[News] How Thousands of Black Farmers Were Forced Off Their Land

[Anti-Imperialist News]

thenation.com 
<https://www.thenation.com/article/society/black-farmers-pigford-debt/>


  How Thousands of Black Farmers Were Forced Off Their Land

By Kali Holloway November 1, 2021


    Black people own just 2 percent of farmland in the United States. A
    decades-long history of loan denials at the USDA is a major reason why.

<https://www.thenation.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/MVentyura-Hollloway-ForeCLOSED-illo_img.jpg> 


Illustration by Marco Ventura.

In 1883, less than 20 years after emancipation, Curtis Gentry bought 
nearly 1,500 acres of undeveloped land in Shiloh, a rural community in 
the Alabama county where he had once been enslaved. Alongside his 
brother Turner, with whom he was able to reunite after 
emancipation—unlike the members of so many other Black families—Gentry 
cleared that property, uprooting trees, brush, and undergrowth. Once the 
land was arable, he planted and harvested an array of crops, including 
ribbon cane, corn, and peas.

“He was a hard worker,” Bernice Atchison, Gentry’s granddaughter-in-law, 
told me. “Not only did he clear his own land, but he took jobs helping 
white people clear their land.” He taught his family how to take care of 
the farm while he worked on other people’s farms, bringing in extra 
money to the household.

Gentry’s children continued to farm after their father’s death, and each 
subsequent generation was trained in the ways of tending to their 
inherited land trust. When Atchison married Gentry’s grandson Allen in 
1953, the young couple were given charge of nearly 280 acres of 
farmland, which included amenities built by those who came before. “We 
had a ribbon cane mill that made syrup. We had a saw mill. There was an 
old still that they had used to make whiskey back in those days,” 
Atchison said. “I loved farming, because you have to come to understand 
the land.”

In 1959, the Atchisons bought another 39 acres, and two years later, 
they built a house in which they would raise eight children. The couple 
sold vegetables and produce to loyal customers, most of whom worked in 
nearby factories and plants. In 1981, just after the Atchisons were 
certified as United States Department of Agriculture pig breeders, they 
received a letter from the USDA notifying them that they qualified for 
federal loans to buy “farrowing pens for the sows to have their little 
babies in,” Atchison said. She and Allen had spent years helping 
neighbors build their own farrowing pens, which had been paid for with 
USDA farm subsidies. “Helping Mr. Waldruf and Mr. Jones and Mr. Scott, 
we saw that the loan program had worked for them. So we went down to the 
USDA to get the money to build ours,” she said.

But there was a crucial difference. “They were white, and we were 
Black,” Atchison explained. When she and Allen went to the local Farm 
Service; Agency office in 1981, the FSA representative, a white man 
named Mr. Byrd, told them there were no loan applications available, 
Atchison said. On a return visit, Byrd told the couple he saw no reason 
they needed to expand their farm.

The Atchisons made multiple follow-up trips to the FSA office, but each 
time, Byrd informed them they would have to wait until local white 
farmers received their USDA loans before the couple could even apply. 
 From the early 1980s to the 1990s, the Atchisons were denied USDA 
subsidies not only for farrowing pens and pig feed but also for 
equipment, fertilizer, and land purchases. “We had several years of 
trying to go back and get loans that was supposedly available. And, of 
course, he would just tell us that there was no money or that it was all 
gone,” Atchison said. “It happened several years, year in and year out. 
He would tell you, ‘Oh, come back in the spring. Maybe there will be 
some [money] then.’” Once, when they finally succeeded in filling out an 
application, “Mr. Byrd tore up our application and threw it in the 
wastebasket. I gave him a little piece of my mind, and he told me, 
‘Nigger, ain’t no money here for you.’”

The couple got no response to multiple complaints they sent to the 
USDA’s civil rights office in Washington, D.C. Ronald Reagan had gutted 
the office in 1983, after which, staffers later admitted, they “simply 
threw discrimination complaints in the trash without ever responding to 
or investigating them.” Back in Alabama, Byrd kept his position as the 
agency’s local loan gatekeeper.

