Black Colorado Farmers In Ongoing Battle With Racist Neighbors

A family of Black ranchers in Yoder, Colorado, who have reported a history of racial incidents they have endured since taking over the property, claim that, over the weekend, someone fired shots during a “drive by,” which they appear to believe was an effort to intimidate them perpetrated by the very racists they’ve been up against for years.

“Shots were fired at our ranch. We are alive, but something inside us has been shaken in a way that cannot be put back easily. Freedom Acres Ranch is the place that was meant to be safe, the land we fought for, the space where we built life and purpose, has been violated,” Courtney “CW” Mallery, owner of Freedom Acres Ranch, wrote in an Instagram post Wednesday. “They want us to lie in fear on our own land. We are carrying the weight of knowing that violence has found us and that it was allowed to happen by those who are sworn to protect and serve. This did not come out of nowhere. This has been building. This has been ignored. This falls squarely on the shoulders of the El Paso County Sheriff’s Office and their refusal to protect us. The people who are sworn to serve and protect have instead allowed violence, stalking, harm, intimidation, and hate to grow unchecked around us.We believe we are being pushed out. We believe there are efforts to remove us from land we have poured everything into. Mentally, we are exhausted. Physically, we are worn down. Financially, this is breaking us. This is affecting our ability to run our business, to protect our animals, and to continue the work that matters not just to us, but to our community.”

Mallery and his wife, Nicole Mallery, have lived in Yoder since 2020, a few years after Hurricane Harvey displaced them from their home in Texas, according to the ranch’s website.

“I had never experienced a hurricane in my life, and being on a roof and not being able to drink water. No food being accessible. The highway being underwater. It really was at that time where I started to think about how fractured the food system was,” Nicole told Capital B News in February. “Depending on what side of the tracks you stayed on, that was your access to food.”

So, Nicole and CW started farming in their backyard, and eventually, they relocated to Colorado and purchased more than 1,000 acres of land to start Freedom Acres, which they said was inspired by cracks in the food supply chain exposed during the COVID-19 pandemic.

According to the couple, things were all good until the local community turned them all bad.

From Capital B:

More than 744,000 people call El Paso County home. Only 6% of its population is Black. In the county sits Yoder, a predominately white community of 1,300 people and where Freedom Acres Ranch is located. It’s nearly 32 miles from Colorado Springs.

When they moved, Nicole thought they’d be in “their own world” and create an oasis where their families and others could learn and be free.

But the freedom they hoped to build didn’t come.

After purchasing the property, the two said they began to encounter racism. Strangers trespassing on their property. They were followed, and CW was even chased off his land. They were called racial slurs and found their animals dead. The Ark Republic’s two–part series broke the news of the couple’s yearslong battle with their neighbors.

It resulted in the Mallerys getting a temporary protection order against their neighbor, Teresa Clark, who also had restraining orders against the couple. One of the points of contention has been an easement between the two properties. In September 2022, Teresa Clark was arrested for violating the restraining order. Clark did not respond to Capital B’s request for comment.

“We came here to be safe from being flooded out, but to then try to flood us out through hate, it just makes me really frustrated and upset,” Nicole said.

Things only went downhill for the Mallerys from there.

In January 2023, CW and Nicole were arrested over their conflicts with the Clark family, and hit with a number of charges, including felony stalking. They were later bonded out with the help of the Rocky Mountain NAACP, and, according to CBS News, the charges were dropped that May.

The Mallerys accused the El Paso County Sheriff’s Office of colluding with neighbors to harass and intimidate them in an attempt to force them off their land, and, in February 2023, the sheriff’s office defended itself against the allegations, and in doing so, only revealed that they arrested the couple and tried to put a felony on their record for what many would argue was a ridiculous reason.

According to CPR News, police officials noted during a press conference that month that, leading up to the couple’s arrest, they had taken 24 reports from about 170 calls for service and complaints involving the Mallerys and Clarks in the last two years, and responded to over 200,000 calls for service overall in unincorporated El Paso County during that time period.

From CPR:

Between August 2021 and September 2022, the sheriff’s office received numerous calls from the Mallery family, Teresa Clark and other residents in the area. Deputies responded in person and by phone to the service calls. Numerous cases were taken, including restraining order violations, criminal mischief and trespassing. 

Teresa Clark called police 46 times, Nicole Mallery called police 47 times, and Courtney Mallery called the police 11 times in the last two years.

An additional nine calls were made by other parties in the area, police said. There were also an additional 13 field interview records associated with the involved parties, police said. 

So, clearly the Mallerys were having problems with their neighbors, but what does any of that have to do with why they were arrested? Well, apparently, nothing. Instead, they were arrested because the security cameras on their property were facing their neighbor’s property, which is apparently illegal in Yoder.

More from CPR:

El Paso Sheriff’s Lt. Chris Gonzales said the property that belongs to Nicole and Courtney Mallory is a large parcel of more than 1,000 acres. The other nearby parcels, including the Clarks, are closer to 40 acres. There is over 1.4 miles of land between the Mallory homestead and the Clark homestead, Gonzales said.

An easement divides the Clark and Mallery properties, which holds the only access to several ranch properties, including the Clarks’. The sole purpose of this easement is to provide property access to the adjacent landlocked properties. 

Police said the easement is actually on the Mallerys’ property line. The Clarks had complained that the Mallerys were on their property while on the easement. Police said that the Mallerys were able to be charged with felony stalking due to cameras on their property that faced the Clarks.

“According to state statutes, you are not allowed to record other individuals on a lengthy basis,” Gonzales said. “And due to the constant surveillance on the Clark property as well as the use of that surveillance to time their arrival with Ms. Clark as well as showing up and taunting her, the district attorney, as well as a judge, agreed that that constitutes a violation.” 

So, just to recap: The Mallerys own a ranch that is much larger than their white neighbors’ ranches, and their white neighbors, the Clarks, have called the police, claiming the Mallerys were on their property, even though it was actually the Mallerys’ property. Meanwhile, the local sheriff’s office was defending itself against racism allegations by pointing out that these families had been beefing for years, which still didn’t explain why it felt the Black couple needed to be arrested on felony charges due to what security cameras they clearly needed were capturing, based on a law they might not have even been aware of, and wasn’t, according to any reports, the reason the police were ever called.

I mean, maybe these Black farmers are right, and everyone around them is racist. These stories just fell all too familiar.

Anyway, the Mallerys set up a GoFundMe page to help them improve their security systems and continue to fight against the onslaught of racism and racial violence they say they still face.

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