Having spent so much time in the South made me aware not only of the pervasive racial inequalities but also of the economic realities that blacks continued to face even after legal segregation ended. I was determined to work for a more equitable solution to land ownership and economic security. Part of the answer seemed to lie in a land-reform program that would restore at least some of the land that had been taken from blacks after the Civil War. I began to put Borsodi's model together with Vinoba Bhave's Gramdan or "village gift" program in India.

After Gandhi was murdered in 1948, the spiritual leadership of the nonviolent independence movement in India fell into the hands of Vinoba Bhave according to Gandhi's wishes. Vinoba was a scholarly man, who knew at least six languages. He had the reputation of a saint and was not active in the political wing of the independence movement as was J. P. Narayan. With Gandhi's death, violence broke out in several provinces or states of India, in part stimulated by the communists, who were agitating against landlords in these areas where landlords controlled all the land and the number of landless was increasing.

At the urging of his followers Vinoba decided to go to one of the places (I believe it was Kerala) where the situation was becoming serious. Although he didn't have any idea of how to prevent the violence, he went to one village and asked the villagers what the problem was. One villager stood up and said simply, "We need land." So Vinoba put a direct question to those assembled, not really expecting to get a positive reply. Pointing to the man who had just spoken, he said, "My brother here is without land. Who can give me some land for him?" To Vinoba's amazement, one man stood up and said he had some land he could give. Then another stood up and another until there was enough land for at least two or three landless farm families. What to do now? Vinoba said he would act as trustee for the land, and his followers worked out a plan for how to divide it among the landless. This was the beginning of the Boodan or "land gift" program.

Vinoba began a walk (a Padyatra) through the villages, stopping in each one to ask for gifts of land. Gifts of land continued to be made, but an unexpected problem developed. When the land was transferred, the landless were given deeds; the new owners, however, didn't have the means to buy tools, fertilizer, or seeds nor did they have credit to purchase any. All they had was the value of the land itself. What happened is typical of most land-reform programs: in desperation the landless sold the land, and after the money ran out they ended up back on the streets of Calcutta begging. Vinoba realized something must change, and thus began the Gramdan or village-gift movement, whereby. as I noted, the land is given to the village as a whole, which acts as trustee for the land. It is actually the village elders who are the trustees. They see to it that the land is fairly distributed among the landless, who hold a lease to use the land, and they help individual farmers to purchase seeds, fertilizer, etc. Most importantly, the trustees cannot sell the land. Vinoba continued to walk through the villages for over ten years, during which time thousands of acres of land were donated and 10,000 villagers benefited from the Gramdan movement. When I talked with Vinoba in 1978 at his ashram in India, he assured me that the Gramdan movement was alive and well.

The answer to how a land-reform movement could happen in the United States emerged from the next large-scale project that CNVA initiated in 1965 when we sponsored a long walk from Quebec to Guantanamo in Cuba. The walkers never made it to Cuba because the police chief in Albany, Georgia, arrested all thirty of them, but through this confrontation there appeared the man who could start the Community Land Trust movement in the South. He was Slater King, a cousin of Martin Luther King, Jr., and a key leader in the civil rights movement in Albany.

As one person put it, "If Slater had been white, he would have been the mayor of Albany." The police chief, known as the toughest chief in the South, arrested the marchers on grounds that they were violating a local law against "racial mixing." All thirty went on a fast in jail. Tough as the chief was, he let them out in thirty days. They proceeded to walk together through the streets of Albany, breaking down segregation there for the first time ever. The marchers won over the hearts of the black community. The joy at their release was felt everywhere. For Slater, this was the first victory he, as head of the Albany movement, had tasted, and it helped open him to the idea of a Gramdan movement in the South. Thus began my close working relationship with Slater.

As a first step, Fay Bennett (director of the National Sharecroppers Fund), Slater King, his brother C. B. King, and I decided to learn more about the land trust concept. With the help of the Jewish National Fund and the National Sharecroppers Fund, we were able to plan a trip to Israel, where a similar land reform movement had been in existence since the late 1800s. Members of the Zionist movement familiar with Henry George (author of Progress and Poverty) had established the Jewish National Fund around 1890 to purchase land from Arab land owners in Israel and lease it to Zionists who were coming to set up kibbutzim (cooperatives) and moshavim (villages) in Israel at that time. Their objective, following Henry George, was to prevent land speculation—with all the newcomers land prices were being driven up. They were successful in holding the price of land down until after Israel became an independent country in 1948. At that point the Jewish National Fund decided to raise the lease price and buy the land with money raised from private owners. This would prevent a relatively few land owners from becoming rich at the expense of the refugees arriving from Europe after the war. We arranged for a group of civil rights leaders to visit Israel in 1967 and spend a month with our host, the Jewish National Fund, studying the Israeli example. When we returned, Slater set out to locate a large tract of land for a model community land trust, which we called New Communities.