BY KEN MORGAN AND STU SINGER
DURHAM, North Carolina - Hundreds of Black farmers, their
families, and former farmers attended meetings November 18-20
in Selma, Alabama; Pine Bluff, Arkansas; and Durham, North
Carolina, to hear about a proposed settlement of their class
action suit against the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA).
The proposal from lawyers for the farmers is being discussed with the U.S. Justice Department, which represents the USDA in the federal court suit. It would divide farmers into two classes, A and B. Class A, which would include 2,000 to 4,000 farmers, would be required to provide relatively little documentation to prove discrimination. They would receive cash payments of $50,000 each, and their loan debts to the government would be written off. The government would also credit them with partial payment of taxes on both the $50,000 and the loan payments.
Some farmers, the lawyers estimated less than 100, would be in class B. If they have much more extensive documentation, they could go to binding arbitration where they could get a bigger settlement or no settlement at all.
A person would be appointed by the federal judge hearing the case to monitor continuing discrimination against Black farmers for a period of several years.
In North Carolina, the Black farmer who initiated the case, Tim Pigford, and president of the Black Farmers and Agriculturalists Association Gary Grant, as well as other leaders of this fight decided not to attend the November 20 meeting in Durham.
Grant commented later, "They have put an offer on the table, but there are many questions. For one thing, it is not morally just. How do you compensate someone for the loss of their health, the loss of a family, the loss of an ability to make a living? There is no compensation for the communities devastated by the large numbers of Black farmers who were driven off the land. There are no options: take it or get nothing.
"And they have not removed any perpetrators from office. How do you say these people did it, discriminated against Black farmers, and these people are still there? What are the assurances we have that this will be implemented. After the Secretary of Agriculture announced a moratorium on farm foreclosures for Black farmers claiming discrimination, some foreclosures continued."
Georgia farmer Eddie Slaughter, vice president of the Black Farmers and Agriculturalists Association who attended the Selma meeting, remarked, "Over 50 percent of Black farmers are facing foreclosures. They need a settlement as soon as possible. The proposal is inadequate. It does not redress past grievances and will allow future discrimination. Black farmers have to come together. And we need to make the whole working class more aware of this."
Black farmers are losing 9,000 acres of land per week. Between 1920 and 1992, the number of farms owned by Blacks decreased from 925,000 to 18,616 - a 98 percent drop.
Spirited discussions at meetings
During the meetings, the settlement proposal sparked spirited
discussions.
"Is this the best offer you could get for us?" James Stephenson, a farmer from Dermott, Arkansas, asked the lawyers at the Pine Bluff meeting. Gwendolyn Stephenson, who is married to James, added, "Why can't they get rid of those people who discriminated against us? Those of us continuing to farm will still have to deal with them."
David Howard, a farmer from Tchula, Mississippi, who attended the Selma meeting, said, "Fifty thousand dollars is not a lot, not even for one crop season. The government is guilty of the charges we have made against them. All his life, my father didn't get one loan on time. In all of Holmes County [Mississippi], not one Black farmer got disaster relief in the drought of 1993 that destroyed the cotton."
A number of farmers at the meetings support the proposed settlement terms. But virtually every farmer pointed to the failure to address the root cause of the problem, racist discrimination that has always been part of the exploitation of working farmers in the United States through the rents and mortgages system.
John Bonner, a farmer from Dinwiddie, Virginia, at the Durham meeting, said, "The offer is pretty fair. Íd like to get rid of the government debt and I don't have a lot of other debt. And I don't want to wait years to try to get a better settlement. But there is nothing in there to change anything about how the system works." The Bonner family joined the fight against the Agriculture Department when they tried to purchase a farm in 1983. "We tended the farm for a white fellow for 21 years, Bonner explained. "When he died his grandchildren wanted to sell it to us. We applied to USDA for a loan. First they said they lost the application. Then they said we didn't have enough cash flow."
Announcement of the settlement proposal was preceded by an op- ed piece by U.S. secretary of agriculture Daniel Glickman in the November 13 Washington Post titled "Fairness for Black Farmers." Glickman referred to discrimination by the USDA as an event of the past, "an Agriculture Department that reflected our nation's misgivings on race." He claimed discrimination by the USDA started to change "when I began unearthing these old complaints as part of my own civil rights initiative."
USDA: `The last plantation'
But civil rights at the USDA only became an issue after Black
farmers started demonstrating in Washington in December 1996
and newspaper stories reported the blatant discrimination by
the department known to many farmers as "the last plantation."
One farmer after another at the November meetings reported on
continuing discrimination. Sandy McKinnon from Rowland, North
Carolina, showed a "Dear Debtor" letter he just received from
the USDA demanding repayment within one month of loans he got
in 1984. The USDA reminds him that "additional interest is
accruing daily." And they warn, if he doesn't pay up or prove
he filed for bankruptcy, "the United States Department of the
Treasury will be notified to collect the delinquent amount...
from ... certain Federal benefit payments, such as Social
Security, Railroad Retirement and Black Lung benefits."
Lester Bonner, from Dinwiddie County, Virginia, said he will file a discrimination complaint with the USDA. "This year they denied me a disaster loan for losses resulting from drought while white farmers in the county got the loans."
The News-Observer, the daily newspaper in the Raleigh area, which is not known for its support to the rights of Black farmers, criticized the proposed settlement in a November 25 editorial titled, "This land is their land." A segment on the CBS television news program "60 Minutes" on November 29 gave a glimpse to a national audience for the situation faced by some of the Black farmers involved in this fight.
Most farmers who owe money to the USDA also have debts to local banks, chemical and seed companies, tractor dealers, and others. "Those creditors would be on the $50,000 like flies on sugar," North Carolina farmer David Strickland said at the Durham meeting. "We'd never see a penny of that money."
Attorney Stephon Bowens of the Land Loss Prevention Project in Durham pointed out that as soon as the debt to the USDA is written off and those liens removed from farmers' land, other creditors would aggressively go after the same land. Black farmers land has been partly protected in the last two years by the USDA foreclosure moratorium.
Although the reporters on "60 Minutes" said that a settlement of the case could be announced in a week, the attorneys report they are still involved in negotiations with the government over terms for a general settlement and are continuing to negotiate individual settlements for the lead plaintiffs. February 1, 1999, is still scheduled for the beginning of the trial if no settlement has been reached.
Stu Singer is a member of the United Transportation Union in Washington, D.C. Arlene Rubinstein from Atlanta and Pat Leamon from Raleigh contributed to this article.