Allensworth Centennial Celebration ~ Black Farmers Annual Breakfast Forum ~ September 26

Washington, D.C. ~ Our California Black Farmers utilize the ancient year 6248 as a calibrating tool to “restore Agriculture as the Foundation of our Culture.” The cycles of life observed by the charting the stars, our sun and moon over time give us the seasons and lessons for everything in it’s season. After the Autumnal Equinox, during the CBC ALC 2008, Friday, September 26, 2008 our Black Farmers Breakfast Forum sets our sights upon continued measured progress.

The season of 1862 remains the salient standard for Agribusiness in America. It was the year Colonel Allensworth escaped enslavement in Kentucky, rising to the highest military rank for a Black Service member during the Civil War and the year the USDA was established.

Today, the separate yet unequal notion remains manifest within the USDA employee structure embracing aspects of limited full participation featuring 1890 HBCUs begging for crumbs from the U.S. Farm Table, recalling the destruction of a HBCU in Allenworth, California and limited nationwide consideration for Black Farmers in California, in fact west of the Mississippi, by Black USDA employees.

Many Congressional Black Caucus members have lead the battle against the status quo of “separate yet unequal” and “far too many good house Negroes” within this limited scope of USDA silently copulating in the “good life” embracing retirement with unparalleled gamesmanship within the politics of food while the rural Southeast suffers. We are encouraged by strong CBC staff and “heroic” USDA political appointees and career veterans whom demonstrate a walk by faith.

Brotha Moses, the man whom walked with God and wrote a version of Biblical Genesis where he wrote that he was taught in all the ways of Ancient KMT, yet the Garden of Eden story will never bring forth good fruit in a 3/5ths of humanity notion of opportunity since the fall of the original man. Many wicked and slothful servants embrace a “wait and see dependency” while laboring in the vineyard.

The Black Farmers Annual Breakfast Forum during the CBC ALC Week events will bring bright light towards a people on the cusp to finally shake the systemic institutional racism inherent in U.S. Agribusiness, inclusive in the sectors of food, fiber, fuel, forestry and finance.

California Black Farmers and Agriculturalists Association has worked diligently to provided an innovative dual path that utilizes both Food, Conservation and Energy Act of 2008, especially the new provisions of “socially disadvantaged producers,” while seeing a far greater utility in agribusiness market capacity embracing productivity and competition.

The USDA/Community Based Organization Partners Meeting V continues our determined participation to maximize the expertise of our “Golden Legacy in the Great State of California.” It remains a positive personal experience, yet Ag policy remains a diabolical sinister cruel hoax needing action through executive privilege.

Our journey, beginning with U.S. Agriculture Secretary Veneman, Secretary Johannes, Acting Secretary Conner and today’s Secretary Schafer; we are experiencing a positive transition toward equal opportunity through active participation utilizing the Solutions Team process within the USDA/CBO partnership.

It is unfortunate that expanded job creation, technical education and agribusiness entrepreneur opportunity remains hostage to a political process that will take time, while avoidable disease, destruction and deaths through diet related solutions fester under the yoke of “separate yet unequal public policy.”

Black August 2008, gazing upon the National Mall, on the exact step where Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke 45 years ago and preparing to hear Senator Barack Obama speech out in the Black West near 5 points Denver, CO, Home of the Black Rodeo, I was reminded of my Grandfathers service to our nation beginning during the Korean War, where freedom was not free, especially in separate but unequal U.S. Army.

President Truman signed an executive order ending that sad chapter in our nation; President Bush should place his signature upon an executive order ending the mandate of inequality within our nation’s Agriculture bounty via the very structure of the last plantation in America, the United States Department of Agriculture.