The Final Call

NOI Minister receives prestigious Black Farmers Award

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Dr. Ridgely Muhammad stands with his family and members of the Grant Family while receiving his award during the 8th National Black Land Loss Summit. Photo: Frank Muhammad

"I am honored to receive such a prestigious award," stated Dr. Ridgely, who is also the Minister of Agriculture for the NOI. "Gary (Grant) is carrying on the great works of his father."

Recipients of this award are outstanding individuals who support community-based economic development through Black land retention, family farm sustainability and the development of youth entrepreneurial leadership. The award was established in honor of Mathew Grant, a veteran farmer and entrepreneur, born in Potecasi, N.C., 50 years after slavery and Reconstruction, and just prior to World War II and the ensuing Great Depression. As the youngest of nine siblings, the depressed rural atmosphere of his home and school was alive with oral history about slave ships from Africa docking off the coast of the Atlantic Ocean, and the auctioning of slaves in nearby Murfreesboro. He spent long arduous hours in fields that were only miles away from Nat Turner's Bloody Revolt in Southampton County, Va., and a few acres away from the "Dismal Swamp" where slave ancestors once found their only mortal escape.

Mr. Grant met and married his beloved wife, Florenza Moore in 1940, forming a partnership in pursuit of justice and economic freedom. They focused on educating their six children and other nieces and nephews, who grew up in the Grant household. The two purchased their first farmland in Tillery under then-president Franklin D. Roosevelt's "New Deal Resettlement Project" in January 1947. By that time, Mr. Grant had obtained a certified machinist degree from Hampton Institute, now Hampton University. In the 1970s, the Halifax County Farmers Home Administration (FmHA) initiated a plan to take back Black-owned land acquired in the "New Deal," but the Grant family put up a fight. The powerful struggle against the racist practices of the FmHA and the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) for over 30 years by Mathew Grant and others led to federal reparations of over $600 million awarded to 12,000 Black farmers.

The Grant family home served as a haven of security, love and education for the weary, brokenhearted, students and researchers. In 2001, Mr. Grant and his wife made their transition within five months of each other. The bodies of this loving couple are entombed in a marble sarcophagus where their vegetable garden used to be on their farm in Tillery. Best known for his quiet strength and impeccable character, the man called Mathew will be forever remembered as a man's man.