“On Monday night, July 26, Koinonia Farm’s roadside market was dynamited. About 10:15 p.m. a car evidently came into the driveway, tossed 10 to 15 sticks of dynamite toward the building, and sped away….The front of the building was severely damaged and part of the roof was blown off…The total damage was estimated at $3,000.” I ran across this quote—taken from the Koinonia Farm newsletter—while reading the September 1956 issue of Catholic Worker. It caught my eye, and I had to go back and make sure that I was reading it right. Why? Why would anyone bomb a farm stand? What was Koinonia Farm doing that their neighbors didn’t like?
Koinonia Farm is a commune near Americus, Georgia, founded in 1942 by Baptist pastor Clarence Jordan. As Dallas Lee records in his 1971 book The Cotton Patch Evidence: The Story of Clarence Jordan and the Koinonia Farm Experiment, Clarence grew up as a white kid in the segregated South, but questioned the prevailing white prejudice against Black people. If God loved all people equally, why was there so much racial inequality? That “wasn’t God’s doing, but man’s”—and he resolved to do something about it.
Clarence studied agriculture at Georgia State College of Agriculture in hopes of helping Black farmers learn scientific agriculture and improve their living conditions. But as he completed his degree, he realized that merely improving people’s material lives without addressing their spiritual needs would not ultimately solve the problem. He decided to become a preacher and spent three years at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville. In 1941, he partnered with a missionary named Martin England to form an interracial farming commune, with the goal of giving both agricultural and spiritual training to impoverished Black farmers near Americus, Georgia. They named the farm Koinonia, the Greek word used to describe the communal fellowship of the early Christians in Acts 2:44-45. Clarence used modern soil conservation practices like terracing and crop rotation, but also used chemical fertilizers and was skeptical of the emerging organic gardening movement because of his scientific training.
The Koinonia ideal was anathema in the segregated community of Americus. As soon as local residents heard that Black and white residents were eating together, a Ku Klux Klan motorcade pulled up in front of the farm and delivered a death threat. The Jordan family was excommunicated from the white Baptist church they were attending, and the white children from Koinonia were mercilessly bullied by the other white children at school. Things got really bad in 1956 as racial tensions heated up in Georgia. White Americus residents boycotted Koinonia’s produce, refused to let them purchase supplies and fuel, cancelled the farm’s insurance policies, cut their fences, dumped garbage into their fields, shot bullets into their homes at night, and bombed their farm stand twice. Koinonia did not rebuild the stand after the second bombing, relying on mail orders from more sympathetic regions of the country to sell their produce.
And all of this was because Clarence Jordan simply applied Jesus’s command to “love your neighbor as yourself” to both his Black and white neighbors. Committed pacifists, the Koinonians never retaliated, again following Jesus’s command to “turn the other cheek.” Ironically, most of the farm’s Black residents left when the violence ramped up, so Koinonia was not as fully interracial as Clarence had envisioned. But it survived the violence of the 1950s and continues as an interracial “Intentional Christian Community” today—with an emphasis on sustainable agriculture, creation stewardship, and growing “healthy food in healthy soil.”
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