How a Forgotten Agricultural Organization Trained Generations of Black Youth
Garages have a funny way of turning up buried treasures. For award-winning author Bobby J. Smith II, that came in the form of two rare, out-of-print books his sister discovered in a storage bin in their mother’s garage—artifacts from his sister’s college agriculture studies.
The titles, it turned out, were the only two ever written about the New Farmers of America (NFA)—the nation’s first organization for youth studying vocational agriculture at Black segregated public high schools across the South and up the East Coast to New Jersey.
Smith, a sociologist with a background in agricultural economics who teaches in the Department of African American Studies at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, had never heard of it.
“We’re talking about an organization that existed in 18 states and had an annual membership of 55,000 rural Black boys,” Smith said on a call from his office. “I was amazed at how big the organization was and the fact that no [scholarly] book had ever been written about it. That’s when I knew it was time for me to write one.”