Farming While Black: Historical Amenesia during the 2008 Presidental Campaign

Farming While Black - Black Farmers and the United States Department of Agriculture
2008 Presidential Election Cycle

Kenneth R. Timmerman

The U.S. Department of Agriculture has paid black farmers more than $575 million since April 1999 for past discrimination in the largest civil-rights award in U.S. history. But some black farmers believe USDA still wants them off the land. Insight sent a team to investigate their claims.

It was a stunning political turn-around. One week before last year's highly charged presidential election--while the Rev. Jesse Jackson and leaders from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People were jet setting across America for Al Gore -- a group of black farmers from North Carolina and Georgia came out publicly for George W. Bush.

Just a few months earlier, in June 2000, these farmers had stood in solidarity on Capitol Hill with members of the Congressional Black Caucus who bitterly opposed Bush. But something had happened in the meantime that turned the farmers around. Republican Reps. Jay Dickey of Arkansas and J.C. Watts of Oklahoma picked up the farmers' cause and sponsored legislation to help them collect on their lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and to prevent foreclosure on their land. Rather than join the Republicans and help the black farmers, the Black Caucus killed the GOP bills. It was politics as usual in Washington.

But the farmers fought back. After endorsing Bush at a press conference the mainstream media ignored, the farmers changed tactics and worked actively to defeat Democratic members of Congress who had voted against the relief they sought, starting with Black Caucus member Sanford Bishop Jr. (D-Ga.).

"We went back home and started campaigning," says Eddie Slaughter, vice president of the Black Farmers and Agriculturist Association (BFAA) who hails from Buena Vista, Ga. "We got on the radio and talked about this guy who had betrayed black farmers like Judas had betrayed Jesus. We said what he did was no better than black-on-black crime. The Democratic Party had to spend a million dollars to save his seat."

Bishop narrowly won re-election, but had to rely heavily on hefty contributions from agribusiness, big labor and the Democratic leadership's political-action committees (PACs). In all, PAC and party money accounted for more than 60 percent of the $1 million he spent, according to records on file at the Federal Election Commission. His Republican opponent, Dylan Glenn, spent nearly as much, but 88.4 percent of his money came from individual contributors.

Top Republican political strategist Karl Rove understood the politics of the Bishop race and welcomed Slaughter and BFAA President Gary Grant to the White House on March 29 when they returned to Washington for a visit. Rove ushered them in for a 15-minute meeting with President Bush to state their case.

They gave Bush petitions signed by more than 400 farmers from across the South asking for prompt action on the April 1999 consent decree with the USDA to provide relief for black farmers who were losing their land to foreclosure at an alarming rate. What began as a massive settlement to correct past discrimination by the USDA had turned into a nightmare for the very farmers it was supposed to benefit.

If Bush agreed to help them, they urged, the wheel of America's long and troubled racial history would come round to where it started. Indeed, their story has deep roots that go back to the days of Reconstruction, when Republicans helped black farmers become independent with 40 acres and a mule.

Today, many of the black farmers Insight interviewed in Virginia, Georgia and North Carolina believe that the government wants to take their land away from them. They say the USDA settlement, which provides $50,000 in cash plus a promise of debt relief to farmers who can prove they were unfairly treated when seeking loans in the 1980s and 1990s, had been doled out by the Clinton administration primarily to people who are not active farmers, many of whom live in urban housing projects. Meanwhile, real farmers with real cases of discrimination were losing their land as they were shut out of the settlement and the USDA foreclosed on their property.

"I have heard these complaints," USDA acting General Counsel J. Michael Kelly tells Insight. "We hope that these allegations are not true. We hope that people are not having their claims approved and are receiving payments who are not truly eligible and deserving."

And yet, according to the official tally of the 12,779 claims paid out by USDA to date, fewer than 10 percent of the successful claimants had loans with USDA that were identified for cancellation, and of these only 135 individuals have loans that still are open. "What that means," says Slaughter, is that most of these people were never farmers, because the farmers had loans."
Paying down debt was supposed to be a major piece of the settlement but, as of today, the USDA has forgiven just 198 loans worth only $8.5 million, a relative drop in the bucket.

The Concerned Black Farmers of Tennessee tracked the 70 individuals in Tipton County who filed claims and found 63 percent of those who were approved had no records to establish that they ever had farmed the land. Each of those individuals received a check from USDA for $50,000. Meanwhile, 73 percent of those whose claims were denied had presented loan documents, crop-payment receipts and other records showing a sustained presence on the land.

"We are in a difficult position to respond because judgment of these cases has been taken completely out of our hands," says Kelly. "We have a facilitator, an adjudicator and a monitor--all paid by us but independent from us. They are the ones who decide which claims are eligible for payment."

