Black Farmers in America ~ Black History Month

Media Contact: Michael Harris (916) 220-5320
http://www.johnficara.com/blackfarmers

John Francis Ficara's "Black Farmers In America"
at Underground Books, Sacramento, California

(February 28, 2006) – Photojournalist John Francis Ficara’s book “Black Farmers in America” is introduced in Sacramento, California by the California Chapter of the Black Farmers and Agriculturalist Association to end Black History Month 2006.

Black History Month Reception
Underground Books
2814 35th Street @ Broadway
Historic Oak Park
Tuesday, February 28, 2006
5:30 p.m. – 7:30 p.m.

“Black Farmers In America,” with an essay by Juan Williams, has been published by the University of Kentucky Press. The 10 x 11 book has more than 100 photographs reproduced in duotone. Ficara’s book says that Black Americans made up 14 percent of all farmers in 1920 and worked 16 million acres of land, but that today black farmers are less than 1 percent of the nation’s farmers and are working on less than 3 million acres.

Changing technology, globalization, an aging workforce, racist lending policies, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture itself each contributed, in some way, to the demise of the Black Farmer in America, the book says, creating “a staggering story of human loss: when each farm closed, those farmers, their spouses, children, grandchildren, and the people they hired, all had to leave a way of life that had existed in their families for generations.”

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