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• Where did the community land trust come from?
• What was New Communities, Inc.?
• What ideas and experiments came before the CLT?
• Who were the pioneers of the CLT movement?
• How did CLTs spread from rural Georgia to cities and around the world?

Where did the community land trust come from?

The modern CLT was born in the civil rights movement in southwest Georgia. In 1969, leaders of the Albany Movement and their allies founded New Communities, Inc. to hold land in trust for Black farmers and their families, who were being forced off the land by the mechanization of farming and in retaliation for registering to vote. It is often called the first CLT.

The idea drew on much older ones, from England’s garden cities and India’s Gramdan villages to Israel’s cooperative farm settlements and American experiments with leased land. John Emmeus Davis tells the whole story in the Roots of the CLT Movement, and the Timeline of the CLT Movement traces it year by year.

Sources

• John Emmeus Davis, The Gardener’s Guide, in Roots of the CLT Movement (2014; on cltweb.org).
• CLT Center, New Communities (history and timeline, 1960–2020).
• CLT Center, Timeline of the CLT Movement.

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What was New Communities, Inc.?

New Communities, Inc. grew out of the Albany Movement, one of the first mass campaigns of the civil rights era. Slater King, its president, along with Charles and Shirley Sherrod, C.B. King, Fay Bennett of the National Sharecroppers Fund, Bob Swann, Father Albert J. McKnight and others, came to believe that Black families in the rural South would only be free to stand up for their rights if they controlled the land they lived and worked on. After a 1968 trip to Israel to study cooperative farm settlements on leased land, they incorporated New Communities in 1969 “to hold land in perpetual trust for the permanent use of rural communities.”

In January 1970 it bought about 5,700 acres near Leesburg, Georgia, at the time the largest tract of land owned by African Americans in the United States. It farmed corn, peanuts, soybeans, watermelons and cattle, but heavy debt, drought, a blocked federal grant and discriminatory lending by the Farmers Home Administration cost it the land in the 1980s. New Communities survived as an organization. In 2009 it won a $12 million settlement in the Black farmers’ discrimination case against the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and in 2011 it bought the 1,600-acre Cypress Pond Plantation near Albany. Its story continues.

The idea took shape on a month-long trip to Israel in 1968, when eight Southern activists, among them Slater and Marion King, Charles Sherrod, Bob Swann and Fay Bennett, studied cooperative farm settlements built on land leased from the Jewish National Fund. Slater King was killed in a car accident in 1969, a month after New Communities took an option on the land, and Charles Sherrod became its president. The planned residential communities were never built, because the federal grant to build them was blocked by Georgia’s governor, Lester Maddox. You can hear its founders in Pioneers of New Communities (1971).

Sources

• CLT Center, New Communities (history and timeline, 1960–2020).
• John Emmeus Davis, The Gardener’s Guide, in Roots of the CLT Movement (2014; on cltweb.org).
• CLT Center, CLT Hall of Fame.

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What ideas and experiments came before the CLT?

Many. From abroad came England’s garden cities, planned towns built on land held for the community; India’s Gramdan movement, in which villagers gave their land to be held by the village as a whole; and the moshav and kibbutz settlements of Israel, built on land leased from the Jewish National Fund. The idea that rising land values are created by the community, not the owner, came from the English economist John Stuart Mill and the American Henry George, whose followers founded “single-tax” colonies on community-owned land.

In the United States, Ralph Borsodi, Mildred Loomis and Arthur Morgan started leased-land communities in the 1930s and 1940s, and Borsodi was the first to call them “land trusts.” Clarence Jordan’s Koinonia Farm in Georgia, an interracial farming community, linked these ideas to the civil rights leaders who would found New Communities. John Emmeus Davis traces these roots in the Gardener’s Guide: see International Precursors and Domestic Pioneers.

The first book on the model, published in 1972, also cited the ejido of Mexico and the Ujamaa villages of Tanzania as examples of “ethical land tenure.” And John Emmeus Davis notes an older root still: many Native American peoples regarded land as a resource given to all, not property to be bought and sold.

