Thanks, Mr. President, for Stepping Up!

Here is a memo that is worth reading. Vilsack is outlining his plan to clean up the USDA, a noble goal and a monumental task. This is likely laborious read, or it may simply make for a skim read.
You can find the full text of Vilsack's memo here.

Here's the full text of an announcement that is widely circulating. It's worth a full read as President Obama and Secretary Vilsack are quoted. This one is lifted from Southwest Farm Press.

Funding for black farmers suit

May 8, 2009 10:46 AM

The Obama administration’s fiscal year 2010 budget proposal will include funds to provide a final settlement for the lawsuit that alleged discrimination against minority farmers in USDA’s farm programs.

“I’m pleased that we are now able to close this chapter in the agency's history and move on,” President Obama said in a statement. "My hope is the farmers and their families who were denied access to USDA loans and programs will be made whole and will have the chance to rebuild their lives and their businesses.”

“I am very pleased that President Obama is taking swift action on this matter as it will help us chart a new course at USDA, one on which all USDA customers and employees are treated equally and fairly,” said Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack.

In 1999, USDA entered into a consent agreement with black farmers in which the agency agreed to pay for past discrimination in lending and other USDA programs. Thousands of claims have been adjudicated, but other claims were not considered on their merits because problems with the notification and claims process hindered some farmers’ ability to participate. To deal with the remaining claims, Congress provided these farmers another avenue for restitution in the Food, Conservation and Energy Act of 2008.

For those who have claims that were not considered on the merits because the claim was found not to be timely, the 2008 farm bill provided the right to file a new claim in federal court. The total amount offered by the federal government, $1.25 billion, includes $100 million that served as a “place holder” in Section 14012 of the Farm Bill.

The announcement comes on the heels of a memorandum released two weeks ago by Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack detailing an aggressive plan to promote civil rights and equal access at USDA. The memo announced the following:

The temporary suspension of all foreclosures within the Farm Service Agency's farm loan program, which will not only aid farmers facing economic hardship but will also provide the opportunity to review the loan granting process for possible discriminatory conduct;

The creation of a Task force to conduct a review of a sample of program civil rights complaints that have been processed or that are currently being processed - the complaints and inquiries total over 14,000, including over 3,000 that have not been processed;

Granting greater authority to USDA's Office of Civil Rights.

The Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights will collaborate with the other agencies to develop and implement a proposal for data collection across USDA, make sure all complaints are incorporated as part of one data system; and develop USDA policy and training to ensure that all complaints are received and dealt with in a consistent manner within a specific time frame.

Deeply Moved

I am deeply moved that people around the country are following the words on these pages. Thanks to all of you for your interest and concern for African American farmers of our land.

Information about President Obama's commitment to addressing the injustices will be forthcoming.

Thanks, friends, for caring about justice.

Dr. Leonard is Coming to Town, no Coming to the Country

Dr. Leonard, Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights for the United States Department of Agriculture, is coming to Tillery, NC this afternoon. This is no small gesture, I hope and pray, on behalf of the Obama administration and USDA Agriculture Secretary Vilsack in particular.

His participation in the meeting sends a signal that the administration will live up to its promises of making wrongs right in the egregious acts of discrimination perpetrated on Black farmers, and other minority and women farmers of our land.

I have heard their stories. They are convincing. I am thinking of a Black farmer in Texas who was denied access to Pigford on a technicality. And then, there's an entire county just south of Birmingham which did not receive the information about the Pigford case. How did this happen? Frankly, it beats me, but when public figures affirm that that is the case, and when there is an entire set of Black farmers who never read various and sundry publications, nor heard CNN, or other media outlets advertise as to the case, then I'm convinced.

You have read on these pages and other outlets over the last few years as to the nature of the offenses: lost applications, stymied at even the application process, too little funding too late, crop failure, no disaster relief for Blacks while the Whites are offered disaster relief, no extension of credit to the Blacks while offered to the Whites, foreclosures, foreclosures, and more foreclosures despite a moratorium on foreclosures. Sale of property not their own for pennies on the dollar. And the list could go on and on.

