Once upon a time there was a newly developing country. Land as far as one could see and beyond which had earlier been inhabited by others was now seized and claimed by white men with long guns. Dreaming big dreams and counting their dollars before they came into being, they dreamed of cotton as far as they could see, rice growing in those fields, and free labor to get it all harvested in time.
So, they sent their minions to the shores of Africa and brought back people from that continent on slave ships, with human cargo stacked like sardines in a can, and some died and were tossed into the sea, and some wanted to die, but instead lived. Standing upon the auction block of port cities from the northeast down to New Orleans, and perhaps as far south as Galveston, men with money examined them as if they were a horse or a cow or a pig or a goat, and paid prices for them, all depending upon gender, age, and purpose.
The humans, enslaved Africans, were then led across country to their new places of abode. Living under harsh conditions of enslavement, they were the labor that would make America great. They provided with their own flesh the economic structure of America, the land of the free and the home of the brave. And it worked.
It worked until it no longer worked.
Then War came. Then Freedom came. Then Reconstruction came. Then violence came. Then formerly enslaved people were now enslaved once more, but just under different laws and codes.
A miracle of sorts occurred, and these formerly enslave people, those who brought agrarian skills from their homelands, were able to purchase land and came to be farmers owning and working their own land, some 950,000 working some 19,000,000 acres around 1910, give or take a few years. They made up 14% of all farmers of the country. Life was good despite Jim Crow South, the KKK, the lynching tree, and other heinous things.
Then, they began to lose their lands at the same time that the federal government strengthened farming with subsidies. Funds that were to have gone to the share croppers landed in the pockets of the white men who owned the land. It was a similar form from the plantation days.
As the years progressed, white men ran the county offices that provided loans for crops or purchases of land or seed or fertilizer. Black men needed similar funds, but the white men voted their prejudices and mostly the white men got the money and Black farmers were slowly and convincingly starved out and forced off their land.
And academic papers were written, speeches were made at professional meetings, and documentaries were filmed.
Black farmers had enough and began to file complaints against all manner of acts of discrimination, but their complaints found their way into a file room where those carefully written documents were treated with disrespect. After all, if the president shuts down the civil rights office, then civil rights complaints must not be very important.
Then, a firebrand of an attorney caught wind of these shenanigans and one by one, the Black farmers lined up, arm in arm with him, to take on Goliath. In some instances, they prevailed. Some 15 of them prevailed before the big class action suit, Pigford, was declared a class.
Depending upon where you abide in America, Pigford was a success, a failure, or a huge scam, a give-away of America’s hard-earned money.
Thousands applied for admission to the class, a lower number in the thousands were admitted into the class, many received a financial award of $50K, but only 371 received debt cancellation, that for which they had worked hard. Lead counsel surrendered discovery, a process by which each farmer could have proved via a “find of discrimination” that they had indeed been wounded financially.
Years passed, complaint after complaint was filed in the Office of Civil Rights, but most were unresolved, as the office was a disaster, and many cases simply were allowed to play out the clock. As the statute of limitations was initiated, those inside the office simply watched the calendar, and then when two years ended, the cases were cast aside.
A courageous group of Senators, Warren, Booker, Sanders, and Warnock, amongst others, saw what was happening and developed the Justice for Black Farmers Act of 2020, but they knew that under the Republican administration, the bill had little chance, so with the election of a Democratic administration, it was resubmitted as the Act of 2021.
At the 11th hour, the senate moved two sections from the JBFA to the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021. These two sections allowed for debt cancellation for socially disadvantaged farmers and ranchers. White farmers were noticing and strategizing. They filed 12 frivolous and racist lawsuits which stopped debt cancellation in its tracks. The banking associations even had enough time to file their own complaints. The secretary of agriculture had done what he did there as we watched. He slow-walked the process.
Finally, as a new Bill was being debated before our eyes, with the slimmest of margins, 51 to 50, another Bill was passed. This time, racially charged language was removed so as to mollify the complaints of racist America. Even the white farmers had opportunity for debt cancellation under the provisions of the $3.1B section for “distressed farmers.” Another section of the Bill committed $2.2B to address grievances for those who have bonified acts of discrimination against them.
On the sidelines in Zoom meetings and phone calls, we negotiated with staffers. We challenged leaders to do the right thing. One staffer called us his “kitchen cabinet,” and we appreciated the acknowledgement but only wanted for this Bill to finally come to pass.
That which we have worked for for decades, debt cancellation for those who have experienced first-hand the degradation of racist attitudes by the USDA and its employees at the county level are sitting and waiting and hoping.
Once upon a time in America these things happened.
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