A delegation of Black civil rights leaders travels to Israel and returns to establish the first community land trust in the United States.

In June 1968, the Aaron E. Norman Fund covered the travel costs for a delegation of seven civil rights leaders from the South to travel to Israel to study two models of cooperative agricultural communities: kibbutz, a collective farming community where all property is shared; and, moshav, a cooperative village where families own their own land but share resources and services. The delegation included: Fay Bennett, executive director of the Rural Advancement Fund of the National Sharecroppers Fund; Charles Sherrod, director of the Southwest Georgia Community Development Project and a founder of SNCC; Slater King, a businessman from Albany, Georgia; Lewis Black, president of the Federation of Southern Cooperatives; and Albert Turner, coordinator of the Southwest Alabama Farmers’ Cooperative Association.

The delegation returned convinced that Black economic and political power in the South depended on a fundamentally different relationship to land. In Bennett’s words, the goal was to prevent “foreclosure and loss of land – the Achilles’ heel of Southern Black people through the years.'” They convened representatives from major civil rights organizations in Atlanta to explore how to bring the cooperative model to the American South. By 1969, New Communities, Inc. was founded on 5,735 acres in Lee County, Georgia, the largest Black-owned farm cooperative in the United States. Organized as a community land trust — a model of collective land stewardship in which land is owned by a nonprofit and leased permanently to individuals and cooperatives, protecting it from foreclosure and speculation and keeping it in the hands of the community it serves — it was the first of its kind in the country. The Aaron E. Norman Fund’s initial $8,000 grant and subsequent $25,000 loan to New Communities to help purchase Featherfield Farm in Southwest Georgia, helped make it possible. The community land trust model pioneered by New Communities has since become one of the most important tools for preserving affordable land access for low-income communities across the United States.

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