Blackcommentator: Black Farmers and Justice

The following appeared in a February issue of blackcommentatory.com. It is now laid alongside the fact that Congress is now in recess and did not deal with this issue. Injustice continues to reign.

This article is fairly long, but I hope you'll give it a close read. It provides a good summary of the litigation with Black farmers. It describes some of the outcomes. It was hopeful. That time has passed. I hope it'll come again.

AFTER WAITING AND FIGHTING FOR DECADES, BLACK FARMERS MAY GET A LITTLE JUSTICE

Black farmers of America may finally be compensated for the loss of their farms and their land all across the southern states, with the recent announcement of a $1.25 billion bias settlement between representatives of the farmers and the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The discrimination occurred over decades and involved county agriculture committees that were charged with providing USDA-connected loans to farmers in their counties. The members of the committees were white and many of the farmers were black and therein was the opportunity for the long-term bias and discrimination. The Obama Administration has congratulated Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack and the farmers’ representatives in the agreement to settle the class action lawsuit, known as “Pigford II.” Pigford I was named for Timothy Pigford, a black farmer who was a lead plaintiff in the original case that was settled in the mid-1990s.

That first suit against the USDA was brought against President Bill Clinton’s agriculture secretary, Dan Glickman. Many farmers were left out of the suit and the number of farmers who received a part of the settlement was small enough that the legal case was continued. The result was the announced settlement this month. Congress authorized only $100 million to pay those farmers who were left out of the Pigford I settlement, so President Obama proposed in the 2010 federal budget an additional $1.15 billion to fund a complete settlement of all of the Pigford II lawsuits. About 16,000 black farmers were compensated in the first settlement, even though there were possibly 66,000 who might have been eligible. In that 1999 consent agreement, the total paid was about $1 billion. Most of the farmers in that case opted for the expedited $50,000 payment that required a rather low burden of proof of having suffered discrimination.

Because of the large number of farmers in Pigford I who didn’t know about the class action lawsuit or were not aware of the deadlines for joining the suit, black farmers’ organizations kept pushing to continue the suit. Included were John Boyd, president of the National Black Farmers Association, and Gary Grant, president of the Black Farmers and Agriculturalists Association. Boyd expressed his satisfaction that the case finally seems to be settled, saying that the farmers and the government have “buried the hatchet.” But Grant, a veteran of the war with the USDA since his father, Matthew, was notified that his farm in Tillery, N.C., was to be foreclosed back in the 1970s, was not so quick to celebrate. He pointed out that farmers may receive the $50,000 and debt relief or debt forgiveness, but that farmers will have to pay taxes on the debt relief as “income.” There is a longer process, as well, he noted, in which black farmers might get as much as $250,000 in compensation, but it’s a longer process and the farmers in the class are not young and most of them might not be willing to go through such a drawn-out procedure.

Also, he did not want to jump the gun and say it was settled, because Congress next month has to approve the budget with the $1.25 billion for the agreement. The loss of black-owned land over the generations has been steady and it’s important to have a historical perspective on the problem: In 1920, one in every seven farmers in America was black, but, by the early 1980s, only one in every 67 farmers was black. Put another way, in 1910, black farmers owned 15.6 million acres and, by the early 1980s, they owned only 3.1 million acres. There were an estimated 926,000 black-run farms in the U.S. in 1920. By the early 1980s, there were said to be only 33,000 and, by the 1990s, even that low number had dwindled by a third. Black farmers lost so many millions of acres of land through a long process of political, social, and economic abuse, including lack of access to capital from both public and private institutions, lack of knowledge of their legal rights, lack of access to land (for expansion of existing farms), and loss of heired property.

The latter was used by unscrupulous land speculators and frequently by other farmers in the county or neighborhood. When a farmer died without a will, the family inherited the farm and, if one member of the family wanted his or her piece of the farm, the entire farm had to be sold, so that the selling member could get his or her share. Often, this happened after family members left the home farm for industrial work in the north---say in Chicago, New York, Detroit, Cleveland, or Philadelphia---and the old place had little or no meaning any more. They could be easily convinced to sell a portion for $10,000 or less and, thereby, the farm was lost.