Since 1965, multiple federal agencies—most notably the USDA itself—have 
issued reports citing, as the US Commission on Civil Rights put it that 
year, “unmistakable evidence that racial discrimination” within the 
Agriculture Department “has served to accelerate the displacement and 
impoverishment of the Negro farmer.” Through discriminatory loan denials 
and deliberate delays in financial aid, the USDA systematically blocked 
Black farmers from accessing critical federal funds. “If you are Black 
and you’re born south of the Mason-Dixon Line and you tried to farm, 
you’ve been discriminated against,” Lloyd Wright, the director of the 
USDA Office of Civil Rights under Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, and a 
Black Virginia farmer, told me. The debts Black farmers consequently 
accrued cost them millions of acres, which were then snapped up by white 
buyers. In 1920, the number of Black farmers peaked at nearly 1 million, 
constituting 14 percent of all farmers. But between 1910 and 1997, they 
lost 90 percent of their property. (White farmers lost only 2 percent in 
the same period.) As of 2017, there were just 35,470 Black-owned farms, 
representing 1.7 percent of all farms. The land Black farmers lost, some 
16 million acres, is conservatively estimated to be worth $250 billion 
to $350 billion today.

In 1997, facing mounting debt, Bernice Atchison signed on as a plaintiff 
in /Pigford v. Glickman/, a class-action lawsuit against the USDA 
brought by Black farmers alleging that the agency had discriminated 
against them and failed to respond adequately to discrimination 
complaints. In the consent decree issued two years later, and in a 
second settlement in 2010, the USDA agreed to provide claimants with 
foreclosure relief, priority consideration for future federal farm 
loans, access to the agency’s land inventory, and billions of dollars to 
cancel the wrongful debt and interest charges that resulted from the 
agency’s discrimination. But the promised resolution never came. 
Instead, the USDA continued to seize Black farmers’ land through 
foreclosure, and the Justice Department under George W. Bush and Obama 
poured millions of dollars into fighting claims and denying payouts. 
Many surviving /Pigford/ farmers are deeper in debt today than they were 
before the lawsuit.

Atchison was among those who never received debt cancellation. She has 
become one of the most visible and vocal /Pigford/ plaintiffs and has 
testified about the failures of the settlement before Congress. Atchison 
and her family have lost more than 250 acres since the 1980s. She still 
farms the 60 acres that remain, raising “enough to fill up my three deep 
freezers” and to share with her kids. Allen died in 1992, amid the 
couple’s battles with the USDA.

In March 2021, President Joe Biden signed the coronavirus relief 
package, which includes $4 billion in debt relief for “socially 
disadvantaged farmers,” a designation that includes Black, Native 
American, Hispanic, Asian, and Pacific Islander farmers. Despite the 
diversity of that coalition, the bill was ;attacked by conservatives 
like South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham as slavery “reparations,” 
though economists at Duke University and Harvard Law School reported 
that the measure offers a “pittance” compared with the land’s true value.

Also lost in the discussion of the bill was the fact that it offers debt 
cancellation only to farmers who have outstanding USDA loans. But 
because of the agency’s racist lending policies, few Black farmers ever 
received USDA money in the first place. Wright estimates that only 8 
percent of Black farmers would benefit from any USDA loan cancellation 
program. Nonetheless, at least 13 lawsuits have been filed by white 
farmers arguing that the law unconstitutionally permits “reverse 
racism.” Injunctions issued in those cases by judges in Tennessee, 
Florida, and Wisconsin have effectively stalled debt relief.

“Black farmers have been denied services by the Department of 
Agriculture for 150 years. Now that a little bit of money is supposed to 
go to people who have been harmed for the last century and a half, white 
farmers have suddenly decided it’s inappropriate for one group to get 
money that another group does not,” Wright told me. “I tell folks that 
we didn’t get 40 acres and a mule. Neither did Black farmers get debt 
relief under /Pigford/. So this [the halt in payouts] is consistent with 
all of the other promises that have been broken.”

The USDA has vowed to fight those lawsuits, but many doubt they will 
ever see fairness from “the last plantation,” as the USDA is known among 
Black farmers. Atchison told me that she is not hopeful her acres will 
be returned.

“The land has been resold a couple of times since it was originally 
sold. I don’t know whether it can ever be retrievable,” she said. “If I 
had gotten those loans, just think about where we would be today. Think 
about the assets that I would have today. That was generational wealth. 
Our wealth was taken away.”

