In North Carolina, a Black farmer purchased the plantation where his ancestors were enslaved—and is taking back his family’s story, his community’s health, and the soil beneath his feet.

This story was published recently by The Bitter Southerner magazine, in print and online.

In the months before Patrick Brown was born in November 1982, his father, Arthur, lay down on a road near the family’s farm to prevent a caravan of yellow dump trucks from depositing toxic soil in his community. The governor of North Carolina had authorized the dumping of the soil, contaminated with polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs, which had been linked to cancer, in the rural county.

A preacher and a farmer, the elder Brown knew the chemicals would likely leach into the sandy loam and clay soil of Warren County, located in North Carolina’s northeastern Piedmont region, up near the Virginia border. He knew they could contaminate the water and make residents sick—and like hundreds of his fellow protesters, he believed that his community was being targeted because it was one of the poorest in the state, populated mostly by people of color.

“That’s my dad right there,” says Patrick Brown, 41, pointing on his phone to a black-and-white photo of his father being arrested. Around 55 at the time, Arthur wears a suit, tie, and round spectacles, and he is being carried away by three helmeted police officers, one holding him under each arm, another under his legs. Looking straight ahead, he appears dignified, calm, and self-assured.

Ultimately, the protest was not successful. The state dumped 7,097 truckloads—40,000 tons—of toxic soil in a Warren County landfill. Though the community was forced to live alongside hazardous waste, their actions gained the attention of prominent civil rights and environmental leaders—and ignited the national environmental justice movement.

It raised awareness that polluting industries and toxic waste facilities are often sited in communities of color and established how ordinary citizens can organize to fight back. Many national and international climate-justice actions today, in fact, grew directly out of the model established in Warren County.

The protest also shaped the legacy inherited by the child born a few months later. “That’s how I got my name, PCB—Patrick Chandler Brown,” Patrick says. “I was named after what happened.”

Patrick’s connection to his land in Warren County—and his commitment to building sovereignty for his family and community—stretches back two generations past his father, to his great-grandfather Byron, who was enslaved nearby until the end of the Civil War. Patrick currently operates Brown Family Farms on the land that Byron worked as a sharecropper once he was freed.

In the rural Hecks Grove community—less than a mile from where Robert E. Lee’s daughter Annie Carter Lee was buried after dying at 23 of typhoid fever—the land has a long and complicated history. Patrick Brown, who was named North Carolina’s Small Farmer of the Year by North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University this year, grows almost 200 acres of industrial hemp for both oil and fiber, and 11 acres and several greenhouses of vegetables—beets, kale, radishes, peppers, okra, and bok choy. He also cultivates 75 acres of wheat, 83 acres of soybeans, 65 acres of corn, and 45 acres of hardwoods and pine trees.

On a cloudy morning in April, Brown stands outside the incubation house that holds trays of vegetable starts, each marked with a popsicle-stick label, mapping out the work for the day. The clouds hang dark gray in the sky, and tender new leaves emerge from the towering willow oak  behind the brick ranch farmhouse at the center of the farm’s production area.

At 6 feet, 1 inch, he has large round eyes and a dark beard peppered with gray. He’s serious, measured, and focused, but also kind. Today he wears a dark gray button-up work shirt with two patches on it—one says “Brown Family Farms & Produce, Est. 1865,” the other “Patrick / Owner”—tucked neatly into a pair of black cargo pants. The white soles of his well-worn leather work boots are covered in dirt.

“Ideally, we’d get this sweet corn in the ground today,” he says, indicating a bag of organic seed and a nearby half-acre plot of loose brown soil. In about a month, the second or third week of May, he will plant almost 200 acres of hemp, the cornerstone of his operation.

In this work with the land, Brown is carrying out acts of reclamation, finding ways to push back against the systems designed to oppress people of color. In a county that was intentionally poisoned—and a world suffering from a changing climate—he is reviving the soil under his feet by transitioning away from pesticide-dependent row crops like tobacco to industrial hemp, which is known to sequester carbon and remediate soil, and using earth-friendly organic and regenerative methods.

And in a region where many residents suffer from diet-related illnesses and do not have easy access to grocery stores selling fresh foods, Patrick offers vegetable boxes through a community supported agriculture (CSA) program, as well as by producing hemp-derived CBD products meant to reduce chronic pain by holistic, non-pharmaceutical methods.

