Column: Black World
April, 1999

No justice for Black farmers

by Lou Turner

In the first week in January the USDA (United States Department of Agriculture) announced with moralizing fanfare its historic settlement of a class action law suit brought by a group of Black farmers (Pigford v. Glickman) charging the USDA with systematic discrimination in the period 1983 to 1997. President Clinton and USDA Secretary Dan Glickman publicly admitted that Black farmers have been the victims of historic discrimination by the Agriculture Department.

Black farmer organizations, such as the National Black Farmers Association, the Black Farmers and Agriculturalists Association, the Federation of Southern Cooperatives/Land Assistance Fund, have participated in the suit. The Congressional Black Caucus and its Black Farmers Task Force have held hearings on the steep decline in Black farms. At its height in 1920 there were 925,710 Black farmers; by 1994 there were fewer than 16,000, and fewer than 200 under the age of 35.

The statistics don't tell the story of Black farmers in its disgraceful brutality, however. And therein lies the inadequacy of the "historic" settlement. Black farmers were driven off their land and left impoverished by an unholy trinity of private lending institutions, local government institutions such as farm committees, probate judges, county administrators, etc., and federal USDA policies. As the Raleigh, North Carolina Land Loss Prevention Project declares, "the plight of the 20th century Black farmer resembles a modern day Trail of Tears."

The January settlement of $375 million dollars is less than 20% of the $2.5 billion requested initially by the farmers. The federal district court judge charged with carrying out the settlement, Paul Friedman, has sought to strengthen a settlement that fundamentally leaves the USDA very much like it was by introducing changes in the settlement offered to Black farmers and their attorneys at a March 2 fairness hearing. Both the U.S. Justice Department and the counsel for the farmers in the suit rejected Judge Friedman's revisions, tying the farmers they represent to a settlement that is not only paltry and which could actually lead to further hardship, but releases the USDA from any liability and burden to fundamentally restructure its policies and practices.

In fact, the settlement places the burden on Black farmers to 1) provide extensive documentation of discrimination; 2) demonstrate that they are entitled to more compensation by proving that they were the victims of a pattern of systematic discrimination; 3) run the risk of having any compensation expropriated by creditors; 4) deal with the same racist administrators that had discriminated against them, since there is no provision to remove them; and 5) show that they were treated less favorably than white farmers.

Finally, the government proposal of $375 million that Clinton and Glickman tout as historic because it is the largest "reparations" settlement ever won by African Americans looks like an insulting pittance when held up against even the most modest needs of Black farmers. If accepted, the settlement would supposedly provide $50,000 to some 3,000 farmers and debt foregiveness, which averages $87,500 per farmer. Broken down, the $50,000 payment covers 14 years (1983-1997), which would come to just under $3,000 per year. When divided by the hours of a normal working day for an individual farmers per year, it comes to an hourly wage of $1.73!

In Mississippi, the state with most of the Black farmers in the suit, Black activist and former mayor of Tchula, Mississippi, Eddie Carthan led the way in initiating the Black farmers' law suit. Carthan, who is the president of the Mississippi Family Farmers Association, told the JACKSON ADVOCATE, "It was impossible for Black farmers to get loans in Mississippi. They had to go out of state... It was planned for Black farmers' failure--for them to get out of farming and lose their property." (See the Black World column, November 1982, on the long fought struggle of Eddie Carthan and Black farmers in Tchula.)

There is a new intensity in the struggle of Black farmers. It took intensifying the struggle to force the government to the table; it will take a further deepening and persistence of that struggle to fundamentally transform a government agency that has had a historic grip on Black rural life and labor.

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