In Gary Grant’s view, that was the beginning of the end of any possibility of African-Americans taking their rightful place in American society. “A landless people is a powerless people,” he said. Since many of the farmers in the Pigford I class had been young under Jim Crow in the South, they knew how little power they had in their local communities, but what they did have, their farms, gave them a measure of freedom and independence, even under those conditions. Loss of that land base for black Americans was a trial for Grant and others across the South, who knew what was being lost.

Discrimination works in many ways and part of the suit included charges that the foot-dragging and delays of the county committees in providing timely loans in the spring made the difference between having a crop to pay the bills and having no crop and losing everything. Routinely, if a white farmer and a black farmer came to the county committee on the same day to have their loans approved for seed and fertilizer, the white farmer would have the loan approved and have money in hand in short order. The black farmer, on the other hand, would wait---it could be a paper wasn’t filled out right---and wait and wait. By the time the loan was approved, the white farmer’s crop would be six inches out of the ground before the black farmer bought seed. That’s just one of the ways farms and millions of acres were lost.

And that’s why the USDA settled first one lawsuit, then another when it was clear that those who had been left out were not going to go away. For those farmers who were in accumulated debt to the tune of $200,000 or $300,000, a settlement of $50,000 is not going to make much difference, either in Pigford I or Pigford II. For most who will accept the agreement, though, it’s the principle of the thing and an acknowledgement that there is a little justice. It would appear that this was one of the most vital civil rights cases to occupy an entire people for the last half of the 20th Century, since it stems from post-Reconstruction and continued in one way or another for more than a century.

Yet, the issue did not raise a stir among any of the mainline U.S. civil rights organizations. African-American organizations might have made note of it at a convention or regional get-together, but it was not an issue of great concern, nor did the trade unions approach black land loss as a great civil rights issue, as they did in the larger civil rights movement of the 1960s. Nearing settlement, the USDA discrimination suit is likely to bring a sigh of relief from black farmers, but the land that is gone will not return to black families and they will not be raising families on their own land, with the dignity and self-respect that comes with being a tiller of your own soil. Had this been a bigger issue for more than just a few tens of thousands of black farmers and landowners, there might have been a different outcome.

Matthew Grant, Gary’s father, who built up his 40 acres in the Tillery resettlement community in the days of Franklin D. Roosevelt, to a farm of some 300 acres on the Roanoke River, said it all in a one-page letter to Secretary Glickman in May, 1996. He explained that, since 1976, he had been in a “continued struggle” with Farmers Home Administration (FmHA), the year the USDA agency initiated foreclosure proceedings. He told Glickman in the letter, “…the blatant racial inequities practiced by the FmHA officers, which got Black farmers into trouble initially, have continued to be practiced. I was able to work with my other lenders and am now current with them. The only answer I have ever gotten from the FmHA agency is, ‘we are going to (sell) you out. It doesn’t matter who you bring.’ or ‘only the full amount due will stop the foreclosure.’”

Matthew also described a civil rights complaint he filed in December, 1995, over what he termed an act of “brazen discrimination”, when a USDA county soils director in Halifax, N.C., appeared wearing a necktie “depicting clearly a confederate troop of soldiers and a confederate flag waving in victory.” “It is difficult enough to make a living as a farmer,” he wrote. “I have farmed all my life and I love it. My wife and I have raised and educated 6 children of our own and 4 foster children without benefit of aid from any government agency. Now, in our golden years, we find that at a time we should be at peace, we are still struggling to get this matter settled. I have no other choice but to appeal to you.”

As did many farmers during the long wait for justice, Matthew Grant died before his farm’s future was settled. His family carries on that struggle. The settlement announced this month is welcome to most for many reasons, but money won’t make up for the families who suffered the generations-old injustices, for those who lost their land and farms, and for those who were sent looking for work in unfamiliar places.

Black Soil: African American Farmers' Struggle.....

This volume has been on my shelf following a trip out to Tillery, NC several months ago. It has intrigued me for a while, demanded my attention, but only on this cold, wintry day have I felt compelled to pull it off the shelf and read through it.

Glad I did.

Louis Andreas Michaelsen, a journalist from Denmark, raised on a small family farm, received a degree in American Studies from the Center for American Studies, University of Southern Denmark, in 2008.

His masters thesis is an interesting read: "Black Soil: African American Farmers' Struggle from Emancipation into the 21st Century."