In the words of a friend of mine from Tennessee, "That can't happen in America." Yes, that can happen in America. It has been happening all across the country. The people's department has become the department of the big and the rich.

Obama's 2010 budget includes a large sum of money to address these grievances. I don't think it'll be enough. Another contribution that the system at the USDA could make is firing those who discriminate against anyone. Why should someone stay in a position paid for by tax payer dollars when discrimination is evident. I'm with former congressman from Texas Charlie Stenholm, when he said on the record that they should be fired.

So, welcome to Tillery, Dr. Leonard. I am sorry that I'm not there to meet you. I care about these people and this movement. It is a blight on the conscience of the American people. It is a burdent on my soul. Until this issue is address, we will wear the stains of guilt and shame as a people for what some of our citizens and employees have done to other citizens of our country. I trust, Dr. Leonard, that there is indeed a new day dawning.

I am praying this afternoon, Dr. Leonard, that you will have eyes to see and hears to hear, and that your head and your heart, that your administrative and decision-making skills will be moved to action. I am also praying today for Gary and for Spencer, and for other members of the BFAA organization, and I'm praying for farmers who will stand before you, Dr. Leonard, and tell their stories. May you be moved, sir, at what you will see and hear.

And I pray to the Almighty, the Holy One of Israel, that this period of shame and degradation of our people will end, that justice will prevail.

Your job is clear, Dr. Leonard. I'm praying that you are up to the challenge. It is big, and I believe that you are.

Summit at Tillery

Here's an event that I would really like to attend, but work demands here in Oklahoma are keeping me home this weekend. Gary Grant and BFAA are continuing to advocate for Black farmers who did not receive justice under the Pigford Class Action Suit. At last notice, there were approximately 67,000 "late claimants," who for various and sundry technicalities were disallowed from entering the class action suit.

Now that we have a new administration in the White House, new appointments are being made in the USDA Office of Civil Rights. One of those is Dr. Joe Leonard. There appears to be a legitimate effort to right the wrongs perpetrated upon Black farmers of our country.

One of those efforts will be a listening session in Tillery on Friday, May 15.

Here is what the schedule looks like.

Friday, May 15, 2009

Tillery Community Center
321 Community Center Road
Halifax (Tillery), NC 27839

12:30 – 2:00pm

LUNCH

The Resettlement Café
8311 Hwy 561
Tillery, NC 27839
252-826-4076

3:30 – 5:00 PM

Town Hall Meeting
Tillery Community Center
321 Community Center Road
Halifax, NC 27839

5:05 – 7:00 PM

Individual Meetings With Dr. Joe Leonard,

Assistant Secretary for Civil Right, United States Department of Agriculture

5:15 – 6:30pm: BFAA MEETING
Tour the Remembering Tillery History House

************************************************

Hosted by: Black Farmers & Agriculturalists Association
And
Concerned Citizens of Tillery’s Land Loss Fund

Check out BFAA's web page for more information about these and other important concerns.

Southern Farmers and Their Stories

Here is a book that I'd recommend to those who care about farming, its history, and racial concerns. The review was written for the Red River Valley Historical Journal, and appeared in 2007, volume 5, pages 147-149. The journal is edited by Dr. Vernon Williams, Department of History, Abilene Christian University. I appreciate his offer to review this volume. It carries with it a narrative theoretical orientation and dominant themes which will be familiar to the readers of these pages.

Here's the text of that review:

Melissa Walker, associate professor of history at Converse College, takes on a monumental task in Southern Farmers and Their Stories: Memory and Meaning in Oral History. An oral historian by training and a farmer’s daughter by birth, she explains the influence of a variety of sociologists and psychologists in developing her orientation toward “communities of memory” in the sense that her study “mapped the boundaries of their community of memory by telling stories about their shared rural past.” The author uses “memory as a category of cultural and historical analysis” as a means of gathering those experiences and their descriptions. At the outset, she intends to answer three questions: 1) “What experiences molded rural southerners’ sense of shared past?” 2) “How did they remember rural transformation?” and 3) “What does the shape of their stories about change tell us about how people use memories and knowledge of the past to make sense of the world in which they live today?”