The use of debt to gain control of ever more land in the United States 
is almost as old as the country itself. In 1803, Thomas Jefferson 
endorsed usurious lending to Indigenous peoples as a colonial 
land-grabbing scheme. “To promote this disposition to exchange lands, 
which they have to spare and we want,” Jefferson wrote in a letter to 
future president William Henry Harrison, “we shall push our trading 
houses, and be glad to see the good and influential individuals among 
them run in debt because we observe that when these debts get beyond 
what the individuals can pay, they become willing to lop them off by a 
cession of lands.” During the Civil War, Black enslavement would be 
abolished in name, only to be supplanted within a decade by debt slavery 
in the form of sharecropping. Instead of sharing in the crop yields of 
the farmland they worked, landless Black laborers—many of whom were 
tenant farmers on the same lands where they had once been enslaved—were 
ensnared in a cycle of perpetual debt and poverty. Under the Black 
Codes, a series of oppressive laws passed throughout the South during 
Reconstruction, African Americans could be arrested for breaking or 
attempting to renegotiate labor contracts and saddled with fines they 
were forced to work off. Attempts to escape debt servitude were met with 
white terror violence. Black sharecroppers involved in unionizing 
efforts and other acts of dissent were massacred in 1919 in Elaine, 
Ark.; in 1931 in Camp Hill, Ala.; and in 1935 in Lowndes County, Ala.

The government’s reversal on its promise to give millions of newly 
emancipated Black folks 40 acres and a mule stood in contrast to its 
land-giveaway policies for white citizens. The Homestead Act of 1862 
took some 270 million acres of territory that had been taken from Native 
Americans—10 percent of all US public lands—and reallocated it in 
160-acre parcels to 1.6 million Americans, almost all native or 
foreign-born whites, the ancestors of roughly 45 million living American 
adults who continue to reap generational wealth from that land grab. The 
Southern Homestead Act of 1866 also put free and low-cost public lands 
into the hands of an overwhelmingly white cohort of owners. Despite 
being denied these sorts of government handouts, emancipated Black 
farmers had acquired 3 million acres by 1875, a figure that would rise 
to 12 million by 1900. Land ownership by Black farmers reached its peak 
in 1910, when they owned between 15 million and 19 million acres.

In the 20th century, mechanization and industrialization transformed 
farms from “labor-intensive to capital-intensive operations,” as the 
historian Pete Daniel writes. Debt became endemic, with farmers 
borrowing money during planting season and recouping the funds when 
crops were harvested and sold. “If you don’t get your money on time, 
then you’re not going to be able to be successful,” Lucious Abrams, one 
of the six original /Pigford /litigants, told me. “In order for you to 
have a successful crop, you need to start the first of the year putting 
out your lye and fertilizer, preparing your land, and seeing what type 
of nutrients you need to put out there. If you get your money in May or 
June, it’s almost time to start gathering your crop again.” For Abrams, 
the USDA’s loan disbursements often didn’t come in time: “They just 
stretch it out, and you don’t get your money till late. You don’t get 
enough money to operate—just enough to hang yourself.”

Abrams’s experience was not unique. As the House Committee on Government 
Operations concluded in a 1990 report, the USDA “categorically and 
systematically denied minority farmers access and full participation in 
the multitude of Federal Government programs designed to assist them” 
and therefore is “directly responsible for the loss of land and 
resources these farmers have experienced.”

A 1996 USDA-commissioned study found that “97 percent of disaster 
payments went to white farmers, while less than 1 percent went to black 
farmers,” and that white men were given thousands more in loan packages 
than Black men. The agency’s Civil Rights Action Team (CRAT) in 1997 
determined that the USDA “took three times as long” to process Black 
farmers’ loans as those of white farmers, and even when a loan was 
approved, it often “never arrives…making it impossible for the farmer to 
earn any money from the farm.”

The CRAT study also found that Black farmers who appealed “well in 
advance of planting season” to their local FSA office for loans were 
often falsely informed that no applications were available or were 
denied critical information required for the application to be 
processed. In 1998, the USDA’s National Commission on Small Farms 
reported that Black farmers were subjected to “indifference and blatant 
discrimination…in their interactions with USDA programs and staff.”

