By Rev. Donald L. Perryman, Ph.D.
The Truth Contributor
Sometimes ‘they’ forget about us, but ‘WE’ will lift us up. – SONIA Organics, Produce Party flyer, September 2026
Swayne Field re-opened Friday in Toledo’s Englewood neighborhood, carrying a nearly $3 million city investment, a ribbon and a grand-opening banner. Much of the African American community felt disrespected despite the dire need for access to affordable, nutritionally rich and culturally significant food.
Sonia Flunder-McNair decided to throw her own celebration in response — three food trucks, a DJ, same neighborhood, same weekend, same hours and a caption that reads less like an invitation and more like a verdict: “Sometimes ‘they’ forget about us but ‘WE’ will lift us up.”
When the city doesn’t call your name, you make sure somebody does. That was the point;
The Ones Already Here
Flunder-McNair has grown food and run wellness programs out of her Woodland Avenue urban farm for years, partnering with the city itself on land-bank projects and with the University of Toledo on community health work. David Johnson built Johnson Produce Market out of a truck into a central city institution that has fed this neighborhood since 2007, through the years the big grocers packed up and left. Thomas Jackson spent three central-city lots and 20 months in court proving his own backyard produce wasn’t a public nuisance — after the City of Toledo prosecuted him for growing it. An appeals court threw out his conviction in 2018. By 2024, the U.S. Department of Agriculture was touring his beds near Auburn Avenue, calling his work a model for the nation’s food system.
Each of these three have provided a strong template for addressing Englewood and Junction’s food-access problem. They needed the city to get out of the way, or better yet, to walk alongside them. For years, it did neither.
The Bridge Toledo Already Had
Instead, the city signed a nearly $3 million contract with Al Peake & Sons and Daughter Too Food Service. This Toledo food distributor has moved product in the city since 1949 and opened the Swayne Field Pop-Up Produce Market at the refurbished Swayne Field Shopping Center.
Roslyn Clemens, the city’s chief of housing and neighborhood sustainability, told The Blade the market would give residents “greater access to affordable, nutritious food in a welcoming setting close to home.” Nobody disputes exactly that, and Al Peake’s 50 years of grower relationships are a real asset. None of that is the problem.
What the city already had — and didn’t use — was Sonia, Johnson and Jackson themselves. I’ve been asking Toledo for a bridge like this since 2015. Not a pop-up — an inclusive healthy food overlay district, a zoning tool that would guarantee our neighborhoods lasting access to nutritious, affordable, and culturally significant food, built with the people already feeding this community instead of around them. That proposal has been slow-walked for over a decade.
Toledo’s food policy manager, Mara Momenee, spent three hours back in March gathering Toledo growers to help shape exactly this kind of decision. The city already partners with SONIA Organics on land-bank work. Every mechanism this city needed to bring Sonia, David Johnson and Thomas Jackson into a $3 million investment already existed before Swayne Field’s plans were drawn. None of it touched this project. Sonia learned about a market built to solve the problem she’s already solving the same way the rest of us did — from a newspaper.
Bridge, Not Bypass
Al Peake & Sons isn’t wrong for taking this contract. The city is wrong for handing it over without an inclusive, equitable second call — choosing corporate infrastructure over Sonia’s years on Woodland Avenue, over Johnson’s truck-turned-institution, over Jackson’s decade fighting the city’s own courts to prove his soil wasn’t a crime.
Martin Luther King Jr. saw this same choice in Montgomery’s empty buses in 1955. The boycott was never really about one bus company — it was Black Montgomery deciding where its dollars would and would not go. Passive acceptance, he wrote, is complicity with injustice.
Black America carries $2.1 trillion in buying power and still owns just 3.4 percent of the nation’s employer businesses — money moving through our hands on its way to other communities. The typical Black family holds 15 cents of wealth for every dollar the typical white family holds. That gap did not happen by accident. It happened by choices, made over and over, one Swayne Field at a time.
Some in this community are already calling for a boycott of Swayne Field. I am adding my voice to it. Not out of spite toward Al Peake & Sons, and not forever — until the City of Toledo recognizes the growers who were already doing this work and brings them in as full partners, not an afterthought.
Shop Sonia’s tables, Johnson’s stand, and Jackson’s beds — and keep shopping them after the cameras leave. Ask Swayne Field when it plans to do the same for the growers left out.
Spend your money like you know the difference.
Contact Rev. Donald Perryman, PhD, at drdlperryman@centerofhopebaptist.org