Placing the global struggle for Black liberation in East Tennessee

Introduction

East Tennessee is definitively the Appalachian South. Characterized by mountainous terrain and largely rural and small-town landscapes, the origins of its significance for placemaking are found in Indigenous histories. European settlers arrived in the region in the late eighteenth century. Since that time, the region has continuously witnessed economic growth and population increases. Knoxville, Chattanooga, and Johnson City serve as the metropolitan anchors of the area. The region is spatially and culturally related to bordering Appalachian South sites in Virginia, Kentucky, and North Carolina, including the Tri-cities subregion comprising Johnson City/Bristol/Kingsport in northeast Tennessee and southwest Virginia, as well as western North Carolina cultural hubs such as Asheville, Boone, and Bryson City. In addition to extractive and manufacturing economies along with federal and university research programs, the region boasts a healthy tourism industry, marketing nature retreats, outdoor activities, and invitation to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park.

The region is often racialized as white. The lower demographic presence of Black populations in the region has resulted in less consideration of Black community formation, placemaking, and placekeeping and the development of Black Appalachian identity. Such a pattern is characteristic of the Appalachian region more broadly. For more than four decades, scholars have called for deeper engagements with Black geographies in the region (see Eaves, 2016; El-Amin, 2019; Turner and Cabbell, 1985). In response to this call, we ask: What has been the role of East Tennessee in the global struggle for Black liberation? How does a Black geographies lens help us read the East Tennessee landscape differently? To answer these questions, we examine three sites across the East Tennessee region: the Highlander Research and Education Center, Children's Defense Fund/Alex Haley Farm, and BattleField Farm. In this article, Black liberation is characterized by undertaking work that guarantees the survival of Black people and communities.

The article takes seriously that “[c]omparative analyses of Black Geographies are important for current and future iterations of Black struggle as such analyses help us identify the different, sometimes conflicting, manners in which movements and individuals envision and enact Black liberation. Comparative work also provides insight into the contingencies that give rise to different Black territorialities. This is important, given that Black social movements materialize in response to the always-renewing forms of oppression Black populations face. In short, comparing Black Geographies is a necessary aspect of realizing Black struggle, as comparison helps identify the various directions such struggle can take” (Bledsoe and Wright, 2019: 420). As we look towards these iterations of Black struggle over the last century, we situate our work in scholarship on Appalachian Geographies and Black Geographies, which follows in the next section. Then, we consider their collective contributions to Black geographies and Black liberation struggles in the Appalachian South. A note on language—we follow Jed DeBruin (2024) when we discuss the Appalachian region, understanding that “Appalachia, a region which both overlaps with portions of the South and maintains a separate regional identity, likewise holds this potential to renovate geographic knowledge” (p. 65). As such, we use the term Appalachian South to narrow our focus on East Tennessee, a place that is both Appalachian and Southern and, consequently, can be examined through multiple lenses.

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Figure 1.

The circular organization of the meeting space is a long-held tradition of the center because it facilitates a sense of equality and egalitarian community for the participants. Highlander's iconic rocking chairs further emphasize this sense of community and indicate a groundedness in Southern culture and practices of community organizing (Photo by the authors).

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Figure 2.

The Riggio-Lynch Interfaith Chapel and pond (photo by the authors).

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Figure 3.

The cantilever barn housing the Langston Hughes Library (photo by the authors).

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Figure 4.

Central area at the farm at Battlefield Farm (photo by the authors).

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Figure 5.

The free veggie stand and the Fannie Lou Veggie Van (photo by the authors).

Appalachian geographies

Ideas of Appalachia “emerged as a fantasy of travelers, reporters, and intellectuals prepared by capitalism to detect backwardness, poverty, and signs of isolation in the people of Appalachia” (Massey, 2009: 65), characterizing Appalachian people as unfit for normative society. Writers of the nineteenth-century local-color movement were instrumental in the effort. American local color writing appeared in a post-Civil War United States during an era popularized by literary realism, the predominant style of literature in the second half of the nineteenth century. Attempts to capture the distinctions of American regional cultures resulted in biased accounts of Appalachia. These writers created a series of reports that exoticized landscapes, embroidered daily living practices, and exaggerated dialects, as they did in local color writing in other regions of the world, such as Africa and Asia. In local color writing, Appalachians were characterized as native-born, white, Anglo-Saxon, and Protestant people whose lifestyles were reported as conditions more akin to frontier-era living defined by familial and clannish feuds, lawlessness, and “shiftless ignorance” (Moore, 1991: 76). Famously, Will Wallace Harney touted Appalachia as “a strange land with peculiar people,” defining it as a monolithic, anti-normative existence from that of an outsider (Billings et al., 1999; Massey, 2009; Shapiro, 1978). Put differently, Appalachia became the Other.