Because the decision of the adjudicator (the Poorman-Douglas Corp.) is final, farmers whose claims are rejected find themselves in a worse position than they were before the consent decree. "Black farmers stand to lose 1.5 million acres of land through that consent decree," says BFAA President Grant. "As long as you're in the lawsuit, foreclosures can't proceed. But once you've been rejected, you have no recourse and USDA can accelerate the payment schedule and seize your land."
Grant and other farmers interviewed by Insight noted a whole host of pretexts used by the adjudicator to reject claims. "One man was denied because he misspelled the white farmer's name who had gotten a loan under similar circumstances when the black farmer had been denied," Grant says. "A Mississippi man was denied because he was a nonvoting member of the county committee that approved the [USDA] loans, and the adjudicator said that delegitimized his complaint. Another man was denied because his claim sounded too much like others coming from his same area. Yet another was denied because he misspelled the name of his county."

The USDA's Kelly denied that the department had a policy of seizing the land of black farmers. "We want our programs delivered without discrimination," he says. "We want all farmers, all customers, to be treated fairly. That doesn't mean there won't be some borrowers who fail to meet the requirements of their loans and whose loans are ultimately accelerated and foreclosed. The economics of farming are very tough, especially for small farmers. And we realize that."

Grant believes the black farmers were sold out by Alexander Pires, the lawyer who negotiated the Pigford v. Glickman consent decree on behalf of the farmers. "No farmer had ever seen the consent decree before it was signed," Grant tells Insight. "We were outraged when we finally saw it. Pires cut a deal with USDA to narrow the scope of the lawsuit, so now everybody is being paid but the farmers."

Pires acknowledges the difficulties many of the farmers are having. "I don't know of any case I've ever done that is more controversial than this one," he tells Insight. "Our position is it's the most successful civil-rights case in the history of this country. You could add up all the other class-action settlements over the past 20 years and they come out to less. Claimants in the Avis discrimination suit got less than $1,000. Those in Denny's got $300. In the Japanese internment case you got $20,000 for being taken from your home in California and put in a concentration camp for the duration of World War II.

Black farmers got $50,000 tax free, no court fees and free lawyers. We did the best we could considering the novel nature of the case." U.S. District Court Judge Paul Friedman, with whom Pires negotiated the consent decree, doesn't agree and recently slapped stiff fines on Pires and his law firm for failing to process claims in a timely fashion. USDA sources tell Insight that Pires is trying to push paper as fast as possible to avoid the fines and that inevitably undeserving claims are getting through. "The biggest problem now is that they want to stop paying the farmers because there is too much fraud in the system," BFAA Vice President Slaughter says.

But USDA has paid Pires. So far his law firm, Conlon, Frantz, Phelan, Pires & Leavy, has been paid $15 million by USDA. Pires contends that fee is no royal sum. "You try interviewing 40,000 people one at a time. This is a labor of love."

The plight of black farmers is a tale reminiscent of the dust bowl, where God seemed bent on punishing anyone foolish enough to have broken the prairies to farm the land by sending year after year of drought. But added to natural disasters, which normally are compensated for by Congress through farmer bailouts, were generations of racial discrimination at the Farmers Home Administration (FmHA), now known as the Farm Services Bureau, the USDA agency responsible for advancing farm-operating funds, disaster-relief and capital-improvement loans.

The system simply broke down during the droughts of the mid-1980s, when small farmers turned en masse to the USDA for help. That is when black farmers first began to take note of how differently they were being treated from neighboring whites.
Calvin Brown, 75, a former National Security Agency employee who returned to farm in Brunswick County, Va., kept detailed records of his own experience with county supervisor Charles Fetherstun. "In March 1984," Brown told Insight, "I was pulling tobacco and getting ready to lay it into a neighbor's barn. The neighbor, who was white, had agreed and so had Fetherstun. But after I had the tobacco laid out on the cart, they called and said I needed a contract."

Brown went down to the general store and tried to call Fetherstun at the county office of the FmHA, but the USDA bureaucrat wouldn't take the call. Knowing the green tobacco would turn black after three hours on the carts and be worthless, the black farmer drove down to the office bringing the contract. Although Fetherstun was there, he refused to meet him. "I lost that tobacco" Brown says.

Brown's story and his detailed notes were part of a substantial body of evidence that helped convince Glickman to settle the case in 1999. "They hadn't been expecting anyone to have documents detailing what the USDA county supervisors had done" Brown tells Insight. He believes that in his case, however, discrimination may have played less of a role than sheer incompetence and laziness. "Fetherstun's immediate supervisor was black, and his supervisor, who was in charge of all USDA programs in Virginia, also was black."

Leroy E. Harvey, now 85, recalls some of the insidious methods used by local Farm Services Bureau officials in Halifax County, N.C., to punish black farmers who needed to borrow money from the USDA, the lender of last resort.

