Offices, bureaucracies, and injustice

A civil rights office was opened in the Department of Agriculture in 1971 and for years it was organized and re-organized. Obviously not at the top of the priority list, it was closed eventually during the Reagan administration in 1983. Later still, during the Clinton administration, the office was re-opened.

In the meantime, farmers were putting their reports of discrimination on paper, but what was happening to the farmers' complaints? Were they being read? Filed away? Shredded? Trashed? Ignored? Read over lunch?

What were the implicit and explicit rules within the bureaucracy of the USDA that encouraged such misbehavior? Now, why is it that we still have a hard time believing that such things happened?

I met one farmer who alleged that discriminatory actions toward him began the first year he was in farming, during the late '60s when the county supervisory blatantly told him he was not going to get funded because he was black. There wasn't an office then to hear his complaints. Other farmers have told story upon story of discriminative acts occurring between '71 and '83. They even wrote letters, but who in DC read them?

What were the allegations? They were many related to policies and offices on the local level: the use of stalling tactics to delay the application process for operating loans, the demand that applications be written in pencil so the supervisor could change the figures to fit his wishes, too little money too late into the planting season, oftentimes less than half of what was anticipated would eventually arrive up in the Spring, lack of disaster relief funds offered to White farmers, and the list could go on and on. One source reported that the average white farmer's application was processed in 60 days while the average black farmer's was processed in 220 days.

Progress has been slow to non-existent under all of the administrations since '83.

So, it looks like no one gets a pass on creating change, not the Republicans and not the Democrats.

The courts had their opportunity to make things right, but the Pigford Case was a "bitter- sweet" settlement according to one farmer advocacy group president. It could be called worse.

Soon to come: a history of court cases and the Pigford case in particular.