Sources

• John Emmeus Davis, The Gardener’s Guide, in Roots of the CLT Movement (2014; on cltweb.org).
• International Independence Institute, The Community Land Trust: A Guide to a New Model for Land Tenure in America (1972).
• CLT Center, CLT Hall of Fame.

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Who were the pioneers of the CLT movement?

The CLT Hall of Fame honors the people whose ideas and work made the CLT possible. They include the thinkers Henry George, Ebenezer Howard, Vinoba Bhave, Ralph Borsodi, Mildred Loomis and Arthur Morgan; the founders of New Communities, among them Slater King, C.B. King, Charles Sherrod, Shirley Sherrod, Fay Bennett and Father Albert J. McKnight; Bob Swann, who did more than anyone to define and spread the model; and later organizers such as Chuck Matthei.

You can also hear several of them in their own words in our Interviews, including Bob Swann, Ralph Borsodi, Charles Sherrod and the pioneers of New Communities.

A few of the people the Hall of Fame honors, and what they did: Bob Swann (1918–2003), a pacifist and house designer, helped establish New Communities and co-authored the 1972 book that first defined the “classic” CLT. Fay Bennett (1914–2002), head of the National Sharecroppers Fund, was a founding board member of New Communities and persuaded the Fund to pay for the option on its land. Charles and Shirley Sherrod led New Communities from 1969 to 1985; Shirley Sherrod later served as Georgia state director of USDA Rural Development. Father Albert J. McKnight (1927–2016), who organized cooperatives and credit unions across the rural South, was New Communities’ first vice president. Mildred Loomis (1900–1986), longtime director of the School of Living, spread Ralph Borsodi’s idea of the “land trust” in the United States and abroad.

The urban CLT has its own pioneers. Maurice McCrackin (1905–1997) and Sister Barbara Wheeler (1924–2014) helped organize the Community Land Cooperative of Cincinnati in 1980, the first urban CLT in the United States. Chuck Matthei (1948–2002), as director of the Institute for Community Economics, led the teams that produced The Community Land Trust Handbook (1982) and the first CLT legal manual (1991), and did more than anyone, John Emmeus Davis writes, to give CLTs their commitment to serving the poor.

Sources

• CLT Center, CLT Hall of Fame.
• CLT Center, Interviews.
• CLT Center, CLT Hall of Fame: individual profiles.
• Kirby White, ed., The CLT Technical Manual (2011), chapter 1 (history of the CLT, by John Emmeus Davis).

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How did CLTs spread from rural Georgia to cities and around the world?

In 1972, Bob Swann and his colleagues published The Community Land Trust: A Guide to a New Model for Land Tenure in America, the first book on the model. Through the 1970s and early 1980s, a handful of rural and urban CLTs experimented with it, and the Institute for Community Economics helped them. By 1985 there were about a dozen. Then cities took notice, starting with Burlington, Vermont, in 1984, and CLTs became a tool for permanently affordable homeownership. By 2010 there were more than 200 in 46 states.

CLTs also spread abroad: to England, Canada, Australia and Belgium, and to the Global South, from Voi, Kenya, in the 1990s to San Juan, Puerto Rico, in 2004. By 2024 the CLT Center’s CLT Map counted 627 CLTs worldwide, more of them outside the United States than inside. Read the full story in From Model to Movement.

Several things drove the growth: the Institute for Community Economics, which trained and financed early CLTs; city governments that saw CLTs as a way to keep publicly funded homes affordable; national networks in the United States and England; and, more recently, international exchange among CLTs in the Global North and South.

Sources

• John Emmeus Davis, The Gardener’s Guide, in Roots of the CLT Movement (2014; on cltweb.org).
• International Independence Institute, The Community Land Trust: A Guide to a New Model for Land Tenure in America (1972).
• CLT Center, CLT Map and Directory (last updated November 2024).
• John Emmeus Davis, Line Algoed and María E. Hernández-Torrales, eds., On Common Ground: International Perspectives on the Community Land Trust (Terra Nostra Press, 2020).

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