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<h1 class="gmail-reader-title">How Thousands of Black Farmers
Were Forced Off Their Land</h1>
<div class="gmail-credits gmail-reader-credits">By Kali
Holloway
November 1, 2021</div>
<h2>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.</h2>
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<p class="gmail-caption">Illustration by Marco
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</div>
<p><span>I</span>n 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.
</p>
<p>“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.
</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>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. </p>
<p>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.
</p>
<p>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.’”</p>
<p>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. </p>
<p>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.
</p>
<p>In 1997, facing mounting debt, Bernice Atchison
signed on as a plaintiff in <em>Pigford v. Glickman</em>,
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 <em>Pigford</em>
farmers are deeper in debt today than they were before
the lawsuit. </p>
<p>Atchison was among those who never received debt
cancellation. She has become one of the most visible
and vocal <em>Pigford</em> 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.
</p>
<p>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. </p>
<p>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.
</p>
<p>“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 <em>Pigford</em>. So this [the halt
in payouts] is consistent with all of the other
promises that have been broken.” </p>
<p>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.
</p>
<p>“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.” </p>
<p><span>T</span>he 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.
</p>
<p>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.
</p>
<p>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 <em>Pigford </em>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.”
</p>
<p>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.”
</p>
<p>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.”
</p>
<p>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.”
</p>
<p>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.”
</p>
<p>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.
</p>
<p>“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.” </p>
<p><span>T</span>he problems with <em>Pigford</em>
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.
</p>
<p>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.
</p>
<p>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 <em>Pigford</em>
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.
</p>
<p>“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?”
</p>
<p>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.
</p>
<p>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 <em>Pigford’s</em>
22,700 claimants, just 371 got any kind of debt
relief.
</p>
<p>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. </p>
<p>“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 <em>Pigford</em>
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.”
</p>
<p>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, <em>Pigford</em> 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.
</p>
<p>“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?”
</p>
<p>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.
</p>
<p>“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.” </p>
<p>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 <em>Pigford</em>, but his
lawyer was of little use. “When we hooked up with <em>Pigford</em>,
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.”
</p>
<p>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.
</p>
<p>Attorney Tracy McCurty, the director of the Black
Belt Justice Center and the co-organizer of a campaign
to cancel the <em>Pigford</em> 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 <em>Pigford</em> II. But McCurty, Wright,
and multiple farmers told me that because of poor
oversight, much of the funding was squandered.
</p>
<p>“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.”
</p>
<p>Pires and his team were paid $15 million. After the
second <em>Pigford</em> 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 <em>Pigford</em>
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.”
</p>
<p>“Since the <em>Pigford</em> 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?”
</p>
<p>“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 <em>Pigford</em> was going to make them
whole again while they was living. A lot of them have
died.” </p>
<p><span>I</span>n December 2020, President Biden
nominated Tom Vilsack as agriculture secretary,
infuriating many of the <em>Pigford</em> 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
<em>The Counter</em>, 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.”
</p>
<p><em>The Counter</em>’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.
</p>
<p>“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.”
</p>
<p>“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 <em>Pigford</em>
lawsuit isn’t in the past. A <em>Politico</em> 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.”
</p>
<p>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.”
</p>
<p><span>T</span>he 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.
</p>
<p>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.”
</p>
<p>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.
</p>
<p>But whether any reconciliation bill will be passed at
all remains to be seen. And every few months, another
<em>Pigford</em> 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.”
</p>
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