Notably, many early color writings focused only on one location within the Appalachian region. For example, Moore (1991) uses Ellen Churchill Semple's study of Eastern Kentucky (Semple, 1901) to show how writers engaged in geographical bias and environmental determinism through limited local observations and discursively created the Appalachian region. The local color movement emerged in Appalachia immediately following the Civil War when the need for an image of a unified America was imperative. Therefore, Appalachia acted as a counterpoint to this emergent mainstream view of the US:

Where the nation was progressive and industrial, Appalachia was backward and agricultural. Where other regions were rapidly urbanizing, Appalachia was rural. Where a generalized middle-class American was ‘normal’, Appalachia and its inhabitants were ‘a strange land and a peculiar people.’ Local colorists’ persistent explication of Appalachia through contrast with mainstream America revealed their outsiders’ perspective. (Algeo, 2003: 32)

The consequences still loom large in the American understanding of Appalachia, and “Today, nearly a century later, these early perceptions remain strong as Appalachian culture is depicted as ‘yesterday's people’ living in a land ‘where time stood still’” (Moore, 1991: 76). The distinction of Otherness has contemporary impacts, as the perceptions of Appalachia have become accepted truths and re-institutionalized into popular culture and media.

Despite these views of the region as backwards in relation to the rest of American civilization, it was simultaneously viewed as a bastion of “pure” whiteness. During the local color era, there was growing racial anxiety in the US due to the influx of non-white European migrants. According to Hartman, “Nowhere more than the region we now know as Appalachia did writers, social scientists, and journalists believe they had located a racial utopia, a place that remained free from the contaminants endemic to the convulsing industrial city or the troubling encounters that ensured as the United States seized distant, foreign lands” (Hartman, 2012: 231). Among these racial anxieties, metropolitan white Americans and politicians were seeking to find evidence of the pureness of the white American race and sought to preserve it, and they found their object for this among the Anglo-Saxons of Appalachia. This represents a massive contradiction in how the region was viewed: on the one hand, it is a backwards, ignorant, and feuding region inhabited by an underdeveloped people. On the other hand, it remains as one of the last outposts of a properly “white” America that acts as a bulwark to the influx of migrants that ensures the maintenance of a properly white and civilized America.

More recently, this portrayal of Appalachia as Other was best exemplified by Vice President JD Vance's 2016 book Hillbilly Elegy and the subsequent media pieces about the region after the first election of Donald Trump. Elizabeth Catte notes, “Vance remakes Appalachia in his own image as a place of alarming social decline, smoldering and misplaced resentment, and poor life choices. For Vance, Appalachia's only salvation is complete moral realignment” (Catte, 2018: 8). Political journalists demonstrated their vitriol towards the region in dozens of op-eds and think pieces in the months following the election, such as Frank Rich who asserted “Let Trump's white working-class base take responsibility for its own votes … and live with the election's consequences” (Rich, 2017). This phenomenon, after the 2016 election, was nothing new and instead demonstrates the long-standing cultural imagination about the Appalachian region, seeing it as a monolith that is not worth helping or even worth the country's attention except when it is politically convenient. The discursive formation of the region simultaneously erases the extensive diversity of the region, in terms of race, class, gender, and political orientations. The need to counter the imagined geographies of Appalachia is critical. We suggest that critical geographies, alongside feminist and Black studies, offer a valuable lens for deconstructing images that have defined the Appalachian region in the American imaginary for more than a century. As part of this urging, we turn to Black geographies.

Black geographies

Geographers understand that geographical knowledge about space and place is informed by race. The field of Black geographies moves beyond merely understanding geographical concepts of race towards disciplinary critiques of erasure and anti-Blackness in geography (Bledsoe et al., 2020; Noxolo, 2022; Wright et al., 2024). As a field, Black geographies resituate geographic traditions in theory and method through a Black lens. Black geographies function, in part, as resistance to epistemological stances that resort to quantitative, positivist measures through the discussion of blackness and, more broadly, race and racialization. By employing a Black geographies approach, scholars and activists draw attention to the practices of Black life, agency, and resistance.

Based on current knowledge, the term “Black geographies” first appears in Katherine McKittrick's Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle (2006; see Eaves, 2024). Current foundations of the term Black geographies center on the contributions of Clyde Woods and Katherine McKittrick. Their use of Black geographies as “a reflection of our continuing interest in developing and sustaining questions about the intersections between race, blackness, and spatial politics in the diaspora” (McKittrick and Woods, 2007: vii). For them, Black geographies were and are necessary for more just geographies. Black geographies functions as a counternarrative to the monolithic engagement of Blackness and persistent rhetorical and physical displacement of Black people and communities and Black histories, including for us in Appalachia. Woods and McKittrick use Black geographies to demonstrate how relationalities, identifications, networks, and power of and about Black subjects critique the contours of conquest and relegation to the “ungeographic” (McKittrick and Woods, 2007). As such, we situate Black geographies as a framework that resists normative geographic renderings of place.

