White Masculinist Pasts→Black Feminist Futures: Lessons from Spelman College’s Victory Garden as Black World-Making

Tucked behind the speckled shadows of Giles Hall on the campus of Spelman College in Atlanta, Georgia, is perhaps the most biodiverse and regenerative space on an American college campus that unapologetically centers Black women, African diasporic foodways, and living relationships with health and food, land, and agriculture.This historic landscape is referred to as the victory garden on campus because of its previous use by and for students, faculty, and staff during and after World War I.At vari ous times since Spelman moved to its current campus in 1883, food has been grown across campus in the form of dairy farming and agricultural crop production.The presentday victory garden serves as a living historical marker of this legacy while also helping us envision just and sustainable food futures.Originally, the land was occupied by the Muscogee Creek Nation and, before becoming the home of Spelman College, it was used as the Fort McPherson military base.At some point after the world wars, Spelman's victory garden fell out of use.And then, contrary to the large-scale, white, masculinist imagination behind the nationwide victory garden movement, beginning in 2009, a group of Spelman faculty began to revive the garden by growing food on-site again.In 2014, Spelman's Bonner Office of Civic Engagement cultivated a servicelearning initiative entitled Sisters of the Soil in partnership with HABESHA, Inc., a local food justice organization.This initiative grounded students in relationship with urban agriculture on campus and throughout the Black West End community.This historical arc contributed to Spelman launching the first interdisciplinary food studies program at a historically Black college or university (HBCU) in 2015.Through this program's garden, we reimagine what victory means in the context of Black feminist food futures.As a deliberate response to the history of the victory garden movement, throughout 14 White Masculinist Pasts→Black Feminist Futures: Lessons from Spelman College's Victory Garden as Black World-Making