After decades of longstanding racism in the United States Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) loan programs, Black farmers stand to lose their farms, land and livelihoods after a temporary injunction halted an estimated $4 billion in emergency relief passed by Congress as part of the American Rescue Act.

On World Food Day, as part of the global People’s Food Summit, OCA Political Director Alexis Baden-Mayer interviewed lawyer Tracy McCurty of the Black Belt Justice Center to learn about the Black Farmers’ Appeal: Cancel Pigford Debt Campaign.

How would agriculture be different today if the 3.9 million Black farmers emancipated from slavery by 1865 had been given land as reparations for their stolen labor and had been able to pass that land to their descendants?

We’ve heard of the promise of “40 acres and a mule,” but in reality Black farmers coming out of slavery got nothing. Even the 400,000 acres that were negotiated by Black leaders in an agreement with General Sherman were taken back after Lincoln was shot.

It was with grit and determination, and without any help, that Black farmers managed to earn 16 million acres of land by 1910. As farmer Eddie Slaughter explains in a video on the Acres of Ancestry YouTube channel, Black farmers had no education, no political clout, and no help, but they had one thing going for them. They were the ones who knew how to farm!

The 16 million acres of land in 1910 was the peak of Black land ownership in America. Whites’ violence against Black landowners, including 3,445 lynchings between 1882 and 1964, coupled with severe economic oppression, forced Black farmers off their land.

The USDA played a large role in this, one that has continued to this day.

Farmers cite multiple instances of discrimination, including:

-Misplaced loan paperwork and approval delays of more than two years;
-Inability to sell equipment to repay loans due to vandalism at the auction house in the form of racist graffiti on the tractors up for bid;
-Loan paperwork being filed on time but funds chronically arriving too late for planting season;
-Inaccurate advice about whether FSA loans could be restructured; and
-Receiving loan funds weeks later in the season than white farmers in the same area, providing them with an unfair advantage in planting and harvesting a profitable crop.

In 1997, Black farmers sued the USDA and won one of the largest ever civil rights settlements against the U.S. government, Pigford v. Glickman. Almost $1 billion dollars has been paid or credited to more than 13,300 Black farmers under the settlement's consent decree. There was a second lawsuit, known as Pigford II, that allowed an additional 70,000 farmers to file claims. In December 2010, Congress appropriated $1.2 billion for the second part of the case.

These settlements were significant, but they did not compensate Black farmers for the full impact of the USDA’s racist discrimination. As a result, over 17,000 Black farmers have been left with crushing debt, threat of foreclosure, and no way to save their family farms. Most of this debt originated from the racist misdeeds of USDA and was supposed to be canceled under the Pigford settlement, but due to a range of factors including attorney malpractice and incompetence, only 4.8 percent of the $1 billion Pigford settlement went to debt cancellation.

Shockingly, the USDA continues to garnish Black farmers’ tax refunds, social security, disability, and subsidy payments to cover outstanding debts. Farmer Eddie Slaughter, a double amputee, had his social security, peanut subsidy, and disability payments garnished for over nine years amounting to over $41,000.

They turned to Congress with the Black Farmers’ Appeal: Cancel Pigford Debt Campaign and finally, in 2021, $4 billion in debt relief was passed by Congress as part of the American Rescue Act. Section 1005 of the American Rescue Plan, signed into law on March 11, 2021, was designed to provide debt cancellation to Black farmers, and other farmers of color, who have long suffered at the hands of the USDA’s harmful discrimination.

Not a penny of that appropriation has reached Black farmers because the courts have sided with white farmers who claim that such payments would discriminate against them!

Congress could fix this by amending the American Rescue Plan Act to forgive USDA loans for “economically distressed borrowers.” This would end up helping white farmers who didn’t experience racism, but it would still provide Black farmers the relief they need without having to defend it in the courts against reverse-discrimination claims.

WATCH: Justice for Black Farmers: A Conversation to Uproot Racist Policy and Plant Seeds of Redress: https://youtu.be/FbhaJ1pwgkE

READ MORE: The Nation: How Thousands of Black Farmers Were Forced Off Their Land: https://www.thenation.com/article/society/black-farmers-pigford-debt/

LINKS:

Black Belt Justice Center: https://acresofancestry.networkforgood.com

Black Farmers’ Appeal: Cancel Pigford Debt Campaign: https://acresofancestry.org/black-farmers-appeal-cancel-pigford-debt-campaign/