At noon on Wednesday, February 23, Calvin Head and Leroy Johnson will present “Mileston Cooperative Farm” as part of the History Is Lunch series. The program will take place in the Craig H. Neilsen Auditorium of the Museum of Mississippi History and Mississippi Civil Rights Museum building and stream live on the Mississippi Department of Archives and History’s Facebook page—https://www.facebook.com/MDAHOfficial—and be available afterwards there as well as on the MDAH YouTube channel—https://www.youtube.com/MDAHVideo and on our History Is Lunch page.
History Is Lunch is sponsored by the John and Lucy Shackelford Charitable Fund of the Community Foundation for Mississippi.
The all-Black Mileston resettlement community in Holmes County was created through an experimental New Deal program that aimed to use the model of cooperative living to lift sharecroppers and tenant farmers out of poverty. Some one hundred families took part in the project, and by 1945 in addition to its farming cooperative Mileston had its own school, health clinic, general store, and cotton gin. After support from the federal government waned, many people stayed on their land. Today thousands of acres are still owned by families of those participants.
“The Mileston community became the cradle of the Freedom and Civil Rights Movement in Holmes County and the catalyst for the movement all over Mississippi,” said Leroy Johnson, Holmes County Board of Supervisors vice president. “Men who owned that land provided a safe haven for Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee members to train and work.”
Leroy Johnson has worked as an organizer, trainer, and manager of movement organizations for more than forty years and has been a visiting lecturer at Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In1989 he co-founded Southern Echo, a social justice, training, and development organization. Johnson, a redistricting expert, is the founding president of the board of Southern Partners Fund foundation.
Calvin Head is a farmer and the director of the Mileston Cooperative Association, which he helped reorganize. He has more than fifteen years of experience as a community organizer. Head earned his BS in social science from Mississippi Valley State University and did advanced coursework in public administration at Jackson State University.
The weekly History Is Lunch lecture series of the Mississippi Department of Archives and History explores different aspects of the state's past. The hour-long programs are held in the Craig H. Neilsen Auditorium of the Museum of Mississippi History and Mississippi Civil Rights Museum building at 222 North Street in Jackson
MDAH livestreams videos of the program at noon on Wednesdays on their Facebook page, https://www.facebook.com/MDAHOfficial/. The videos are posted on the department’s YouTube channel, https://www.youtube.com/MDAHVideo.