we have more local food. In the winter, it’s a bit of a challenge.”
After event goers finished the fritters, they walked past muscadine vines near farm equipment and rows of tomato plants to hear from Sidney Handy, a fertilizer production and soil science expert and CEO of the Delta Phoenix, which does regenerative farming. Instead of using common pesticides, he makes castile soap to spray over crops and produces his own chicken-manure fertilizer from the chickens at the farms.
“What we want to do here is produce food that is actually food that can help heal your body because it’s grown properly,” Handy told eventgoers.
Tomatoes, zucchini, watermelon, bell peppers and squash all grew in neat rows at Start 2 Finish Farm, while muscadine vines flowed over metal and wooden poles.
Handy encouraged young people to become farmers, noting that they could “make a living at home.”
“Your future is right here in the ground,” he said while stomping his tennis-shoe clad feet.
To learn more about the events that A Bland Delta Farm hosts, visit ablanddeltafarm.com.
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