Local control over USDA loan disbursement is at the heart of the 
problem, Wright and others said. Three- to 11-person elected panels 
called county committees essentially control every aspect of FSA 
financial aid distribution at the local level, including hiring the 
staffers in agency offices. “The county committee system is set up to 
take care of their family, their friends, and themselves. And Blacks are 
not one of the above,” Wright told me. “They need to eliminate the 
county committees and…[hire staffers] federally like the rest of the 
government. Local control is great in most environments, but it has 
never worked for Black folks.”

The USDA’s horrific treatment of Black farmers also results from a civil 
rights department that has consistently failed in its responsibilities 
to the farmers it serves and to its own employees. Allegations of racism 
against employees have dogged the agency since the 1970s.

“We’ve had racial epithets. We’ve had people called ‘nigger.’ We’ve had 
women assaulted. We’ve had women be retaliated against for making 
complaints,” said Lawrence Lucas, a high-level USDA staffer for nearly 
two decades and a former president of the USDA Coalition of Minority 
Employees. “The culture at USDA is the reason why Black farmers are 
having the problems they’re having now.”

The problems with /Pigford/ began even before the consent decree was 
approved. More than 40 civil rights organizations and plaintiffs, 
including Timothy Pigford, filed letters with the US District Court 
objecting to the proposed settlement agreement, and in March 1999, 
hundreds of debt-saddled farmers trekked to Washington, D.C., to 
register their opposition in person. USDA lawyers and the lead attorney 
for the class, Alexander Pires, testified that every farmer would get 
full debt cancellation under the consent decree they had negotiated, 
which set up a two-track system. Track A offered, in Pires’s words, a 
“virtually automatic” $50,000 payment to farmers, even if they lacked 
documentary evidence. This was ideal because most farmers did not keep 
records, Pires testified, noting he had waived the discovery process 
during negotiations for the same reason.

Track B offered unlimited money if farmers had documents to back up 
their debt claims, but the more stringent “standard of proof was not 
burdensome,” USDA lawyers testified. And if neither track appealed to a 
farmer, attorneys claimed, they could opt out of the decree and file 
their own lawsuit.

Plaintiffs responded with a litany of objections. The consent decree did 
not compel the USDA to return wrongfully seized farmland, nor did it 
direct the USDA to punish employees who discriminated. (The USDA 
explicitly refused Judge Paul Friedman’s request to add a sentence 
stating it would make future “best efforts” to ensure employees followed 
anti-discrimination laws.) Farmers argued that $50,000 “won’t even buy a 
medium-sized tractor,” as /Pigford/ complainant Vernon Breckinridge put 
it. (Class counsel admitted to guesstimating that the $50,000 figure 
would suffice for Black farmers based on the $37,500 payment that 
Tuskegee experiment victims received, though the agricultural economist 
Donald McDowell had calculated fair compensation at $250,000.) 
Plaintiffs also questioned class counsel’s decision to negotiate away 
discovery, which meant that the USDA was under no obligation to provide 
Black farmers with information, including from the farmers’ own files. 
If an arbitrator ruled against a Black farmer, the farmer got no money 
at all and had no right to appeal.

“If I were a mass murderer [who] was found guilty of the most heinous 
crime in the world, I have a right to appeal,” James Morrison, of the 
National Black Farmers Association, said at the hearing. “Are you 
telling me the farmer who has spent his entire life farming, who has 
been denigrated, who has been castigated, who has seen nothing short of 
pure hell, cannot have any opportunity to control what his fate is going 
to be based on?”

Over those protests, Judge Friedman approved the consent decree in April 
1999, writing in his opinion that it was “a good first step.” Class 
counsel had estimated the number of complainants would hit 2,000. 
Instead, more than 22,000 Black farmers applied and were deemed eligible 
to join the class.

Five years later, it was clear the consent decree had failed. A 2004 
investigation by the Environmental Working Group (EWG) found that 9 out 
of 10 Black farmers had been “denied any recovery.” An estimated 64,000 
farmers were rejected because they missed the court’s original filing 
deadline, even though they submitted claims before the court’s “late 
claims” period. Another 9,000 had their claims refuted and got nothing. 
Just 10 percent of 173 eligible Track B filers were granted 
compensation. Of /Pigford’s/ 22,700 claimants, just 371 got any kind of 
debt relief.

