Cast Down Your Bucket: The Founding of Freedom Nation

Freedom Village, Georgia

In 2011, three men sat down together with one question. Mukhtar Jugger. Faruq Hunter. Ihsan Muhammad. Three fathers. Three brothers.

And the question was never whether we could build some great town. We didn't care about that. The question was simpler, and harder: how do we, as a family, reach the highest point of excellence without having to depend on other people?

Now, hear that right. That was never about isolation. We weren't running from anybody. It came from something every one of us already knew in our bones. No one cares about your success more than you do. No one.

Three Brothers, One Table

Back then, Faruq had been working as a professional for a decade. Mukhtar had just started his career in software development. And Ihsan was the staple of the family. Its patriarch.

For years, we had watched our family drift. Estranged. Separated. Pulling further apart every season. And it became clear that what we needed was a space. A place where we could all agree on the rules, the dynamics, the outcomes. A place where every one of us brought something to the table, and every one of those things had value.

The thought was simple. If we purchase a piece of land and teach our people how to survive, they'll appreciate things. If you know how to build your own house, you'll value it. If you know how to milk your own cow, you'll love the milk. And the cream. And the butter.

The Suit Came Off

At the time, Faruq Hunter was living with his family at Freedom Labs. A 1.25-acre plot of land with a small house on it in South Atlanta, right across from Cliffendale Park.

He and his brother had been in the software business for some time. Faruq started his first software company at 21. By his early 30s, he had made a couple of million dollars. By every measure the world hands you, he had made it.

Then Black Enterprise magazine featured him in an article about using life insurance to build family wealth. And instead of feeling proud, he felt hollow. Because something in him knew that paying into somebody else's institution was never going to produce the kind of generational wealth he wanted for himself and his children.

So he took off his suit.

It happened in Texas. Faruq was speaking at an event called Community Life Forward, sharing the stage with several Black American leaders and a representative from the White House. And sitting up there, listening, he became dismayed. Not out loud. Inside. Because everybody kept pointing to the system as the solution to personal problems.

That's when he started to see it differently. The system isn't the solution. At best, the system gives you leeway. A little room. Enough independence to purchase your own land and take your life into your own hands. What you do with that room is on you.

Cast Down Your Bucket Where You Are

That was the attitude of Booker T. Washington. In 1895, he stood before the crowd at the Cotton States and International Exposition in Atlanta and gave a speech that people still misunderstand to this day. He told the story of a ship lost at sea, its crew dying of thirst, signaling for water. And a friendly vessel called back: "Cast down your bucket where you are." They did. And they drew up fresh water.

His point was that what you need is often already right beneath you. And he told the people that the South was the greatest place in the United States of America for Black people to build a real measure of independence.

Faruq is from Tuskegee, Alabama. Washington's Tuskegee. That message didn't just resonate with him. It landed in his heart and stayed there.

So during that trip to Texas, he took off his dress shoes and put on his cowboy boots. He threw off the suits and traded them for jeans and good, thick shirts. The kind you can work in.

He came home. He sat down with his two brothers. And they decided to begin.

Learning With Our Hands

The first trip was to India. Faruq and Mukhtar flew out together to the Auroville Earth Institute in Tamil Nadu to learn how to make brick from the earth itself. They came home certified brickmakers. They bought the machinery. Then Faruq flew to Brazil to learn automated brickmaking.

That machinery is still at Freedom Village, Georgia, to this day.

After that, Faruq took every tax return and every extra penny he could gather and put it into tools. He bought a sawmill. He learned to cut down trees and mill them into lumber. And the first job he finished? He built his entire office out of an old poplar tree from the backyard at Freedom Labs.

Period.

Then Came Food

Next was food. The whole family consolidated everything. We started buying dry goods. Boxes and boxes of vegetables, once a month. We learned how to can. How to preserve. How to make sausages seasoned from the herb gardens we planted out front at Freedom Labs.

Freedom Labs became our testing ground. We set up tents. We tried everything we found on YouTube. Barrel grills. Wood stove heaters made out of old barrels. Brick pressed from the dirt in the backyard. Aquaponics. You name it, we tried it.

And every bit of that energy, every lesson, every failure, every win, we carried over to Freedom Village.

Fifteen Years Later

Fast forward fifteen years. The novelty of the work has left us. And honestly, that's a good thing. What's left is the work itself, and the truth that comes with it.

A lot of realities have shaped our understanding of what it really takes to give a person the opportunity to hold a piece of land they have full control over. Land where they can do the things that build their own self-reliance. Their own empowerment. Their own family's future.

That outcome is what we call a Freedom Nation.

It started with three brothers at one table, a suit left behind in Texas, and a bucket cast down right where we stood. The water was there the whole time. We just had to draw it up.

Welcome to Freedom Nation.