Safe havens: The intersection of family, religion, and community in black cultural landscapes of the southeastern United States

Abstract While land loss is a central narrative in the story of the black cultural landscape of the southeastern United States, some black families have held the land since Emancipation. Black-owned landholdings today are geophysical and ecological spaces where social, political, cultural, and economic worlds intersect and where the past (often painful) is being both honored and renegotiated in ways that create opportunities for the future. Three dominant themes emerged from our research as key elements of the black cultural landscape today: 1) the importance of family history, (2) the ways that religious beliefs guide understanding of land ownership, and (3) the importance of land ownership to the broader black community. These three components are so intertwined that it is difficult to tease them apart, and their intersubjectivities create a cultural and social system that is not just superimposed upon, but deeply rooted in and enmeshed with, an ecological one.