“He is incredibly business-oriented and entrepreneurial, but he is grounded, he’s literally grounded in the earth and the values of Black family life,” says Jereann King Johnson, a Warrenton organizer and cultural historian who has long known the Brown family and hosted Patrick on a public panel discussion about Black land ownership and land loss a couple of years ago. “The values that have been instilled in him from his family—of being a good steward of the land, caring for the community, being a good businessperson—that whole legacy of the Brown family—when you see him and talk to him, he is enshrined in those values.”

In addition to admiring his approach to farming, Johnson respects the way he thinks beyond his own operation and advocates for policies that benefit others, especially young farmers and farmers of color—those the system excludes. “He is a guiding light for young farmers,” she continues. “It’s not just the practice of farming that he is engaged in, but also exploring ways to best pursue resources through America’s bigger farming system.”

Brown’s connection to his land in Warren County—and his commitment to building sovereignty for his family and community—stretches back two generations past his father, to his great-grandfather Byron, who was enslaved nearby until the end of the Civil War.

On top of farming, Brown works full time for the social justice nonprofit Nature for Justice, which helps communities at the front lines of the climate crisis work toward solutions. As director of farmer inclusion, his job is to distribute $1.7 million over five years to farmers of color in North Carolina in order to help them implement regenerative farming methods that sequester carbon and restore soil and ecosystem health. And he serves as chair of the board of the Eva Clayton Rural Food Institute, founded in January 2023 to help deliver healthy food to communities in rural North Carolina.

In 2021, he carried out the ultimate act of reclamation, purchasing the plantation house and surrounding 2.5 acres where his great-grandfather Byron had been enslaved. “Now, I own it,” he says, holding in his palm the weighty set of skeleton keys that unlock the doors of Oakley Grove house and the outbuildings surrounding it.

Over the next few years, he has plans to create a family museum, event venue, and education center for young farmers and farmers of color—ways to honor his family, make extra income, and serve farmers like him. While his ancestors were forced to inhabit this place, he is choosing to, and transforming it into a space that serves his needs.

Farming Through Four Generations

In the early 19th century, Oakley Grove plantation was owned by a medical doctor named Lafayette Browne and his wife, Mary Ann Falcon Browne. At its peak, it was a sprawling 7,000-acre operation that raised tobacco, cotton, and wheat with the labor of more than 175 enslaved people. It was such an agricultural player that the state of North Carolina ran railroad tracks to the property to export its goods up north.

Driving his white farm truck from the plantation house through the former Oakley Grove territory last year, Brown emphasizes its size. From the main house, we drive at 45 mph for 10 minutes, and we’re still on former plantation land. “All of this, on the left side of the road, is all plantation, all the way down here,” he says as we descend a hill. “It was huge. It was huge.” He shudders to imagine the amount of backbreaking work it would have taken to manage all that land without the help of modern-day farm equipment.

After Lafayette died in his early 40s in 1841, his son Jacob managed the plantation alongside his mother—and at one point inherited a young woman of color named Lucinda Fain, who is said to have had very light skin. Exploiting the unequal power dynamic, as was common on Southern plantations, Jacob arranged for Fain to work as a cook in the big house and had multiple children by her. Byron, the first of nine, was born in 1850. Because his skin was fair, he worked in the house, where his grandmother Mary Browne groomed him to become an overseer.

Jacob went on to have many more children by a white woman. While his white descendants spell “Browne” with an “e” on the end—and inherited all of his land and wealth—his descendants of color, as was often the case, were forced to drop the last vowel, and inherited nothing. During our visit, Patrick takes me to a Browne family graveyard tucked back in the woods, which holds the white descendants of Lafayette, Mary Ann, and Jacob. “Watch out for copperheads,” he says, as we make our way through the tall grasses to the granite headstones. “This is where I found out I had a lot of cousins.”

In 1865, when he was 14, Byron was walking through the woods when he ran across a Confederate soldier, who told him that the Civil War had ended and he could no longer be forced to work for free. He returned to the plantation house to share the news with his mother and sister Flora, then fled on foot to the southeast side of Warren County, to the township of Shocco. He found work there as a sharecropper, on a farm down present-day Lickskillet Road.

