Black farmers are organizing to counter the racist practices of the USDA.

Delores Amason’s family has been farming for generations. Her father, Leroy E. Harvey, was a sharecropper who bought 40 acres of farmland in Tillery, North Carolina, through a New Deal program that offered loans to help small farmers own the land they worked. For decades, the family grew cotton, peanuts, corn and soybeans, and bought more acres as they could.

“We weren’t rich by anybody’s standards,” Amason says, “but it didn’t bother us because we worked for ourselves.”

Harvey, like most farmers, relied on cyclical operating loans to pay expenses in advance of the income-generating harvest. The U.S. Department of Agriculture (commonly referred to by its acronym, USDA) was tasked with supporting small farmers who had trouble getting credit from other sources. Yet when Harvey was hurt by early freezes in the 1980s, he fell behind on payments to the agency and found himself struggling to get a regular USDA operating loan. He turned to a private bank and was startled to learn that the USDA had ordered them not to approve his loan, saying they were about to foreclose on his land.

Many Black farmers like Harvey have seen their economic situations hurt rather than helped by the USDA. In 1920, at the height of Black farm ownership, one in seven U.S. farms was Black-operated; by 1992, the number had fallen to one in 100. While the USDA is not solely responsible for this (physical violence, flimsy heir-property laws and other factors are also to blame), the department has played a huge role. From discriminatory lending practices to foreclosures, the agency’s policies have directly contributed to a massive loss of Black land wealth and the rapid decline of the Black farmer, leading some to call the USDA “the last plantation.”

Black farmers are organizing to protest these conditions and to share resources among themselves. As a coalition, they lobbied for changes to the Farm Bill that passed in Congress last year and won a number of important provisions, including halting foreclosures against any farmer who has a discrimination claim pending against the USDA. They are hoping their collective work will finally begin to chip away at the federal agency’s long-standing practice of targeting Black farmers.

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In 1920, one in seven U.S. farms was operated by Blacks; by 1992, the number had fallen to one in 100.

The U.S. government itself has documented widespread, ongoing discrimination against Black farmers by the USDA.

Black farmers tell stories of USDA officials—especially local loan authorities in all-white county committees in the South—spitting on them, throwing their loan applications in the trash and illegally denying them loans. This happened for decades, through at least the 1990s. When the USDA’s local offices did approve loans to Black farmers, they were often supervised (farmers couldn’t spend the borrowed money without receiving item-by-item authorization from the USDA) or late (and in farming, timing is everything). Meanwhile, white farmers were receiving unsupervised, on-time loans. Many say egregious discrimination by local loan officials persists today.

Lloyd Wright, who directed the USDA’s civil rights department in 1997–98, remembers a farmer whose land was foreclosed and sold by the government while his civil rights claim was pending. “We found that the Department of Agriculture was guilty, but we really couldn’t compensate him because his land was gone,” Wright reports.

In 1997, a group of Black farmers led by Tim Pigford of North Carolina filed a class-action suit against the USDA. They argued that they had been systematically discriminated against by the agency and that the mechanisms for challenging such discrimination were useless: they’d been filing complaints for years to a civil rights office without knowing that President Ronald Reagan had disbanded it in 1983.

Between 1983 and the late 1990s, Wright says, there was no consistent, functional civil rights office within the USDA. In all, 22,000 farmers were granted access to the Pigford class-action suit, and in 1999, the government
admitted wrongdoing and made a $2.3 billion settlement—the largest civil rights settlement in U.S. history.

Yet Black farmers’ feelings about Pigford are mixed. Membership in the class was limited to Black farmers who were racially discriminated against by the USDA between 1981 and 1996. “Fifteen years does not cover the damages that had been done,” insists Gary Grant of the Black Farmers and Agriculturalists Association.