It hasn’t been easy being a Black farm family in South Carolina. Sanders recounts years of fear at the hands of Klu Klux Klan groups in the area. White landowners would pick arguments with local Black farm families over something as small as seeing them look at the landowners’ wives. Black farmers were run out of town and into nearby North Carolina leaving behind all that they had worked so hard for. While this wasn’t the case for all White landowners in the area, there were too many stories to scare Black locals.

For those White landowners who were not racist, they forged an interconnected bond with Black landowners.“If they need help on their farm, they ask us and we help them. If we need help on our farm, they come over to help us,” Sanders says.

While Sanders is grateful for the help of those in her community, there were still outside battles that this Black farm family, and others like them, had to face.

In that same 2004 address to the Southern Foodways Alliance, Dori recalls that, as the 21st century turned, Black farmers began to face even more hardships — this time from the government.

In 1999, tens of thousands of Black farmers applied for restitution as a part of a landmark class action suit between the U.S. Department of Agriculture and Black farmers across the nation. The agency had acknowledged years of discriminatory lending practices. A judge initially estimated a $1.15 billion payout for the farmers, however that amount dropped significantly and was only awarded to a fraction of those that applied.

Only a few years earlier, Sanders came across a study from the U.S. Commission of Civil Rights that estimated by the year 2000, there would virtually be no Black farmers left in America.

This study was a wake-up call, a realization that maintaining her family’s farm would take major effort on her part.

“It’s something about the farming life that has held me here each year and keeps me coming back. Every year I say that I’m done, but each spring when I get out there and begin to feel the dirt under my nails, I stay.”

Sanders explains that if she were to give up the farm now, she wouldn’t know what to do or where to go. After all, why would she give it up after working so hard to get it and keep it for over 100 years?

To Sanders, land equals power and too many of our people are giving up that power. She gets daily requests to sell even a small strip of her land, but she will not be swayed.