Under the Bush administration, the USDA “aggressively fought claims by 
African American farmers, contracting with United States Department of 
Justice lawyers who spent at least 56,000 staff hours and $12 million 
contesting individual farmer claims for compensation,” the EWG study 
found. In many cases, local FSA employees of the USDA simply contested 
Black farmers’ claims of racial discrimination.

“The government is holding up progress with technicalities; and the same 
USDA agents that discriminated against the farmers in the first place 
are now being called upon to respond to and reject applications from 
Black farmer class members. The adjudicators are not making fair and 
consistent rulings which has caused many of the rejections,” J.L. 
Chestnut, a Black civil rights lawyer and a /Pigford/ class-action 
attorney, said in 2000 after seeing the number of rejections. His law 
partner added that Black farmers should go “into the streets to fight 
for justice in this case. Do not trust the judge, the lawyers, the 
adjudicators, the monitor or anyone else to resolve this case.”

A major barrier to compensation was the consent decree’s “specifically 
identified, similarly situated white farmer” standard, which required 
Black farmers to locate a white farmer “in their county who applied for 
the same benefit program at the same time, with the same acreage, the 
same type of crop, the same credit history, and received a higher 
payment or better treatment than the African American farmer.” The USDA 
had some of this information in its files, but agency lawyers denied 
Freedom of Information Act requests from Black farmers and their 
attorneys. Without those details, /Pigford/ farmers were forced to rely 
on public records and guesswork. One Black farmers’ advocate described 
applications getting rejected for misspellings of white farmers’ names 
and other minor issues.

“When they gave away discovery we was already sold out, because then you 
put the burden of proof back on the farmers—but you already had evidence 
that discrimination transpired all over the country over the years,” 
Abrams told me. “Al Pires and them, the last thing they told me was I 
had to go and find a similarly situated white farmer. How can I do that 
other than break into their fancy USDA offices, go through all the 
files, and then have the police be out there to take my behind to jail?”

In October 2000, just two weeks before a major filing deadline, Pires 
and his team admitted to the court that they were way behind. To ensure 
that “counsel’s failings should not be visited on their clients,” Judge 
Friedman added stipulations to ensure that claims would not be excluded 
from review. Less than six months later, he noted that the lawyers had 
“failed to meet the minimum requirement” on timely filings “even once,” 
which he labeled a “disturbing trend.” Less than two weeks later, after 
class counsel made what Judge Friedman called “the remarkable admission 
that they never had a realistic expectation of meeting” target dates, 
the court began to charge them daily fines for tardiness. Instead of 
improving submission rates, “counsel drastically increased the rate at 
which they withdrew petitions,” a move that, Judge Friedman wrote, 
“bring[s] into question Class Counsel’s fidelity to their client” and 
was “bordering on legal malpractice.” The US Court of Appeals would in 
2002 also issue an opinion stating that Black farmers, as a result of 
class counsel’s incompetency, had experienced a “double betrayal: first 
by the [USDA], and then by their own lawyers.” Fearing for the fate of 
Black farmers, in 2001 Judge Friedman asked the American Bar Association 
Committee on Pro Bono and Public Services to “assemble a team of pro 
bono lawyers to assist Class Counsel on an emergency basis.” The effort 
made little difference.

“I went through two or three of those type of lawyers after Pires and 
them left me,” Abrams told me. “You sign up, they keep you for about a 
month, and then next thing you know, they drop you. Then a new one comes 
in, does the same thing.”

Bernard Bates had lost 950 acres of land, including some 200 acres 
originally homesteaded by his grandfather, who settled in Nicodemus, 
Kan., years after his own father fled the South after the Civil War. 
Bates told me that after a few difficult years in the 1980s, he tried to 
get a USDA loan but was denied an application. He joined /Pigford/, but 
his lawyer was of little use. “When we hooked up with /Pigford/, I 
thought we would have some help,” said Ava Bates, Bernard’s wife. “But 
in the end it was just a runaround. The lawyer lied all the way through. 
When we got back home and [Bernard] would try and get in touch with her, 
they would never answer their phone. They promised us a lot of stuff, 
but it wasn’t worth a hoot.”

