In 2013, in New York City, what we find is the absence of poignant evaluations of the work of people of color and their contributions to farming community gardening or stewardship of land in public spaces. As the vice-president and visionary for this memorial project, it is incredibly important that we all take the time to look inwards in our communities and to go deeper in our understandings of how we will be remembered after we leave and particularly for people of color and women. There is this huge disparity of the absence of our voices and meaningful recordings or the preservation of our works in the world in the communities that we live, that we give, where we love, where we nurture our old, our children.  So with that deep understanding welling up inside of me as a farmer and as a woman farmer operating in the one of the oldest and largest African-American projects in New York City, I woke up and realized that every year when I looked at my membership roster that I was losing, that we were losing at least four or five people - some people to death, some people had moved away.  Some people were just getting frail and could no longer serve the earth in the way that they might’ve before.  And so with that understanding I took it upon myself and with the permission of my elders and my ancestors I have come to share in its raw, unrefined, uncensored form, the contributions of some people of color to the village of Bedford-Stuyvesant. And this contribution that is in our presentation, in our memorial exhibit, in our prayers that we raise to the ancestors to remember the contributions of our gardeners that have passed on to the ancestor-land. To the remembering of the way we’ve cooked our foods, made our wines, created our pickles, made our breads – all these skills, skills of our carvers and our buildings, our land people - like this is a humble attempt to capture in a very organic manner the efforts of our people to the Hattie Carthan Community Garden in Bedford-Stuyvesant. It is our attempt to reclaim our sovereignty.  Thank You.

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Yonette Fleming, Vice-President of the Hattie Carthan Garden and Founder of the Hattie Carthan Community Market and Herban Farm