Sometime in the mid-1990s, the head of the National Black Farmers Association, John W. Boyd, Jr., went to his local branch of the Farm Service Administration’s loan office in Virginia, to try to obtain a loan for $7,500. For generations, the FSA has overseen loans to American farmers to help insure stable income between the planting, harvesting, and selling of crops. Helping farmers through seasonal difficulties and bad years has been a focal point of USDA responsibilities since its inception in 1889. (Abraham Lincoln established the Dept. of Agriculture in 1862, setting in motion the federal government’s increasing involvement with farmers.)
John Boyd didn’t get his $7,500. Rejected by his local USDA officer, Boyd watched the officer hand a check of $150,000 to a white man who, the New York Times reports, “had not even filled out an application.” When Boyd confronted the loan officer, the federal employee spit at Boyd. It was, Boyd told the Times, “the most degrading thing that ever happened to me.” This information comes from a recent Times article by Sharon LaFraniere. Oddly, LaFraniere’s long and well-researched article argues that decades of racial discrimination, lawsuits, settlements, and public ire are not as important to her report as the 10-15% cases of fraud that have accompanied the billions of dollars of government payouts since the 1999 Pigford v. Glickman settlement. (Suing in 1997, Timothy Pigford settled for $50,000, establishing a precedent for the government to reimburse thousands of blacks who had been denied loans since 1981.)
Bookshelves are filled with stories of deliberate racial discrimination in the name of the U.S. federal government. And more books are being researched and written right this moment (in my house) about the difficulties minority farmworkers face in the U.S. due to racism, white farmer privilege, and government officials. Yet LaFraniere chose to title her article, “U.S. Opens Spigot After Farmers Claim Discrimination.” She seems to be incensed that the government has wasted money trying to fix problems it started. It’s a bit hard to understand. It’s not that LaFraniere is wrong about what she unearthed—the Pigford settlement created serious problems of accountability and definitely could have been handled in a more pragmatic way. It’s more a matter of emphasis—had the Times been diligently reporting on racial discrimination in the USDA on an annual basis (or even irregularly), LaFraniere’s revelations would be significant additions to the complexities of the case. As it is, though, because systemic racism from the top down is rarely news in America, one reads LaFaniere condemning tens of thousands of Mexican-American, Native American, women, and black claimants—some of whom have taken advantage of the USDA and Justice Department’s mis-steps. Most haven’t. The tone of the article is well known to American historians: lazy, undeserving minorities shilling the government for billions. Luckily historian Pete Daniel knows what’s up.
The USDA’s systematic discrimination against black farmers is well documented. Less well-known are the ways federal officials (and, primarily, their representatives at local levels) actually increased racist practices during and after the Civil Rights Movement. The numbers are harrowing and nearly unbelievable. As Daniel recounts in his new book, Dispossession: Discrimination Against African American Farmers in the Age of Civil Rights, black farm ownership between 1950 and 1981 fell from 500,00 to 45,000. You read that right: over 90% of black farmers lost their land between Eisenhower and Reagan’s presidencies. In 1999, there were only 18,000 black farmers who owned their own land. Surely, this was not only the USDA’s fault; a lot happened in the rural South and Midwest as agriculture industrialized and agribusiness seeped. But comparing black land loss with whites, blacks still should have owned 300,000 farms in 1981. Blacks lost their land in outrageous numbers due primarily to their inability to get USDA loans, a practice that continued well into the 1980s and 1990s (and under Reagan, the department became notorious for throwing away claims of discrimination—one of the major reasons the Pigford settlement was so open-ended. Again, this is a problem the USDA created for itself).
Pete Daniel has written an excellent and concise rebuttal to the Times, and a group of Midwestern professors wrote a letter to the Times taking issue with the take home message. But the Atlantic Monthly has bought LaFaniere’s take hook and sinker, and wonders how, after all three years, Breitbart.com got this story right and “progressive journalists” got it “so wrong.” Admittedly, this is a complex story and, certainly, there are examples of fraud. But if the Times wants to reveal injustice, it would be better to start with historical and structural realities of American racism before casting judgment on minority farmers trying to finagle their $50,000.