"Black farmers were advanced loan proceeds later than white farmers, which delayed planting" Harvey told Insight in an interview at his homestead in Tillery, N.C. "In my case, I was advised by county-government officials to buy more land in order to increase my collateral and also to build a boat landing on some property that I had on the Roanoke River." He didn't build the boat landing, which he thought nobody would use, but the new loans increased the government lien on the Harvey homestead until eventually he was forced into bankruptcy. The USDA then accelerated repayment on the loans and, when he couldn't pay, they took steps to foreclose.

"This is all about the land" says Gary Grant, who lives nearby. "We don't have stocks and bonds. Our wealth is in the land, and that is what we want to leave to our children." Harvey's case has become a symbol for the black farmers. He was one of 90 black farmers who came to Tillery in the late 1930s and early 1940s as part of a New Deal resettlement program aimed at restoring the Reconstruction-era offer of 40 acres and a mule promised to freed slaves. Included on the lots sold to black farmers for $5,000 was a house and farm equipment.

Over the years, Harvey purchased additional land, sometimes using USDA loans, until he owned 260 acres, today worth around $1,000 per acre. But because of the government loans, all of which are collateralized against his land, he still is paying the government on the original $5,000 note for his 40 acres and has no equity in his property.

His daughter, 59-year-old Delores Amason, tried to assume her father's debts and farm the land, but was told by the USDA county supervisor that she had no farming experience despite having been brought up on the land and earning a college degree. "Daddy had to borrow operating funds every year, as all farmers do. And he paid it back. Then we had three bad crop years in a row in the mid-1980s, with crops freezing on the field," she says.

Harvey managed to establish a credit line with a local bank but, when he went down to pick up his loan he was told that a USDA county official named Wilbur Daniels had phoned the bank and told them not to make the loan because he had no collateral. "Not only did USDA close their own doors to black farmers," Amason tells Insight. "They encouraged others to close their doors, too."

In 1910, there were 900,000 black farmers across the United States who owned a total of 16 million acres of land. Slightly more than 90 years later, scarcely 18,000 black farmers remain and their holdings have dwindled to 3 million acres. Ironically, as a result of the landmark Pigford v. Glickman civil-rights settlement, black farmers stand to lose another 1.5 million acres of land to the government.

Leon Johnson, 57, also of Tillery, lost his land to the government 15 years ago. Johnson had prospered during the 1970s and early 1980s, raising peanuts and corn. With his earnings he expanded his holdings from the original 40-acre plot until he owned 114 acres and rented another 1,200, the biggest black farm in Halifax County.

When the drought years came in the mid-1980s, he turned to the USDA to advance him money for seed and fertilizer. Instead of paying him directly, they made the checks payable to his creditors, a practice known as "supervised" loans, which the USDA now admits was discriminatory against black farmers. "Each check they gave me had my name and the name of the Peanut Growers Association on it," Johnson tells Insight, "so I had to go to them to get it cashed."

One year, Johnson's peanut crop was so bad because of the drought that when he took it up in December the county office of the FmHA refused to pay him. "They said the yield was so low it wouldn't even cover my payments, so they just took my harvest" Johnson says.

To meet payments on his tractor and his home, Johnson eventually sold a bin of corn in March. "The USDA sent around federal marshals to my home and handcuffed me" he says, "for selling mortgaged crops." He eventually was convicted and spent six months in jail for selling crops the government said it owned.

In Georgia, 80-year-old farmer William Miller tells a yet more outrageous story of a Farm Services Bureau official filing fraudulent liens against his property in a neighboring county for loans he never received. "I know plenty of people who have had loans charged to them they didn't owe" Miller tells Insight. "The USDA supervisor knows when the money is coming, so he goes down to the courthouse and signs it to you. But you never get the money."

The court document, which he made available to Insight, shows that liens totaling $770,000 were filed against Miller's property on March 25, 1981. The lien document, File 81-262 in the Dooly County real-estate records, makes the United States of America the secured party. It is signed by Henry J. McLeod, the USDA county supervisor for Macon County, Ga., where Miller lived. Miller's signature is not on the document.

Because of these liens, which Miller only discovered last year, his claim was rejected by the adjudicator and he now stands to lose his 1,138 acres of land. Insight asked USDA acting General Counsel Kelly about Miller's case. "No such allegations of fraud or gross behavior have been made to USDA" he says. "I hope Mr. Miller seeks adequate counsel." Miller has filed an appeal with the monitor under the consent decree, which he shared with Insight.

In March 2000 these farmers descended on Washington and tried to meet with then-agriculture secretary Glickman at USDA headquarters, but guards barred the doors; 11 farmers were arrested, including BFAA president Grant and vice president Slaughter.

With the new administration, the farmers so far have received much better treatment. Bush Agriculture Secretary Ann Veneman and her chief of staff, Dale Moore, met with the farmers in March, and Slaughter says they are hoping to meet with U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft in the coming weeks to urge him to investigate allegations of fraud.

Farming while Black during the 2008 Presidental Cycle will continue another chapter in the ongoing legacy of Black Farmers and Agricultualists in America.