In 2012, the former president of Bates’s local credit association signed 
an affidavit affirming that the lender’s board of directors, the federal 
land bank, and the local USDA office had colluded “to get Bernard out of 
farming” and that it had been decided they would “rather foreclose, even 
if they lost money, rather than to take Bernard’s money.” To this day, 
he has not gotten debt cancellation or his land back.

Attorney Tracy McCurty, the director of the Black Belt Justice Center 
and the co-organizer of a campaign to cancel the /Pigford/ farmers’ 
debt, said there was a “ray of hope” in 2010, when Obama authorized 
$1.25 billion in debt cancellation funds for Black farmers who had been 
left out of the original class-action suit, a settlement that became 
known as /Pigford/ II. But McCurty, Wright, and multiple farmers told me 
that because of poor oversight, much of the funding was squandered.

“Some of the attorneys informed the farmers that the agreement stated in 
black and white that ‘You’re going to get debt relief, so you really 
don’t need to continue to pay on this. Go ahead and buy feed and 
fertilizer and start farming,’” Wright told me. “So some of the farmers 
who could’ve struggled and paid their debts didn’t, because they were 
advised they didn’t have to. They ended up with interest and penalties 
accumulating for that five years, and it was so steep now they couldn’t 
pay. So many of them lost land that they otherwise would not have.”

Pires and his team were paid $15 million. After the second /Pigford/ 
settlement, Judge Friedman granted a second team of lawyers a requested 
$90 million in attorneys’ fees and expenses. “They might have lined 
their pockets, but they didn’t do anything for the farmers,” said 
Everlyn Bryant, a /Pigford/ legacy farmer from Arkansas. She and her 
late husband got $50,000—far short of the debt relief her family needed. 
They lost 900 acres to USDA foreclosure. “Even after the consent decree 
was done, I was telling the attorneys that $50,000 for a real farmer is 
nothing. It won’t even pay the diesel bill for one month.”

“Since the /Pigford/ debacle, because farmers have these enormous debts, 
their credit is ruined with USDA. Their credit is ruined with other 
traditional lenders,” McCurty said. “How is it that these elder farmers 
in their 70s and 80s, who’ve suffered for over 30 years, are still 
having to present themselves pro se in federal court to delay 
foreclosure proceedings?”

“One of the things that really hurt was that I went across the country 
and talked with all these Black farmers. And this was supposed to make 
them whole again—and everything I told them was a lie,” Abrams told me. 
Living under the threat of foreclosure, his wife had a nervous 
breakdown; he has suffered from high blood pressure, diabetes, and 
kidney failure. “I thought that /Pigford/ was going to make them whole 
again while they was living. A lot of them have died.”

In December 2020, President Biden nominated Tom Vilsack as agriculture 
secretary, infuriating many of the /Pigford/ litigants. Lucas, the 
former president of the USDA Coalition of Minority Employees, said at 
the time that he was flooded with calls from Black farmers who worried 
that the appointment of Vilsack, who they believed had “shown such 
arrogance and indifference to civil rights,” confirmed their fear that 
they would never see justice. When Vilsack left the Agriculture 
Department at the end of Obama’s term in 2016, he presented a rosy 
picture of the strides the USDA had made to improve conditions for Black 
farmers and to end systemic racism within the agency. But according to 
Nathan Rosenberg and Bryce Wilson Stucki, who conducted a two-year 
analysis of Vilsack’s claims for /The Counter/, an investigative 
newsroom focused on food, the former agriculture secretary and his team 
distorted data to cover up the USDA’s continued failure to serve Black 
farmers. (Vilsack also made headlines in 2010 for firing Black USDA 
employee Shirley Sherrod based on false allegations.) After Vilsack 
asked Wright to return as head of the Civil Rights Office in 2009, his 
first task, Wright told me, was to tackle the 14,000 Bush-era 
discrimination complaints that had gone unaddressed, of which, he and 
his team determined, 4,000 had merit. Many of those complaints exceeded 
the two-year limit on receiving compensatory relief, so Wright and 
others attempted to find a fix. “We drafted a bill to extend the statute 
of limitations, and some members of the Congressional Black Caucus found 
the money to pay for it, and that bill passed twice in the House,” 
Wright said. But the bill hit roadblocks in the Senate. “My office 
didn’t have the same contacts in the Senate as we did in the House. I 
found out that not only were we not being helped by Secretary Vilsack, 
but that he may have been putting sand in the gears. He gave me zero 
help in trying to get it done.”

