Dynamite Hill-Smithfield Community Land Trust
We are creating sustainable residential and cooperative business ownership programs For Susan, her family of nine children, and many others Smithfield is home
A Brief History of the
Dynamite Hill-Smithfield
Community Land Trust
The Dynamite Hill-Smithfield Community Land Trust is a service based community land trust based in the Historic Smithfield Community of Birmingham, Alabama, focusing on permanently affordable housing and homeownership opportunities to low and moderate income families; community stewardship programs; sustainable urban agribus
08/17/2024
"The Land Is Everything." John Boyd, NBFA
Black Farmers Celebrate "Historic" $2 Billion Payout for USDA Discrimination, Still Seek Debt Relief Support our work: https://democracynow.org/donate/sm-desc-ytWe look at the historic $2 billion payout by the U.S. Department of Agriculture to farmers who ex...
04/30/2024
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ekbm3w-UbPI
Multi-lingual wonderfulness🥰
Transform Stones and Pebbles into a Stunning Path 🍃 DIY Mosaic Tutorial (Ancient Artistry) Welcome to my latest DIY creation, where we transform ordinary pebbles and stones into a breathtaking mosaic path, a nod to the ancient Greeks. In this tutor...
04/30/2024
Food for Thought
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The best ideas for growing vegetables at home for you, very easy and effective Recycle plastic waste into a one-of-a-kind Cabbage garden, so wonderful and beautiful- In this video, we'll show you how to recycle plastic waste into a one-...
03/23/2024
Come walk with us Sat. March 23, 2024, as we remember stories of Sugar Hill in Historic Smithfield.
"Sugar Hill" is a name that repeats in Black communities throughout North America, where goodness, creativity, and unity thrived. In historical Birmingham, Sugar Hill was a neighborhood gathering space of sweetness, joy and community love that thrived, even in the midst of madness.
Special honor to histoirical women leaders, mothers, and visionaries. Fundraiser. $10. Led by Wilhelmina Thomas, Director of History, DH-SCLT.
03/20/2024
Dynamite Hill-Smithfield Community Land Trust We are creating sustainable residential and cooperative business ownership programs
02/28/2024
Join us for a Sugar Hill Walking Tour, Satuday, March 23 at 10:00 AM as we regenerate our sacred land work on Dynamite Hill in 2024.
We will gather at 11th Court North and Bankhead HWY, 35204, just up from A.H. Parker High School, and two blocks down from Center Street.
The tour is led by DH-SCLT's Historical Director, Wilhelmina Thomas, Birmingham's own daughter, a gifted and talented historian extraordinaire, cemetery docent, historical geneologist an storyteller, and much more.
$10
(Funds to support the DH-SCLT Regneration Project)
Come out and learn about Historic Enon Ridge and the Pioneers of Sugar Hill!
Celebrate our ancestors by walking this sacred land space together!
Contribute to our continuing Community Education mission and work!
02/05/2024
https://thrivingearthexchange.org/project/birmingham-al-dynamite-hill/
Stay tuned as we regenerate activity with DH-SCLT!! We are very pleased and fortunate to be well support ed by Thriving Earth Exchange. Thank you, Kathleen Kirkpatrick!for the connection!
Planning the Development of a Community Land Trust on Dynamite Hill The historic, resilient, and vibrant Dynamite Hill – Smithfield community faces housing and food insecurity as a result of increasing development and gentrification. A community land trust is planned on 8 land parcels of historical and cultural significance, including regenerative community agricu...
01/22/2023
Greetings, we apologize for the short notice, however, Dynamite Hill-Smithfield Community Land Trust is participating in the Point In Time count with our partners and One Roof. Point in Time is to count the numbers of our neighbors experiencing Homelessness as best we can. We are in need of Volunteers willing to go out into the Western area to survey. We are centering the five neighborhoods of Historic Smithfield Community and perhaps some other areas. So much of the Western Area I fear is missed, it is a really large Geography. If you are wishing to Volunteer with us, we are in need of a large number of folks repping DH-SCLT in this. The dates and times are :January 24 - 25, 2023. If you can help us please let me now by the 23rd by calling me at 205-767-2667 or by DM and Gmail at [email protected] .