While the last two decades have seen unprecedented interest in Black geographies approach, the roots of the field have a much longer history. More than five decades ago, then-Geography students Bobby M. Wilson and Herman Jenkins wrote asking what geography had to offer to the Black American: “Can geography, as a set of concepts and tools, be of relevance in solving the problems of the Black American community” (1972: 42)? A few years before, Dr Theodore Speigner—founder and long-time head of the Geography Department at North Carolina Central University, a public historically Black university located in Durham—remarked, “In the history of geography in our nation, black Americans have not received a fair deal. The role of Afro-Americans has been distorted or misinterpreted by many white American geographers who, by omission or ignorance, have left the impression that black people have contributed little to geographical thought and perspective in America or Africa” (1969: 388). In this way, we argue that Black geographies advances geographic thought, in that it disrupts the theoretical attachment to place as a container, the deterministic idea that Blackness only belongs and is inherently naturalized in specific sites. And we focus on the Appalachian South as an exemplar.

Black liberation in the United States is deeply entwined with the broader corpus of Black geographies. Black liberation struggle is a placemaking project. Geographers have long written about the significance of liberation taking place in Black communities, particularly through US civil rights (Bledsoe et al., 2017, 2018, 2020; Inwood and Alderman, 2020; McCutcheon, 2022; Wilson, 2000a, 2000b; Woods, 1998) and Black power movements (Bledsoe et al., 2020; McCutcheon, 2011). As Celeste Winston writes, “Contemporary sites of geographic refuse are conventionally referred to as spaces of white flight, deindustrialization, and environmental hazards without considering the ciphers of freedom created there” (2023: 4). This framing and understanding of geographic refuse allow us to engage abolition geographies (Gilmore, 2022) and freedom-making anew (Bledsoe, 2017, 2018; Bledsoe et al., 2017, 2020; Eaves, 2023; McKittrick, 2011; Moulton, 2021; Winston, 2023; Woods, 1998).

We place our work in conversation with geographers and other scholars who have engaged in Black Appalachia. To further challenge the monolith of Appalachia, scholar and poet Frank X Walker created the term “Affrilachian” to bring greater visibility to Black people in the region after reading in the dictionary that the definition of Appalachian as distinguished by “Anglo-Saxon” people (Armstrong, 2006). By coining Affrilachian, Walker makes the type of intervention that troubles the narrative of ubiquitous whiteness that pervades the region and allows for a new kind of regionalism to be considered, including that which includes an Appalachian perspective on Black liberation struggle. In recent years, scholarship on Black presences in Appalachia has gained momentum, excavating Black stories and placemaking practices in the region and disrupting continued attempts at Black erasure in Appalachian geographies (DeBruin, 2024; El-Amin, 2019; El-Amin and Isom, 2023; Fain, 2019; McCommons, 2025; Schwartzman, 2022; Turner, 2021). El-Amin and Isom (2023) emphasized the ways Black people in Appalachia met a call to action by using community memory and social science methods to document Black presence and placemaking in the region. In this article, we advance geographic perspectives of Black liberation through Appalachian geographies research.

Research overview

Our work takes place at three locations: the Highlander Research and Education Center, Alex Haley Farm, and Battlefield Farm. Our research originated in a Black Geographies seminar. We sought local examples to ground the theoretical work of the seminar. Our read of East Tennessee landscapes unveiled numerous possibilities for engaging in the region's Black geographies. For fieldwork, proximity to our home base in Knoxville played an important role in how the sites got chosen, allowing for ease of access to the field over several months. Additionally, these sites were chosen due to their deep engagement with freedom visions for all people, aligning with how we conceptualize Black liberation. Further, they represent varied scales and time spans of liberation work, crucial to developing regional analyses. The Highlander has the longest history in the region, nearly a century, and has an international reach in its impact. Alex Haley Farm has a national presence developed over four decades. Battlefield Farm was founded less than a decade ago and operates primarily in a city-wide context. The co-authors began this research in August 2023. As a collective, we undertook fieldwork at each site, walking the grounds, talking with leadership, photographing the landscapes, and participating in events. For example, in September 2023, we attended the 91st Annual Highlander Homecoming. We conducted follow-up visits and conversations with staff members at each site. We also conducted archival work and analyses of secondary data as we engaged in deeper interrogations of Black placemaking and liberatory strategies.