In order to answer those questions, she assumes a narrative theoretical orientation in pouring over a massive amount of archival material which included the transcripts of 475 interviews, eight of which she conducted herself, with 531 people, held for the most part from 1975 to 1995. These transcripts of conversations with rural southerners from fourteen states varied enormously in terms of their purposes, i.e., Black life in the Jim Crow South, the Civil Rights Movement, southern industrialization, and rural life. While acknowledging the challenges of reading transcripts as compared to participating in the interviews, she asserts that the complexity of the purposes, interviewers, and time frames all allow her to achieve her purposes, that of uncovering themes of rural southerners. The diversity of the interviewees provides much richness to the pursuit of answers to her questions as the interviews criss-cross such diverse populations as landowners and non-landowners, men and women from different generations, black and white, those who had to endure racial discrimination and those who did not, and those who lost land and those who persevered and still own the land.

In addition to organizing the material into common and disparate themes that ultimately answered her questions, the author carefully develops the concept of “communities of memory,” which she describes as the shared past with its multiplicity of contrasts, the sense of “us” versus “them, ” “rural” versus “non-rural” people, and the past versus the present. She also nuances the notion of “collective memory,” that which is located in and spoken by the individual, which ultimately overlaps with memories of others in tracing themes that include the past, the present, and the future.

She contributes to the discourse of rural southerners and their struggles during the transformation of the south by providing a seventeen page summary of the manner in which the crisis of economics, government policy, technology, and structural changes in the economy of agriculture impacted farming and rural life. From there, she organizes her material into five chapters. Chapter one describes the lived experiences of three southern farmers, a White woman, an African American man, and a White man who owned land. Her nuancing their common and disparate themes such as the satisfying nature of farming, continuity with the past, identity, commitment to farming, hardships, friendships, and independence is very readable material. Chapter two uses the concept of memory in an attempt to understand rural southerners via dominant themes of self sufficiency, work ethic, mutual aid, love of the land, relative economic equality, differences between town and country, and rural identity and personal character. Chapter three contains descriptions from the stories of two groups of rural southerners: the pre-war generation and their views of the changes in the south, and the post-war’s generation and common themes of “get big or get out,” and the role of the federal government and its policies. Chapter four examines the concept of memory and the meaning of change via the complexities of several variables: gender; class; landless versus landowning pre-war whites; racial discrimination, government policy and reasons for leaving the land for African Americans; and post-war whites and their reasons for leaving the land.

In chapter five the author organizes her materials around the concept of how the past and its stories are shaped by the present via sub-themes of the blessing and curse of material improvements, views of today’s young people, changes in community life, cracks in the mythology of rural community, and critiques of contemporary life. In her conclusion she provides a nice, brief summary of the common threads of the entire book.

Valuable information is offered to the reader in the appendices for either informational purposes and/or further study. Appendix One contains demographic data, gender, state, purpose of interview, decade by birth, landowning status by race, and education level by number and percentage of the interviews. Appendix Two lists alphabetically all interviewees by state, gender, year of birth, landowning status, and level of education with a lengthy list of abbreviations for help in mastering the massive amount of content. Appendix Three contains 25 pages of archival sources for all of the interviews. Dr. Walker’s bibliographic essay is especially informative as she describes her academic use of specific sources and her way of thinking about specific points of inquiry: memory, public discourse, and oral history and the relationship between history and memory. Finally, notes for both comments and bibliographical sources are organized by chapter and are exceptionally thorough.

In short, Dr. Walker’s book is well worth placing on our shelves if we are interested in narrative theory, communities of memory, the rural south, transformations in the culture of farming, gender within the rural south within the context of farming, and racism in the south and agriculture policy. Her book is readable though challenging conceptually. She goes to great lengths to answer her key questions, and she does so both efficiently and thoroughly.