The sun beat down on the vegetable stand on 115th Street, across from St. John Missionary Baptist Church in far south Roseland. Fresh cantaloupes, yams, and tomatoes baked in the 90-degree heat. Three volunteers, organized by church leader Donnell Williams, waited patiently for customers behind the table, sipping ice water. Sweat beaded on Williams’s forehead, but a smile never left his face. “It’s a small start, but you’ve got to start somewhere,” said Williams, 31. One of his helpers—actually, his mom—retreated to the car to listen to Rainbow/PUSH in the comfort of the air-conditioning.
Reverend Sampson has been organizing farmers’ markets across the south side for 32 years, since long before the term food desert entered the vernacular. He started in 1978 with just one, at Fernwood United Methodist, a few years after he took over as pastor, and he’s managed about five a year since then. In April, Sampson announced he was making a much bigger push. His goal: 20 markets, one for each of the 20 traditionally black wards of Chicago. “It will be the largest mobilization of black farmers’ food in the history of this town,” Sampson told a gathering of community organizers.
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Sampson began his civil rights work in 1959 as a student at Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina, preaching to nearby farming families. “Black farmers—they fed us when no one else did,” Sampson says. “And they have never been honored.” In 1960, not long after Greensboro’s famous Woolworth sit-ins, he and another black student sat down at a whites-only lunch counter in a McCrory-McLellan store in Raleigh, refused to leave, and were arrested. They had no money for bail, but the judge allowed a black farmer to put up his land title to get them out of jail. Sampson says he figures the judge hoped they’d skip north so the county could keep the farmer’s land. The two students were later found guilty of trespassing in the state supreme court, but more sit-ins and other demonstrations were increasing pressure on stores. In October of that year, McCrory-McLellan, Woolworth, and other department stores integrated their lunch counters.
“For years, black folk have been going down south and getting the vegetables from family,” Sampson says. “Let’s produce a marriage between black farmers down south and the black consumers up north. As a minister, there’s some weddings I don’t have to charge.”
The single-story city hall in Hopkins Park sits on a small hill at the village’s central intersection. As we walk in, Sampson gets a bear hug from a burly man in a blue turtleneck. “Brother John Thurman!” Sampson greets him, then says to me, “He’s passing on the seeds of his farm to his sons and daughters.” Thurman, 49, has nine children, most of whom still live in the county and help him with his vegetable farm each summer. He inherited five acres from his father and grew the farm to 29 tillable acres.
I ask Sampson to take me out to one of the farms. We leave city hall and he drives me to Pop Ivy’s place—east of town, past a shuttered Kwik-Mart. We pass a pair of hitchhikers thumbing beside the road, but Sampson doesn’t pick them up. “I should get the Nobel Prize for driving you around,” he says.
Most of Sampson’s markets are set up outside churches. “That’s a great concept,” says Joel Gruver, a professor of agriculture at Western Illinois University. “If the church has a large enough congregation, that’s quite a few ready customers.”