Highlander: A living legacy and lineage

Activist and native East Tennessean Ash-Lee Woodard Henderson was the first Black woman Co-Executive Director of the Highlander Research and Education Center, hired in 2016. Above, she reflects on the geographic significance of Highlander and the spatial praxis of Black liberation it undertakes. Nearing its centennial, Highlander embodies deep cultural and working histories of Black and other liberatory movements. Appalachian Tennessee has been Highlander's home since its inception. We examine Highlander as a vector for Black geographical organizing and movement building. Throughout its existence, history, Highlander has worked to create a space of mutual learning and engagement that emphasizes lived experiences (Figure 1). Employing a Black geographic lens enables a reading of Highlander as a space of interracial solidarity and allyship in addition to being a nexus point, convergence space, and crucible for the work of Black activists of Black organizing entities.

Children's Defense Fund + Alex Haley Farm: 1980–present

The Alex Haley Farm—Haley's intent for it and, later, the Children's Defense Fund's (CDF) use for the space within its larger vision—is best understood through a Black geographic lens. Especially, such a lens enables the seeing of the deep and various contours of a site and understanding how those contours enable Black liberation. Haley Farm, originally purchased by the Black American writer Alex Haley in 1984 as part of his vision for creative collaboration and neighborly community and purchased a decade later by the CDF, can be seen through a Black geographic lens in at least three ways. For one, the Haley Farm is rural. Secondly, its bucolic, peaceful site is secluded—almost secret or hidden in plain sight. Third, the Farm is an example of Black placemaking. As such the Farm is situated inside the “inherent pluralities” of Black geographies (Bledsoe and Wright, 2019). Black geographies interrogate normative geography and engage alternative visions that enable viewing and understanding spatial sites from various perspectives. Haley Farm is part of this “plurality.” These attributes of the Farm's rurality, seclusion, and the Farm's contribution to Black placemaking in the South are the features that enable it as a site pursuant to Black liberation.

A Black geographic lens advances reading the Farm's rurality as a primary characteristic. Normative understandings of geography often assume that ruralness is racialized as white (McCutcheon and Eaves, 2023). Many historical reasons support this assumption, and, as McCutcheon and Eaves argue, even after emancipation, “with increased emphasis on urban issues in the press and scholarship, the naturalized whiteness of rural areas became more pronounced” (2023: 71). The Farm, however, provides an “alternative read[ing]” of rural space (2023: 79). Haley purchased the 157 acres in 1984. His visionary development foresaw an open environment, with housing, front porches, gathering spaces, a pond, and an apple orchard. As Ken Libby, the Farm's manager, shared with us, Haley envisioned guests standing on one porch and calling out to a guest across the Farm on another porch, emphasizing Haley's vision of rurality, neighborliness, and openness. Haley once welcomed the entire population of Clinton. He frequently had dinner parties, inviting upwards of 80 people, with guests like Maya Angelou and Fannie Flagg.

In Haley's vision of facilitating community and collaboration, the spaces on the Farm, like the many porches and their concomitant rocking chairs, contribute to the overall vision. Libby shared that Haley hoped to collaborate with people on his writing and to build a space that fostered community support. When writers came to stay, they would write during the day and come together at night over shared dinners. Haley also loved “to serve his guests … apple butter, applesauce and apple fritters” made from apples from the orchard that he planted on the farm (njones, n.d.). CDF continues Haley's vision of hospitality by inviting the public to Apple Picking Days, wherein the public is encouraged to pick apples from the orchard and enjoy refreshments and company with each other.

One way this vision of hospitality pursued liberation was that it provided an escape from what could be called a particularly oppressive historical moment. The 1980s saw a dramatic rise in incarceration rates, with Black and Brown people imprisoned at disproportionate rates. By the end of 1985, one year after Haley purchased the Farm, the incarceration rate was 201 per 100,000, the highest ever recorded. Unemployment had risen as over four million jobs moved overseas between 1973 and 1980. A long recession had particularly affected Black Americans, leaving them experiencing “record jobless rates virtually since the beginning of the recession, exceeding 20 percent during the last 3 months of 1982” (Urquhart and Hewson, 1983: 9). The situation was more dire for Black teenagers, “with an unemployment rate hovering around 50 percent” throughout 1982 (Urquhart and Hewson, 1983: 9). The presidential election of Ronald Reagan initiated various legislation created further barriers for Black and poor folks in the US, like the termination of the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act, a reduction of the federal food stamps program, and federal support of child nutrition.

One can understand the need for alleviation from a particularly harsh moment of systemic racial oppression. Haley provided a space of reprieve. Black geographies enable a reading of the Farm's potential for, and integration of Black liberation, particularly. Describing Black institution building (specifically, the Black Church) in rural areas, McCutcheon and Eaves describe how Black Southerners collaborated to “transform the rural South into a site of belonging and transformation” (2023: 72). Belonging was Haley's intent for everyone who visited. From his purchasing of the rural site, Haley hoped it would be a place of welcoming hospitality for all people, a place of rest. In Haley, as a Black man, envisioning and enacting this spatial transformation, the Farm exemplifies what McCutcheon and Eaves describe: this rural Appalachian South farm becoming a site belonging for Black people.

