Still Here - Ebony Woodruff

Ebony Woodruff is an agricultural attorney in Chalmette, Louisiana.

Ebony entered law school with plans to become a corporate attorney. As the daughter of a welder-electrician and a teacher, her initial goal was upward mobility. “It was really all about the money,” she said. 

But her professors at Southern University Law Center in Baton Rouge, themselves first-generation attorneys, encouraged students to return to their communities and make a difference. Their words stuck with her after graduation.

Ebony combined her passion for food and her concern for civil rights—and found her place fighting Black land loss. According to a study by economist Dania V. Francis, Black farmers in the United States lost 90 percent of their land between 1910 and 1997. The reasons are numerous: state-sanctioned violence, racial discrimination by banks, and denied access to federal farm benefits by local administrators.

Ebony focused on another reason for this loss: a legal nightmare called heirs’ property. When a landowner dies without a will in Louisiana, their property is divided among all their children, and then might ripple out to the grandchildren and beyond. As the ownership spreads thinner, it becomes easy for predatory developers to buy up shares and eventually force the land out of family hands.

Now she works with families that are trying to hold onto their land, while also raising awareness. “I’m like the little mosquito,” she says. “You hear it. It’s buzzing. It’s annoying. It’s biting you. You want to slap it, but you just can’t see it. If I’m nothing more than that, I have done my job in this struggle. Because we can’t go down silent. Someone has to tell the story.”

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