The matter of land and the relationship of black people to land has considerable significance both for the social health of the general society and also for the black community's own welfare. Many of America's current domestic ills were traced to the surge of southern blacks to selected urban areas as the rural southern economy found it could no longer employ large numbers of small farmers and farm workers under existing social arrangements. New agricultural technology, the effects of the farm subsidy programs, as well as the general tendency for farm youth to gravitate toward urbanized areas, have all contributed to this migration pattern, which has included whites as well as blacks. In the 1960's alone, more than 1.3 million blacks left the South, for the most part migrating to northern and western urban communities. As a result of a 1969 conference on these problems, the Black Economic Research Center (BERC) was established, which in turn pioneered the Emergency Land Fund. Primarily concerned with land use education, legal assistance, and financial assistance, the fund also includes technical assistance (primarily consisting of referrals to other agencies) and the possibility of an economic development program. A BERC publication, this document covers the early chronology of the project, the plight of southern black agriculture, and the mechanisms to address this problem. The 25 appendixes, which comprise the majority of the document, include: a bibliography on land use, rural poverty, and urban crises; excerpts from final reports on the Southern Land Project; and farmland prices in the South. (KM)