It covers the current landscape of the challenges for Black farmers. It also covers the landscape for African Americans from plantation to Pigford and beyond. He addresses both sides of institutional racism. He interviews four important figures in the Black farmer struggle, two I've met, one I know well, one I'd like to know better, and two I'd like to meet some day. My path with Lloyd Wright, Former Director, USDA Office of Civil Rights, crossed in August, 2007 at a DOJ/USDA mediation hearing in Washington, DC. My life has been intertwined with Gary Grant, BFAA President, since early 2005.

Among things that make Mr. Michaelsen's thesis an interesting document is his liberal use of photos throughout. While a thesis done in American universities would not allow this sort of personalization, his work permits photos of those interviewed to be placed in key places of text. I think that is a great juxtaposition of narrative and persons.

Beyond this, his appendices are both personal and historical. Newspaper articles about Blacks moving from the farm to the city, census documents, and correspondence between Wilkins of the NAACP and Freeman, Secretary of Agriculture, and other historical pieces, are fascinating.

Both personal and moving are other documents. Documents between the Grant family and the USDA, one in particular that was the "Final Resolution Agreement - Matthew Grant," signed by Lloyd Wright on March 2, 1998 and by Matthew Grant on 3-4-98, and witnessed by Barbara Demery and Timothy Burke, was especially interesting and historical. It should have settled the Matthew and Florenza Grant case v. USDA. Documents that follow from the hand of their son, Gary Grant, show that matters were not settled. To this day they remain unsettled.

Finally, Appendix M contains printed materials from the funeral of Florenza Moore Grant, wife of Matthew Grant, and mother of Gary Grant. She passed in 2001, four years before Charla and I met her family. One line reads, "In her own right, for almost 80 years, Florenza was the sunshine of our world, the courage of our strife, and the dazzling superior mother in the Grant 'House By the Side of the Road.'" We have stood on several occasions at their burial site on the Grant family farm.

We were moved the first time and we were moved the last time. We will stand there again, if the Lord permits.

So, thanks, Louis Andreas Michaelsen for this important work. It deserves to be read and reviewed often.

A Great Day in Tillery

The drive out to Tillery is always interesting. The terrain changes. There are fewer houses and larger fields. The morning sun glistens off the dew. The fields are in preparation for planting.

And on this day, we pulled into the parking lot at the Tillery Community Center and breakfast was on the stove and on the counter. The gracious women of the Concerned Citizens of Tillery had prepared a most amazing breakfast for those of us who had gathered there for the board meeting of the Black Farmers and Agriculturalists Association. Warm greetings and warmer hugs were just the start of the day. Thanks to those wonderful women who spread breakfast in a wonderful way for us to begin the day.

Grant Grant, President of BFAA, led us thoughout this moving day. The morning session was spent re-envisioning BFAA. We heard an incredible history lesson as to how we got here, told by one who was there from the beginning. We discussed a number of things in terms of where we are. We explored options of moving into the immediate future in matters of social justice that impact all of us. The conversation was lively, at times intense, and always with an eye to what is best for the movement of which we are a part. We articulated a vision that continues to set BFAA apart as a radical organization, one committed to social justice, to righting the wrongs perpetrated upon Black farmers. Among other things, our task is to inform in a clear and concise manner those specifics related to what is being called "Pigford II," or the reopening of possibilities via the President and Congress' actions for those who are labeled "late filers," or those who did not get admitted into the Pigford Class Action Suit based on technicalities.

We took a break mid-day and had lunch at the Tillery Resettlement Cafe. Evangeline Redding is always a gracious host and a wonderful cook. It's always a pleasure to sit around her tables, eat her wonderful food, and engage in meaningful and often humorous conversations about life, events, and people in Tillery.

In the afternoon we returned to the Center and continued our deliberations, this time in an effort to wrap our minds around what we are calling for the moment the "October Event." More information will follow as to what will make in my opinion an amazing event on the Grant Family Farm in Tillery, an event that will stir our souls and give us more information about the plight of Black farmers and the challenges of holding on to the land. As the sun set, we wrapped up our conversations and took a trip down to the Roanoke River.

As the sun set of the river, which was higher than I'd ever seen it before, I thought to myself, "Lord, I wonder if the sun is setting over more black land loss, or is it simply setting on a day in which we've deliberated about our role in the effort to stem the tide of land loss?"

More information will be posted on this page over the next few weeks about the "October Event." For you who are praying people, please pray for this event and its impact.