“Welcome home!” was how Ken Libby, current manager of the Farm, greeted us, an affirming alternative to the racism and oppression that surely all Farm guests. Libby noted that the greeting originated with Haley's desire for “everyone to feel like they belonged on the property” (Libby, personal interview, 10/25/2023). This desire is akin to bell hooks’ “homeplace” (2015), which entails home-building as a type of resistance. In describing the resistance of Black women to oppressive society, hooks identifies “the construction of a safe place where Black people could affirm one another and by so doing heal many of the wounds inflicted by racist domination” (2015: 42).

When the Children's Defense Fund (CDF) purchased the site in 1994 after Haley's death, their vision mirrored Haley's, to create a safe space of renewal, specifically for child advocates and people working in community building. The Farm now serves as a place of congregating and community building for Freedom Schools, the Hall-Proctor Institute for Child Advocacy Ministry, the Black Community Crusade for Children, and many other organizations from public school teachers, members of historically Black sororities and fraternities of the National Pan-Hellenic Council, and church congregations. The CDF envisions the Farm as a space for advocates to “get in touch with themselves and fellowship with other people in the room … [to] get a sense of rebuilding their spirit [at the Farm] and preparing themselves for the work” (Libby, personal interview, 10/25/2023). This is Black placemaking: the effort to move political power into the hands of disadvantaged communities and communities of people who have experienced discrimination and oppression, echoing the work of Highlander. Advocates who gather at the Farm are working toward these liberatory ends.

Haley saw the Farm as an inclusive project and welcomed all people. The CDF continues this vision by welcoming advocates working with and for all children. CDF Freedom Schools and the Hall-Proctor Institute, both supported in their child advocacy by the CDF Haley Farm, are movement-building organizations pursuing justice and are led by diverse leaders celebrated for their work in racial justice, religion, systemic racism and mass incarceration, child well-being, and radical social change. The work towards liberation continues at the Farm daily. A physical reminder of liberatory vision, the architecture of the chapel on the grounds—Riggio-Lynch Chapel (Figure 2)—is built in the shape of an ark, inspired by the biblical story of Noah. Designed by architect Maya Lin, the ark stands as a symbol of hope to reassure all children that people are working for their prosperous futures.

Similar to the chapel, the barn on the Farm (Figure 3) situates itself solidly in the rural landscape but is also a repository of knowledge, as its interior has been transformed and refurbished by Maya Lin to house the Langston Hughes Library. This library contains 5000 volumes of books, mainly focusing on the Civil Rights Movement, children's advocacy, the role of women in the Movement, and Black history (njones, n.d.). Our research team used the library for seminar meetings and was inspired by being in a space dedicated to Black liberation. By creating an intentional space reading and gathering inside the vernacular Appalachian architecture of a cantilever barn, the library thus generates Black placemaking and pursues liberation through the garnering of Black knowledge in books and archives and giving writers and advocates for Black children specifically a space to collaborate and create community.

The Farm is also hidden. In 2003, when Libby first visited the Farm, he drove past the entrance and had to retrace his steps to find his way inside: “I didn't see anything that said this is an entrance…. I just kept driving down Sinking Springs Road, not seeing anything that would tell me where to go” (Libby, personal interview, 10/25/2023). Twenty years later, the Farm is still hard to find, as research team members found out while trying to navigate to the site. The Farm's hiddenness informs its purpose and, likewise, is a key part of understanding it through a Black geographic lens. Hiddenness is an attribute of Black geographies. As Purifoy (2023) notes (citing McKittrick and Woods, 2007), “The situatedness of Blackness as outside of dominant geographic thought precisely creates the possibilities of ‘our understanding of spatial liberation and other emancipatory strategies’” (Purifoy, 2023: 4). Emancipatory strategies like housing and training national staff of organizations, as the CDF does, so that those organizations will be able to “take a stand and offer … growth in child advocacy in their own communities” (Libby, personal interview, 10/25/2023). The CDF model pursues liberatory practices of child advocacy of bolstering, inspiring, and training workers to carry the tasks to their communities. To inspire and train requires a sequestered space. Liberation recognizes that institutional forces seek its demise and, thereby, a secret space is required to fulfill its work. Part of the liberation of Black geographies, their “emancipatory lifeline” (McKittrick, 2006: 18), exists inside their hiddenness. This is the case with CDF Haley Farm and is illustrative of Highlander. It is also exhibited by BattleField Farm and Gardens.

