Can food help reconnect a racially divided Louisville?

Bailey Loosemore | Courier Journal

Louis Holmes' tomato plants are as tall as his waist, with crisscrossing white strings holding them up to full height.

They're surrounded by equally flourishing spinach, zucchini and pea plants all developed through hours of careful work — which could seem cumbersome to new gardeners, but not to Holmes.

The retired western Louisville native grew up gardening with his mother and grandmother and relishes the opportunity to continue growing his own food at the People's Garden in Shawnee.

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It's a chance made possible to Holmes by Louisville Grows, a nonprofit that opened the community garden in 2013. But it's also a chance unwanted by some of his neighbors — who questioned the organizers' initial plans and their reasons for entering the often isolated community.

In Louisville, there's an increasing acknowledgment within nonprofit and governmental agencies that a division has formed between the city as a whole and its west end.

Many call it the Ninth Street Divide: a geographical boundary that separates a majority of Louisville's black population into an area of its own.

Crossing that divide — both literally and figuratively — has been discussed in programs and projects put forth by Mayor Greg Fischer.

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But as outside proposals such as the ill-fated FoodPort struggle to gain traction, it's worth taking a look at how Louisville Grows has acknowledged the community's past in order to influence its future.

COMMUNITY DIVISIONS

Like several of west Louisville's eight neighborhoods, Shawnee was not home to a predominantly black population until after World War II — when white residents moved out to the county's suburbs and black residents of lower and middle classes stayed behind.

The outmigration caused a shift in the neighborhood that continues to exist today, with Shawnee suffering from lack of business investment and job loss, according to a 2014 report from the Network Center for Community Change.

The neighborhood is now located in a food desert, certified by the United States Department of Agriculture as an area that lacks adequate access to groceries and fresh produce. About 26 percent of its residents fell below poverty lines in 2012. And the median household made anywhere from $19,549 to $34,284 annually, according to 2015 census estimates.

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But what Shawnee lacks in resources, the 2014 report stated, it makes up for in community pride and engagement.

You just have to know the right way to tap into it, Louisville Grows members said.

"It seems like the mistake keeps on being made of trying to do something for people instead of empowering people to do things for themselves," Louisville Grows co-founder Mason Roberts said. "There are a lot of people that shoot themselves in the foot by working in that mentality. Like, I'm going to do something good, do this thing that I think people need without really including them from the start."

It's a lesson Roberts and his fellow co-founders learned the hard way when launching the People's Garden, located at 536 N. 44th St.

The project happened quickly. Around the time the nonprofit began focusing on community gardens, it received both a piece of land and two used greenhouses from the city — perfect for a farmers' market, an orchard and summer and winter gardening.

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As much as the group wanted to get neighborhood input before starting, it already had ideas for filling the space.

Resistance came just as fast as the project did, Roberts said. Questions arose about everything from the garden attracting rodents to the sincerity of the nonprofit's volunteers.

Were they just a fly-by-night venture that would leave the land as deserted as it was before? Or were they serious about turning the property around?

"I thought of our community as one community, and it illustrated there are more divides," said Roberts, who now lives in Denver, Colorado. "Louisville has a long history of doing things in the West End without community input, and it's created ... a feeling of disrespect, I think, for their neighborhood and their history."

WORKING TO UNDERSTAND

You can't talk about race and farming without talking about slavery and land access, said Priscilla McCutcheon, an assistant professor of Pan-African studies at the University of Louisville.

African Americans have not historically enjoyed the access to property and food that white Americans have, McCutcheon said. And when people don't acknowledge those facts, they can't have a full conversation.

"We have to talk about that and some of the farming movements that black people started and maintained," McCutcheon said.

The topic isn't easy to approach.

Many of the white volunteers and board members of Louisville Grows will never be able to see gardening and farming from their black neighbors' eyes.

But by talking to some of the people working in the Shawnee garden, you can start to hear similarities in the members' backgrounds — and shared hopes for Louisville's future.

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Ked Stanfield, the recently-named executive director of Louisville Grows, grew up in Eastern Kentucky with two parents who farmed to put food on the table.

Stanfield's rural hometown couldn't be more different than the urban neighborhoods of west Louisville. But his socioeconomic status was the same, and that experience has allowed him to understand some of the issues the families he wants to share information with now face.

"We grew up poor, but I didn't know I was poor because we always had food. And we always had food because we gardened," Stanfield said. "... We want to teach people how to do this and make it accessible to everyone."

Holmes, whose grandfather was a farmer, has maintained a plot in People's Garden every summer since 2015.

He grows cucumbers and radishes there, along with collard greens and his strung up tomatoes. He gives away produce he doesn't keep for himself to the elderly women who attend his church — "I call them my girls."

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Holmes' wife and children, the youngest being 40, help him in the garden when he asks. But he'd like to get more youth in his neighborhood involved.

"We need young kids to learn how to do this and let them know vegetables don't grow in Kroger, they grow in the field," Holmes said.

Work to improve his neighborhood has to come from the inside, Holmes said. But it has to come from the outside, too.

"Us people in the neighborhood can only do so much," he said. "We all work together, eventually we should get his solved."

Story continues after podcast.

BJ Jones, a member of the Spirit Of Love Center on West Market Street, has maintained produce beds at the People's Garden for the past four years.

Each summer, he grows hundreds of tomato, squash, green bean and bell pepper plants that fill gift boxes for other congregants along with people living near the garden and church.

"We have a 500 gift box goal and I'm not going to quit until I reach it," Jones said. "And I'm not going to quit then."

The garden fulfills a spiritual mission for Jones. But he knows the garden fills other needs for the community, too.

"In communities where there’s a lot of drug problems, a lot of hungry kids who go without food, it is important," Jones said. "I just hope this ministry will grow and people will see how important it is."

Reach reporter Bailey Loosemore at 502-582-4646 or bloosemore@courier-journal.com.

LISTEN IN

Hear culinary historian Michael W. Twitty discuss food, race and identity on the Mighty Fine Farm & Food podcast, available at courier-journal.com and soundcloud.com/cj-mighty-fine-farm-food.