Are Any of Your T-Shirts Made by Black Cotton Farmers? Tameka Peoples on Building Global Black Cotton to Textile Ecosystems

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Season 1 | Episode 16

Let’s be real—your “woke” t-shirt might be screaming liberation, but let’s take it a step further…
Is it organically grown, ginned, spun, woven, cut, and sewn by Black hands that's economically building Black global supply chains?

In this blistering and beautiful convo, Dominique Drakeford links arms with Seed2Shirtfounder Tameka Peoples to expose the truth behind the cotton industry—and why Black folks must reclaim every thread of it. From deep ancestral ties to cotton that built empires to the glaring wealth gap between Black and white farmers, Tameka breaks down why we can’t talk sustainability without talking sovereignty.

Seed2Shirt is the first Black woman-owned, vertically integrated apparel manufacturing and print-on-demand company in the U.S.—ethically and sustainably produced by Black American and African cotton farmers.

This episode is a masterclass in not becoming what the system has been to us. Tameka takes us from Southern U.S. fields to African textile mills, revealing how building non-extractive, global, Black-centered ecosystems isn’t just a dream—it’s LITERALLY happening.

If we’re serious about liberation, we need more than slogans. We need supply chains that love us back.

MORE ABOUT TAMEKA

Tameka Peoples is the founder of Seed2Shirt - the FIRST Black-woman-owned vertically integrated apparel manufacturer & cotton enterprise in the US. Their products are ethically and sustainably manufactured from cotton material from African, and African-American cotton farmers produced at their small batch production centers in the US and Africa.

“The wealth gap at a farm level between Black and white farmers is pretty high. When you think about it, there’s a lot of black farmers, but the most that they make a year on average is $250,000 or less, where their white counterparts are in the millions. so increasing by 80%, increasing by 80 % to be at the same scale. or increasing 80 % to be at counterpart scale or a third of their counterpart scale, right? And in order to do that, we need to have ecosystems or an economy that’s buying from them to grow their scale. To me, it’s almost not about more Black farmers period. It’s more, how do we get more value systems? ”

— Tameka