BattleField farm: Since 2018

Food, a universal necessity, significantly influences interpersonal relationships, economies, and the well-being of both human and non-human entities. The management, distribution, and accessibility of food serve as tangible indicators of socio-economic power, control, status, and associations with and proximity to whiteness (McKittrick and Woods, 2007: 3–5). The aftermath of urban renewal in East Knoxville in the mid-twentieth century resulted in a community that stands as the city's most impoverished and with the highest concentration of Black residents. The concentrated poverty prevalent in East Knoxville has engendered multiple disparities that are easily discernible while traversing east of downtown Knoxville. Manifestations of this disparity include dilapidated infrastructure, such as roads and buildings, and a limited number of local businesses catering to the community's needs. Black residents in East Knoxville also encounter compounded racialized challenges of low-wage labor, lacking sufficient access to healthcare, housing, and opportunities for upward mobility. While this brief historical background may tell a story of struggle and despair, some fissures can appear as places of hope and futurity. Campt (2021: 8) argues for the use of a Black gaze, which forces an engagement of blackness from a different vantage point. A Black gaze that shifts the optics of “looking at” to a politics of looking with, through, and alongside another. Reverend Chris Battle's establishment of BattleField Farm in East Knoxville is a proactive measure aimed at addressing food insecurity, malnutrition, and preventable illnesses linked to poor food choices or a lack thereof. Furthermore, a Black geographic lens allows us to examine East Knoxville not only as a place of blight, death, and degradation but also to attribute life and a sense of Black placemaking despite these dominating factors (Bruno, 2023; Reese, 2019). The cooperative endeavors of BattleField Farm shine a light on their role in creating spaces within the city of Knoxville. These spaces serve as hubs for community gatherings, knowledge-sharing, worship, and the reclamation of agency.

The United States Department of Agriculture has identified over 15 food deserts in Knoxville, characterized by a lack of accessible fresh, healthy, and affordable food options (Klingler, 2022). The widely used but also controversial term “food desert” often falls short in thoroughly analyzing and shedding light on the numerous unethical factors that contribute to the formation of these environments. These communities predominantly depend on fast-food establishments and convenience stores, leading to suboptimal dietary selections, heightened obesity rates, and other diet-related illnesses. The absence of proper food access negatively impacts the quality of life in these communities. We also refer to this concentration of food deserts in predominantly Black neighborhoods as food apartheid, where we are able to notice the socioeconomic connections between structural racism and food access. Similarly, in Reese's (2019) exploration of food access and security in Washington, D.C., she defines Black food geographies as the connection between food apartheid and how Black communities subdue these systemic challenges. Reese depicts Black food geographies as spatial, cultural, and unequally socially produced but also a sign of resistance and resilience in systemically marginalized, Black and Brown communities (2019: 69). In other words, the discursive and material construction of East Knoxville activates Ruth Wilson Gilmore's definition of racism: “the state-sanctioned or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death” (2022).

We can approach these complexities through a Black geographic lens, which sheds light on how food geographies shape the experiences of food apartheid in Knoxville and across the United States. This perspective helps us see how food justice, economic justice, and racial justice are interconnected, including in the Appalachian South. It also raises the question: What does liberation through food and ministry look like for the Black communities and people of color (McCutcheon, 2015: 386)? Through the work of Rev. Chris Battle, we catch a glimpse of an imagined future through food access and security.

Reverend Chris Battle of BattleField Farm

Former Senior Pastor Chris Battle left his role at Tabernacle Baptist Church and embraced urban farming as a new calling. Motivated by a passion for social justice and addressing food disparities in East Knoxville, Battle founded BattleField Farm, a community garden, in 2018. Initially, the project faced challenges through land access and community buy-in; however, Battle later secured a 2-acre plot through community support. BattleField Farm aims to combat food insecurity by harvesting produce, hosting events, and teaching gardening and composting to the community. Similar to Battle's efforts, Reese (2018: 411) denotes that Black communities’ investment in self-reliance is a political and cultural framework for communal uplift.

The farm, located at 3624 Boyd's Bridge Pike in Knoxville (Figure 4), emphasizes inclusivity, aiming to bring people of diverse backgrounds together. The initiative addresses food apartheid in Knoxville, particularly on the city's east side food deserts, where limited access to affordable and nutritious food is prevalent and the lack of access to grocery stores and healthy food options contributes to food insecurity. Battle stresses the importance of advocating for better nutrition and providing accessible fresh fruits and vegetables, challenging the notion that one's zip code should determine one's ability to eat healthily.