/The Counter/’s investigation found that those farmers never had their 
unwarranted debts settled. “USDA actually foreclosed on some of them and 
attempted to foreclose on others before their cases were 
resolved—despite a moratorium, mandated as part of the 2008 farm bill, 
on exactly this practice,” Rosenberg and Stucki reported. In fact, from 
2006 to 2016, the USDA foreclosed on “Black-owned farms at a higher rate 
than on any other racial group…. The agency was more than six times as 
likely to foreclose on a Black farmer as it was on a white one,” they 
wrote.

“They just can’t assume that every time they aren’t successful it’s 
because of discrimination,” Vilsack would later state. “I think you can 
do a service to your client by not only fighting hard for them, but also 
explaining why they didn’t get the help that they thought they were 
entitled to, and it wasn’t anything to do with the color of their skin 
or their culture or whatever.”

“The reason why we do not trust Tom Vilsack is because during his 
administration, farmers continued to lose their land,” Wright told me. 
After all, the discrimination that spurred the /Pigford/ lawsuit isn’t 
in the past. A /Politico/ study revealed that the USDA “granted loans to 
only 37 percent of Black applicants last year in one program that helps 
farmers pay for land, equipment and repairs but accepted 71 percent of 
applications from white farmers.”

Wright is not hopeful Black farmers will ever get their due. “Trump was 
able to pay farmers these soybean payments when the product price went 
down because China was not buying soybeans,” he said. “If you want to do 
something, you get it done. If you don’t want to do it, you do process. 
And all the Department of Agriculture has done since this administration 
got in is process, as it relates to people of color.”

The USDA has said it plans to fight the lawsuits that are currently 
holding up debt cancellation payments to Black farmers. But in August, 
the agency failed to appeal one of the preliminary injunctions by the 
appointed deadline. McCurty, who has been aiding Black farmers with 
legal issues for years, believes that winning the court challenges is a 
long shot in any case. She has pushed for Senator Raphael Warnock, who 
proposed the $4 billion in debt cancellation in stand-alone legislation 
in February, and Senate cosponsor Cory Booker to seek more creative 
solutions. In September, Booker announced plans to include debt erasure 
for Black and other minority farmers in the budget reconciliation 
package that Democrats are currently drafting.

In order to sidestep the lawsuits that are preventing the funds 
allocated by the Covid relief act from being disbursed, the proposed 
bill would amend the American Rescue Plan by eliminating any mention of 
“socially disadvantaged farmers.” Instead, the bill’s provisions include 
100 percent loan cancellation to USDA farm loan borrowers who fall under 
the category of “economically distressed.” It also allots $1 billion to 
debt restructuring for farmers. And just over another billion is divided 
among various services, including $350 million to those “determined to 
have suffered discrimination in Department of Agriculture farm lending 
programs.”

Wright, McCurty, and Lucas, who are advising Democrats on how to move 
forward with the bill, caution that history shows that if the USDA 
doesn’t explicitly make provisions for Black farmers, they are almost 
certain to be discriminated against yet again. To that end, Wright has 
suggested that “historically underserved farmers” should be one 
qualifier of eligibility for full debt cancellation, and that the $350 
million allotted to victims of USDA discrimination be raised to $1 billion.

But whether any reconciliation bill will be passed at all remains to be 
seen. And every few months, another /Pigford/ legacy farmer dies without 
seeing the federal government, or this country, do right by them. 
“Martin Luther King once said to tell Black folks to wait is the same as 
saying ‘never,’” Wright told me. “I’m not optimistic that they’ll get 
relief from any of these provisions, although I’m convinced that the 
president really intended that these programs be fairly implemented. The 
last plantation hasn’t caught up yet with that.”
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://freedomarchives.org/pipermail/news_freedomarchives.org/attachments/20211105/df7e2f7e/attachment.htm>