When the owner of the land where Byron was sharecropping died, he willed Byron at least 10 acres. By the time Byron passed away in 1931, he had accumulated 2,000 acres, on which he grew timber and raised livestock. “My great-great-grandfather looked Caucasian, so he carried himself as if he was,” Patrick says.

When Byron died, he willed 200 acres of land and increments of cash to each of his children, but most of them had migrated north because they “wanted to get as far away from Warren County as they could,” Patrick Brown says. His grandfather, Grover, was the only one who elected to stay and farm—and as a result (to the dismay of his siblings), he inherited a sum of more than $100,000.

Grover established a peach orchard in 1935, and cultivated grain and raised livestock until the late 1970s. On the side, he ran a general store that contained a butcher shop—and even had part ownership of a bodega in Brooklyn, New York.

“My grandfather was a stubborn old man,” Brown says, pointing out a black-and-white photograph of Grover, sitting next to Arthur on a picnic table bench, wearing a suit and tie with his mouth turned down into a sour expression. “He was very business oriented. He never smiled. When he was in the field, he had suits on. He was a people’s person with respect and honor and dignity, but small talk and stuff like that? That wasn’t him.”

Brown’s father, Arthur, was born in 1927. Though two of his fingers were webbed on each hand, he never let that get in the way—and, in fact, played catcher for semi-pro baseball teams. “He never used it as an excuse,” he says.

As a preacher, Arthur—known as “Reverend Doctor A.A. Brown,” or simply “A.A.”—served more than six congregations over 60 years. “Everybody knew him—he was a patriarch in this community,” he says. “He preached a lot of funerals, a lot of weddings; he would preach on Sundays and go to convalescent homes in the evenings. Monday through Friday, it was all farming; Saturday and Sunday was taking care of members of his church, providing some type of support to the community. He just did a lot.”

Larry Hedgepeth, a 70-year-old Black farmer with a white mustache and two gold teeth, rented and farmed Arthur’s land for 15 years after Arthur retired. He still grows soybeans in neighboring Vance and Franklin counties. He describes the reverend as a quiet, gentle man who always looked out for others. “He’d plant watermelons and take them to a person’s house, and if they weren’t home, he’d leave them on the porch. Same thing with butter beans, string beans, and tomatoes,” he says. “He was a community man.”

He was also an activist. In addition to asserting the right of his community to maintain a clean environment by protesting the toxic waste landfill, he was involved with voter registration projects alongside Eva McPherson Clayton, a friend of the Brown family and the first African American woman elected to Congress from North Carolina, serving five terms in the U.S. House of Representatives and holding a post on the Agriculture Committee.

“He was a standout person,” says Clayton, 89, over the phone while tending tomatoes in her backyard garden. “He was not only an advocate for justice, but he was an example of what you do trying to be responsible to have justice. He exemplified good citizenship, he exemplified good business, and he carried on his father’s tradition in farming.”

Civil Eats Newsmatch banner reading
On the farm, Arthur raised some livestock and vegetables but mostly grew row crops like tobacco. Patrick’s mother, Celeste, was an educator. She served as a high school principal for 11 years and then worked two decades in the schools’ central office.

In 1998, after 52 states and territories signed a settlement agreement with the four largest tobacco companies in the U.S. to resolve lawsuits associated with the cost of treating smoking-related illnesses, Arthur accepted a buyout, distributed by the Golden LEAF Foundation, to help him transition away from the crop. He used the money to pay off the farm loans he had with the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). A year later, however, he began having strokes—two while atop the riding mower out on the farm—and had to stop working. He began leasing his land to Hedgepeth, who grew tobacco, soybeans, and wheat.

In August 2020, Celeste went to the hospital for a heart valve replacement and died unexpectedly the next day from complications. Arthur passed away in February 2023 at the age of 95. Their joint tombstone, featuring a dove, a cross, and an oval portrait of them together, sits in the cemetery of the brick Union Grove Baptist Church, overlooking the family farm—and, on many days, their son out working the field, following in the footsteps of the three generations before him.

“I see it,” Clayton says. “He is aware that he has the honor, as well as the responsibility, of carrying on the tradition of his parents and his family.”