History, origin, and inception of the Farm

Rev. Chris Battle started pastoring in Kentucky more than 25 years ago, and made his way to Knoxville in 2008. Driven by a desire to change the culture of the Black church, Battle realized that only 20% of the people in Knoxville attend church regularly (once a month). He grappled with how the church can be done differently to attract more members. In 2016, Rev. Battle formulated the idea of establishing a community garden when he recognized the issues of food disparities and food deserts in across East Knoxville neighborhoods. However, the garden alone was not enough to address the widespread problem. In his determination to make a difference, he reached out to nearby churches, encouraging them to start their gardens. In the process, Battle discovered that the garden became a place where he met more people in the first gardening season than he had during his tenure as a pastor at Tabernacle. This realization sparked an idea—why not bring the church to the garden? Now, his church meets at the farm.

Subsequently, he engaged in a discussion with Robert Hodge, Director of the Center of Urban Agriculture at the Knoxville Botanical Gardens, seeking his insights on community gardening. Rev. Battle's primary concern revolved around the connection between church accessibility and the availability of food for residents in the 37915 and 37914 zip codes in Knoxville. His particular emphasis was laid on the 37914-area due to its heightened vulnerability to food disparities in Knox County. Importantly, this region grapples with roughly 12 food deserts, impacting approximately 53,000 residents (Klinger, 2022), with 70.4% identifying as individuals from racial or ethnic minorities (USDA, 2023). Reese (2018: 409) notes that there is a considerable amount of research that highlights race as a significant factor in determining food access. Battle's ability to operate within the confines of these food deserts is a spatial anomaly in a community that is faced with figurative and literal violence. As McCutcheon (2011: 192) notes, there is agency in the formation of community through food.

BattleField Farm outreach

Rev. Battle and his team of volunteers facilitate access to fresh produce for East Knoxville residents through the Fannie Lou Veggie Van, a mobile initiative that transports vegetables directly to the community (Figure 5). The presence of the Fannie Lou, named after civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer, demonstrates a commitment to honoring Black historical figures and their contribution to the Black liberation struggle. For Fannie Lou Hamer, prioritizing the feeding of hungry Black individuals was crucial, and she connected with the plight of the impoverished and hungry, having personally endured hunger and malnutrition during her youth (McCutcheon, 2019). Fannie Lou makes her weekly rounds throughout the region on Wednesdays and Thursdays, delivering fresh produce free of charge to cash-strapped members of the community. Throughout the route, halting at various subsidized housing complexes, one can only observe the racial disparities that exist within the city of Knoxville that have rendered the city's east side undeserving of a full-service grocery store. As Reese (2019: 11) defines: “Food justice is fundamentally about racial justice because in the United States race and racism not only structure everyday experiences but also influence the (under)development of neighborhoods and the implementation of policies that disproportionately disenfranchise Black communities.” The amalgamation of limited food accessibility, low rates of car ownership, low-wage employment, and unreliable public transportation creates a recipe for adversity. In conversation with Rev. Battle, he noted his initial surprise at the significant number of individuals confined to wheelchairs because of diseases and ailments related to food insecurity. He aspires for future generations of Black residents in East Knoxville to avoid a similar destiny.

In his role as a farmer/gardener, Rev. Battle is guided by a belief commonly held: “If everyone grew one crop, we'd eat for free.” Straightforward yet impactful, his conviction led to the establishment of another initiative—the Rooted East Collective. The Rooted East members have embraced the principle of “teaching a man to fish” and translated it into the realm of gardening and food cultivation. By furnishing essential supplies such as raised beds, nutritious soil, and fertilizer, as well as seeds or seedlings, they play a vital role in sharing imperative knowledge about food sovereignty and production. Additionally, they contribute to alleviating some of the financial strains on residents in east Knoxville who may be facing financial challenges. While growing food requires time, with the right knowledge and tools, communities and households can initiate the process of providing for those experiencing food insecurity.

Furthermore, BattleField Farm in conjunction with partner organizations 5 Points Up, the National Women in Agriculture Association, SEEED Knoxville, and Nourish Knoxville came together to form the Eastside Sunday Market. The market serves as an exclusive venue for vendors, showcasing seasonal produce, artisanal crafts, and locally prepared cuisine from various locations within East Tennessee. This ability to foster solidarity within East Knoxville is a form of community building and the Eastside Sunday market is a tangible outcome of food accessibility solutions and upliftment.

Future plans for East Knoxville

Since leaving the Tabernacle Baptist Church in 2019, Rev. Battle has made it his personal goal to address food injustice in East Knoxville. Battle continues to work in collaboration with community organizations, such as NourishKnox, United Way of Greater Knoxville, and other faith-based organizations. He believes that retirement will be a possibility when a full-service grocery store (one that sells fresh fruits, vegetables, a variety of uncooked meats, dried and canned foods, and an array of non-food items as well) makes its way to the region. Rev. Battle holds the conviction of the late Fannie Lou Hamer “if the black communities are going to move economically and politically, they must have non-federal funds” (Hamer in Fallows, 1969: 1). To authentically establish a community-run and operated grocery store that caters to the needs of the residents, the city, which bears responsibility for the current state of East Knoxville, cannot be engaged in the process. Battle is currently searching for potential retail spaces that would be suitable for the project.