If you cannot help physically perhaps you can message me on where some folks experiencing Homelessness might be, you can do this discreetly with addresses of abandoned homes or parks where they may stay.....I will give you further details on it, we need your assistance in any way, please.
Rev. Dr. Majadi Baruti, Community Engagement Director
Dynamite Hill-Smithfield Community Land Trust
205-767-2667
01/01/2023
Happy New Year!
It is January 1, 2023, New Year’s Day, and the Seventh Day of Kwanzaa, Imani, which means Faith in Kiswahili.
The Trustees of Dynamite Hill-Smithfield Community Land Trust are very pleased to announce the purchase of our first lot at the sacred crossroads adjacent to the historic epicenter of Dynamite Hill.
Thanks to an unexpected and generous private donation, we were able to purchase the lot and site of the Sugar Hill Community Farm at 1133 Bankhead Highway.
We wish all who gave time, resources, energy, prayers and good wishes for the success of this organization and ancestral work a huge Thank You and a Very Happy New Year! “ Faith is the assent of the mind to the truth of a proposition or statement for which there is not complete evidence belief in general.” The Century Dictionary
11/29/2022
We are so blessed by the assistance and resourcing DH-SCLT received in 2022, It is Giving Tuesday and we are hoping for one last sprint into 2023 for our continued work to put land into community use. Please assist where you can and spread the word today.
From our Board of Directors and founder, the visionary,
Ms Susan Diane Mitchell
Thank you so very much.
Land Acquisition Fundraiser For DH-SCLT, organized by Majadi Baruti Dynamite Hill-Smithfield Community Land Trust (DH-SCLT) must raise funds to … Majadi Baruti needs your support for Land Acquisition Fundraiser For DH-SCLT
11/01/2022
Below is a message from our Founder, Ms. Susan Diane Mitchell
10/14/2022
Land Acquisition Fundraiser For DH-SCLT, organized by Majadi Baruti Dynamite Hill-Smithfield Community Land Trust (DH-SCLT) must raise funds to … Majadi Baruti needs your support for Land Acquisition Fundraiser For DH-SCLT
09/18/2022
Sign the Petition Make Black Femicide a HATE crime in the US.
09/05/2022
What could sustainable development look like for the city of Birmingham? Creating clean energy sources? Dependable infrastructure to withstand weather and climate change? Or more food accessibility in the form of community gardens? Join us as discusses how we can band together for a new, green, Magic City. Find out how we can improve our communities and build upon local resources, programs, and legislature. Registration is required at https://bit.ly/3TCXBeu
Will You Join Us? The Green New Deal for Birmingham is hosting our second Community Climate Assembly! This time the focus is on
Greetings,
DH-SCLT is in need of someone that can take a look at a newer Model Bush Hog for us. It may have missing parts because of how the Manufacturer sent it to us. If someone can do this for us for free that would be great. Please contact
Rev. Majadi Baruti
205-767-2667
Hey folks we need to help our beloveds in Jackson Mississippi ASAP this is emergency stuff. We need U-Hauls, Water, Water, Water, drivers, gas money, U-Hauls or folks with trucks, pickups, Vans, Cars, Station Wagons, Gas Money to go to and from Jackson Mississippi.
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Our Story
A Brief History of the
Dynamite Hill-Smithfield
Community Land Trust
The Dynamite Hill-Smithfield Community Land Trust (DH-SCLT) is a 501c3, non-profit and service based community land trust initiated in the Historic Smithfield Community of Birmingham, Alabama. It focuses on the best practices for regenerative community building. The focus areas of the DH-SCLT include permanently affordable housing and home ownership opportunities to low and moderate income families; community stewardship programs; sustainable urban agribusiness cooperatives; and community education and resources. The Smithfield Community constitutes the five neighborhoods of, Lower Smithfield, Enon Ridge, Graymont, College Hills and East Thomas and covers a geographic area of about 26 square miles.
