Community Action Interview with Dawud Ummah
At first, farming didn’t leave a strong impression on Dawud Ummah. “With the migration,” he says, “with folks coming up from the South, moving up North, being a farmer wasn’t the hippest thing.” No one wanted to be portrayed as country or backward. Dawud later went on to do time in the military and serve overseas in England, and the first gulf war. He recounts that the first gulf war was called the battle of all battles. He recalls the pollution--oil fields on fire, smoke, tanks, and destroyed property--with a few simple words: “it was just a mess.” Although he was a medic, Dawud felt a responsibility for the destruction left behind. He had to correct his mistakes. And to do so, he became a farmer, not out of family upbringing, but for a desire. to right previous wrongs and became a veteran for peace.
He bought his first farm in Litchfield in the early 1990s and introduced agriculture to his kids, teaching them to be conscious of processing and food. He went on to create an organization called the Center for African heritage, which focused on youth. However, due to life changes, Dawud found himself in Cleveland again, where he had family. Around him, he saw processed food and pollution, and again, Dawud began to farm. He started an organization, Asphalt Farming, working primarily with retirees to convert parking lots into inner-city gardens.
Dawud describes his return to farming this way, saying, “once you get into it, it becomes part of your nature, part of a desire that you have that’s just driving you to a point of connecting with the earth, reconnecting with nature, reconnecting with the community in a different way.”
Perhaps this best sums up the agriculture journey that Dawud has lived for the last three decades. To Dawud, farming is not simply a career. It’s a mindset. In his own words, “the earth is like a parent.” It communicates in its own way. It deserves respect. In his worldview, nobody owns the land. Every farmer is a custodian and every farmer is allowed to make a living for themselves, but not as an owner, as that has “never been the offer from the creator.” To own the land isn’t to respect the land. To respect it is to maintain it.
Dawud continues this line of thinking when it comes to his view on the climate crisis. His hometown, Cleveland, was often called “the mistake by the lake,” as he was growing up. Dawud remembers polluted air due to steel mills, chemicals on the land, water pollution that was once so thick that the river caught fire, and a level of toxicity that normally affected Black neighborhoods the worst. His words touched on the point of environmental racism and the propensity of toxins to end up in Black neighborhoods. In Cleveland, environmental pollution coincided with the war on drugs, which Dawud describes as turning the city into a “dope field,” or an “alcohol field,” to a level that still affects the community today. Coupled with the poor food quality, the pollution had a heavy human cost: it left people stuck in their situations like “prisoners of war,” as he describes it, trapped in low-paying jobs, unable to progress, unable to flourish, and unable to fight against the rising toxicity in their communities.
In his youth, Dawud left Cleveland to escape this pollution and ended up in Los Angeles, before finding Los Angeles polluted too and entering into the military. But he found the military polluted too, in the war, and decided to handle the problem himself, opting to buy farmland outside of the city. He phrases it this way, saying, “I [didn’t] have any choice but to be an environmentalist.”
His environmentalism is multi-dimensional, as is his measure of progress. As opposed to an individualistic, self-driven mindset, Dawud approaches farming through another lens--as a means to find himself as a person and as a means to improve the lives of himself and others. In our conversation, I learned he currently has a farm in Turner, where he hopes to change the way meat consumption is viewed. As of now, there’s a lot of waste--from the hide to the byproduct, to the disrespect of the animal in its life and death. Dawud proposes respect for the animal, respect for the farmer, and respect for the customer by improving conditions and raising and ethically processing animals. He hopes to also enable those who have religious restrictions on their food, for example, those who consume halal meats, to access ethical meat. He sums it up this way, “if a person is eating good, has access to good, clean air, and good clean water...they can become caring,” which keeps in line with his desire to build something, instead of destroy, and to bring peace and change in the ways that he can.
For the future, Dawud has high hopes. He wants reparations, which in his own terms, is more than money, it is the restoration of the damage done by colonizers, and the freeing of those caught in the “prison trap” of no mobility, property, peace, or satisfaction. He would like to see more people elevate out of the “prisoner of war” lifestyle, which offers no mobility, peace, or satisfaction. But he acknowledges that his path is not for everyone. There are some who can’t change their view of the land, who can’t change their attitude, making them no different than those who abused the land for centuries. He recognizes there are many coming from desperate situations, who haven’t had the time to reflect, digest, and change the way they look at custodianship and property, but he asserts that this attitude must be changed for success to be had. He also acknowledges that in the current framework of exploitation and theft that comes in the name of profit, none of the changes that create better, healthier lives, come into play. Doing right by the environment is doing right by those who have been repressed. They are linked, indivisibly, and no one will be free from the former crisis without solving the latter.
~ Interview conducted by Ogechi Obi