Through a Black Geographies lens, we can interpret Rev. Chris Battle and BattleField Farm as a powerful example of Black placemaking and a manifestation of the struggle for Black liberation. We can see Rev. Battle's use of food in his ministry as a form of Black placemaking and narrative building, reflecting Eaves and McCutcheon's analysis of how similar tools operate through religion in the Black US South (McCutcheon and Eaves, 2023). The farm represents the resilience and liberatory power of faith, narrative building, and community work, showing how Black individuals continue to take ownership of their food source and create sustainable change within their communities (Harris and Hyden, 2017: 57–59). Ruth Wilson Gilmore (2022: 351) tells us that place-making is a normal human activity where we figure out how to combine people, land, and other resources with our social capacity to organize ourselves in a variety of ways. Battle's decision to bring the church to the garden demonstrates a reimagining of religious spaces through a Black Geographies lens. By gathering at the farm, the church becomes more accessible and inclusive, fostering a deeper connection with both nature and the community. This challenges traditional notions of church and creates a space where people can explore their faith in a way that resonates with their experiences as Black individuals.

With East Knoxville having its fair share of prevalent stereotypes, including underresourced schools deemed “dangerous,” deteriorated housing, and food options limited to corner stores and fast food restaurants, BattleField Farm emerges as a “dark agora.” Drawing from J.T. Roane's conceptualization (2023: 33), dark agoras are unaccounted-for spaces and forms of Black gathering, often misrepresented solely as places of terror and danger. This form of assembly in East Knoxville embodies a characteristic duality with its association with darkness yet constitutes a point of possibility and power within this stigmatized locale (Roane, 2023: 29). Black stories and ways of being demonstrated by BattleField Farm possess the capacity to breach the heavy weight of dispossession and loss as they are embedded with liberatory clues and resistances.

Rev. Battle's involvement in establishing the East Side Sunday Market, alongside the community garden and the Rooted East Collective, significantly contributes to Black placemaking and placekeeping in East Knoxville. This initiative addresses the issue of food deserts by providing widespread access to fresh produce. Battle's actions signify a departure from the imposed negative perceptions of the area, reflecting a form of resistance aligned with McKittrick's (2021: 44) argument regarding rebellion as a method to think about the praxis of Black life and livingness. Additionally, Battle's use of land offers the possibility of temporal and spatial control while functioning as a semi-autonomous space of cultural production imbued with a sense of burden and creative possibility (Posmentier, 2017: 40–41). This signifies an inherent intent to redefine the valuation, visibility, and recognition of marginalized communities, illustrating that the people of East Knoxville transcend projected marginality and persist in shaping and creating new futures through sites like BattleField Farm.

Conclusion

Black geographies are capacious. The framework of Black geographies helps engage places, regions, and communities that might have otherwise gone unseen or that were interpreted as disparate. The Highlander Research and Education Center, Children's Defense Fund/Alex Haley Farm, and BattleField Farm represent what Katherine McKittrick (2006) refers to as “absented presence,” a concept that examines the anti-Black exclusionary contradictions of hegemonic spatial production and knowledges. Centering Black geographies augments our understanding of Appalachia and provides more nuance for investigating questions of region. Our research suggests that these three sites individually and collectively enable Black geographic understandings of spatial liberation and other liberatory strategies. Inherent in these forms of Black worldbuilding is an emphasis on varying forms of solidarity and coalition building, which are inherent in all three. For example, BattleField Farm relies on volunteer labor and collaborative partners who are not exclusively Black. Such a praxis mirrors the interracial solidarities found at Highlander and the CDF/Alex Haley Farm.

Highlander, CDF/Alex Haley Farm, and BattleField Farm function as sites for potential liberation in a region historically characterized by Black exclusion, erasure, dispossession, and displacement. Furthermore, their existence and activities disrupt our understanding of the Appalachian South as a place solely defined by this displacement, dispossession, and violence, and serve as one way to essentially rewrite the region as a radical space and this is exemplified through their work, reminding us, “We must remember that Black geographies, first and foremost, exist in the praxes of Black people, a tradition that continues across various Black communities” (Bledsoe et al., 2018: 13). Examining these sites through a Black geographies framework emphasizes an orientation that does not rely on narratives of mere despair about Black life, particularly in the Appalachian region, and proposes richer understandings of the ways that East Tennessee offers a spiritual and intimate space for cultivating Black livingness (McKittrick, 2021) instead.