Supported by Magic City Agriculture Project (MCAP), the DH-SCLT was initiated in 2015 by Susan Diane Mitchell. Magic City Agriculture Project’s work include assisting communities in establishing Community Land Trusts, organizing cooperative businesses and democratic institutions in their communities, with a focus on developing sustainable agri-businesses.
Susan, a 25 year resident of Birmingham, Alabama, currently lives at the top of Center Street and 11th Court North, in the heart and at the apex of what was once called “Dynamite Hill.” Upon moving to the East Thomas Neighborhood in the Historic Smithfield Community of Birmingham, Alabama, in 2005, Susan learned from community members and through her own research about the historic and cultural significance of the community in the Civil Rights Movement, educating herself of the spirit and history of the area, and becoming further inspired by the legacy of resistance and self-determination that the residents of “Dynamite Hill” expressed in their narratives about the community. Her work as a volunteer with MCAP led to education and training in the CLT model, which prompted her to lead this initiative.
“Dynamite Hill” became a nickname of the area in Smithfield along Center Street that was the site of numerous bombings against black citizens of Birmingham who were moving into Smithfield after Attorney Arthur Shores overturned segregated zoning laws which allowed them to purchase land spaces and residential housing in the area in the late 1940s. This action led to systematic attacks and bombings on black citizens by the Ku Klux Klan (1947-1965), with impunity under the egregiously oppressive regime of City Commissioner of Public Safety Eugene “Bull” Connor (1957-1963), which further prompted a neighborhood group commonly called a rifle patrol, aptly named “The Dynamite Hill Defenders,” to defend their properties from attack. Many of the civil rights organizing meetings and meetings between black clergy and moderate whites took place in Smithfield Community churches.
It was from Smithfield and surrounding areas that the children marched from AH Parker High School and other schools downtown to sit in protest of segregation in the Children’s Crusade of 1963. One of the four young girls killed in the 1963 Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing , Cynthia Wesley, lived near Center Street.
Moreover, the Angela Y. Davis family home is situated at the top of Dynamite Hill and acts as a constant source of visual inspiration from the view of Susan’s porch across the street, Professor Angela Y. Davis is an esteemed human rights leader, scholar, person of honor, and a personal heroine for Susan, and her inspired writings on the liberation of black people informs much of her own studies.
The spirit of prosperity, social justice, academic excellence, a thriving local economy, and strong community relationships was once very vibrant in Smithfield. Due to redlining, disinvestment, neglect and decline over several decades, the community is now experiencing a 41.3% poverty rate, and a 25.6% vacant housing rate. The DH-SCLT is working through the social economic strategy of the community land trust model to catalyze this natural spirit and the wealth of human creative energy it contains with community members as the greatest community assets.
In 2014, Birmingham implemented a Western Area Framework Plan which outlines development of three Western area communities: Smithfield, West End, and Five Points West. In the same year, Birmingham was also chosen as the site of the 2021 World Games, which along with other incentives has helped to accelerate the rapid development of Downtown Birmingham. The Smithfield Community is the first community west of I-65 and Downtown Birmingham, and in clear vulnerability of the vapid gentrification and displacement of low and moderate income residents that often comes with urban renewal.
In 2015, Susan decided to form the Dynamite Hill- Smithfield Community Land Trust in honor of the bravery of the black families who defended their homes and community under oppression, and as a community effort to resist gentrification, preserve the cultural integrity of the Historic Smithfield Community, and catalyze the re-creation of a thriving sustainable business district. Its vision is to be a strong strategy for localized cooperative economic stabilization and community led development as Birmingham engages in its Western Area Framework Expansion efforts during the revitalization of the Magic City.
For Susan, her family of nine children, and many others, Smithfield is home.
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10 Eleventh Court North
Birmingham, AL
35204
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