“We Have Worked the Land for Centuries”: Diasporic Memory and Black Environmental Belonging in Urban Green Space

This article traces Black environmental relations in the stewardship of community gardens and other green spaces in the city of Newark, New Jersey. It engages with a widely held belief that Black diasporic people, particularly those who live in cities, are alienated from nature or altogether opposed to agriculture as a result of the historical traumas of slavery and its immediate afterlives, including sharecropping and convict leasing. Focused on Black Newarkers with marked roots in the American South and the Caribbean, this essay follows gardeners and other stewards of urban green space as they contend with the legacy of the plantation yet still frame land cultivation and stewardship as a mode of recovery and resistance. It highlights the ways in which Black growers and other green space stewards indeed reckoned with their associations between cultivation and captivity but did so in ways that enabled them to name present-day labor extractions and enact alternative forms of care and self-determination.