Uprooted: Black Tompkins County herbalist forced to move beloved farm after neighbor’s racial harassment
Herbalist Amanda David bet the farm on Rootwork Herbals in 2021 after achieving a lifelong dream of buying her own plot of land and sharing it with others. From the dirt grew the Jane Minor BIPOC Community Garden, a sanctuary for Black, Brown, and queer people to tend and harvest their own crops. Goats and chickens call the property home, as do David and her three children.
But now, just a few years later, friends are fundraising to relocate the New York native, who is Black, from her Tompkins County homestead due to continued alleged threats and racial harassment by her neighbor, who is white.
“I have been working hard for many years, never able to afford a home,” David said in a virtual call with the AmNews in June. “I was finally able to afford a home and as soon as I purchased it, I wanted this to be a place where Black and Brown folks can have access to this little piece of nature, [for it] to be a sanctuary, a place where people can build community and reconnect to the land and all of those beautiful healing things that have been systematically taken away from us.
“To then almost immediately be subjected to this kind of racial harassment—the exact thing that I was trying to create safety around is now happening daily to us. Despite that, we have built a beautiful community. We have classes and events that really bring people together [who] are really healing and it’s gotten to the point where it doesn’t feel safe to do that anymore.”
In 2020, David and her children moved to Brooktondale, a small town outside of Ithaca, initially renting the property. Early on, the neighbor’s alleged racist remarks to David were directed toward the previous owner, who was Asian American. She purchased the home a year later, which is when the neighbor, named as Robert Whittaker in a lawsuit filed in June by the herbalist, “began making racially and/or sexually derogatory remarks” toward her.
The filing alleges he called David and her children anti-Black slurs and remarks, some of which were captured on video and obtained by the AmNews. When she built a fence on the property line in response, Whittaker’s harassment persisted. He allegedly threatened to beat her son with a stick while referring to him with the N-word in one instance. Another incident in the lawsuit filing alleged Whittaker fired a gun from his porch when David hosted an event for Black teens. All the while, he allegedly continued to tamper with the fence she installed.
The Tompkins County Sheriff’s Department arrested and charged Whittaker multiple times throughout the past three overs due to harassment against David, which led to two guilty pleas. She said multiple orders of protection, temporary and permanent, have not prevented him from engaging with her, and that he even referred to her by the N-word and an anti-gay slur to an officer, who noted the interaction on the arrest report. In February, a judge mandated that Whittaker surrender his firearms—both guns and pellet guns—but they have since been returned, according to David.
While Whittaker faces both civil and criminal actions, David’s options remain limited. Sally Santangelo, executive director of CNY Fair Housing, which represents David, said most injunctive relief obtained by the organization in past harassment cases comes from landlord-tenant disputes rather than neighbor versus neighbor.
“It’s possible that the monetary damages could be significant enough to force him to sell his property or allow her to move, or the threat of that might be enough,” Santangelo said. “Even if a court couldn’t act directly to force him to sell his property, it’s possible that it could happen as a result of monetary damages.”
While David weighed her options the first time she spoke to the AmNews in June, she now believes moving would be the safest option.
Mutual aid efforts defending David sprang up following the harassment, with a Signal group formed by sympathetic fellow farmers and herbalists. Some are in her immediate vicinity while others offer broader support from a distance. One member, Erica Frenay, said Whittaker seems to behave more pleasantly when white people like her are present.
“We’ve tried to step in to do things, like put up the security cameras along that border, that she really doesn’t feel comfortable going to,” Frenay said. “The batteries in those cameras seem to die frequently and so we replace the batteries whenever that’s needed. Some people in the network have helped take care of her animals when she doesn’t feel comfortable going outside to take care of the goats and the chickens.
“We’ve also done other things that are not physical support, but more mental [and] emotional, because this history was going on for a while before the Signal rapid response group started. We’ve helped her to organize a spreadsheet and folder of documentation so whenever she has filed a police report or talked to a lawyer or the D.A., we try to document all of that.”
Her town, which is included in the township of Caroline, is overwhelmingly white—more than 85%, according to the 2020 Census. Just 2.2% of the population is Black. With Rootwork Herbals’ potential relocation, the local community stands to lose a significant resource.
“This [is] not just straight-up farming, but Amanda has a whole medicine school where her students can go up there and directly understand how to create herbal medicines that have been ancestral and passed down,” said Onyx Ramírez, senior communications manager for the Black Farmer Fund. “She has the garden beds, which are accessible for people in the community to be able to grow their own stuff. And beyond that, Amanda hosts so many healing community events…it’s been withheld for the purpose of keeping people safe.”
Whittaker’s lawyer did not respond to AmNews’ requests for comment by press time.
Tandy Lau is a Report for America corps member who writes about public safety for the Amsterdam News. Your donation to match our RFA grant helps keep him writing stories like this one; please consider making a tax-deductible gift of any amount today by visiting https://bit.ly/amnews1.
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