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...$400 million and a mule? Black farmers say settlement won't end racism at the Department of Agriculture. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Early this week federal Judge Paul Friedman will decide whether to approve what may turn out to be the biggest class-action settlement in history, to compensate black farmers for decades of discrimination at the hands of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Whatever Friedman decides, it was clear from the tears and anguish at last week's settlement hearing that the cash award will never compensate the nation's surviving black farmers for their years of suffering, bankruptcies and humiliation. Last Tuesday in Courtroom 20, a walnut-paneled, high-ceilinged room in the same federal courthouse where an army of TV crews hung out all summer waiting for glimpses of Monica Lewinsky, Friedman presided over a hearing on objections to the settlement, which would award participating farmers about $50,000 each and forgive their USDA loans. The courtroom is usually saved for ceremonial occasions, and the gilded portraits of some 40 dead judges, all but two of them white, stare down from the walls. But on Tuesday it might as well have been a church. Some 400 farmers -- many in tattered coats and bib overalls who had driven days to testify on decades of harsh hate and discrimination -- had overflowed the benches and, with Friedman's permission, stood along the walls and aisles. Occasionally they'd punctuate the proceedings with an "amen" or a "that's right" or a "tell it," in the cadences of a riled-up Sunday morning congregation gathered to hear the Lord's word. The Department of Agriculture's history of racism was not disputed. In 1997, its own investigators belatedly discovered "years of bias, hostility, greed, ruthlessness, rudeness, and indifference" to black farmers. Their report used virtually the same language found in the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights report in 1965 -- and a dusty box full of reports in between. But while the $400 million settlement worked out in January between lawyers for the farmers and the government may seem large -- it could well climb to $1 billion, lawyers in the case now say -- it would award thousands of farmers only about $50,000 each. That's a pittance, according to the speakers, who described decades of humiliation and bankruptcies at the hands of the largely all-white USDA county councils, the good ol' boys who processed loan applications and decided who got money for seeds, tractors and land. Charlie Harris stood against a cold marble wall outside Friedman's courtroom last Tuesday morning. A poor black peanut farmer from Pike County, Ala., Harris, 42, remembered how it worked the first time he walked into the local USDA office in rural Alabama and asked for a loan. The council members were sitting around their clubhouse enjoying themselves. "An ol' boy there took my application and said, 'You got this wrong, and you got that wrong,'" Harris said in his soft Alabama lilt. "They was scratching out all my answers with a red pen." He still manages to sound surprised at how blatant it was. "Most of 'em were openly joking," Harris said of the loan officer and his pink-faced, tobacco-chewing cronies, "saying, 'You got to do this, you got to do that.'" The council members told him to come back later, he said. But as he was leaving a white farmer walked in and got a slap on the back and an invitation to the back room for a few minutes of chewing the fat. A little while later the farmer emerged smiling, loan approval in hand. This was 1979, Harris recalled, and, according to the parade of black farmers in the federal courtroom Tuesday, nothing had changed in the 20 years since. Despite volumes of reports and congressional hearings over the years, black farmers were still being nudged into bankruptcy by a recalcitrant, white-dominated, anachronistic bureaucracy that requires nothing less than a top-to-bottom demolition. "There's nothing about systematic change in this agreement," a speaker in a tattered green jacket complained to U.S. District Court Judge Paul Friedman. "We need a complete house-cleaning at the USDA." Friedman listened with obvious sympathy to the 17 speakers who walked to the lectern and poured out their tales of woe and protest during nearly eight hours of testimony. Like Harris, most of them said they didn't even try to get a loan from the USDA local councils anymore. Harris eventually got his first loan from the "ol' boys," he said, but it came too late for most of his planting -- on purpose, he believes. In time he was forced to get loans from commercial banks at high interest rates, which led to bankruptcy. His house, land and equipment were auctioned off -- to friends and relatives of the council members who'd forced him into a hole in the first place, he said. Eventually he got back on his feet, with the help of an out-of-state bank set up to aid poor farmers with low-cost loans. Last year he was Pike County "farmer of the year." "These guys who've survived all this are really rocket scientists," marveled Lorette Picciano, a Washington official with the Rural Coalition, which advocates on behalf of minority farmers. The problem is that so few of them are left. While small farmers of all races have been run off the land, crushed by a triple whammy of bad weather, failed loan gambles and the relentless march of corporate agribusiness, blacks have edged toward complete extinction, dropping from 14 percent of the nation's farmers in the 1920s to less than 1 percent today. From a high-water mark of nearly a million black farmers in 1920, perhaps only 20,000 are tilling the soil today. "Most of them will be gone by the end of the year," predicts Tim Pigford, lead plaintiff in the original class-action suit against the Agriculture Department. "The rest will be gone soon after 2000." It's a startling thought. Typesetters are gone, too, and so are switchboard operators, but no one ran them out of business on purpose because of their skin color. Yet the Department of Agriculture, which is supposed to represent and protect farmers, has as much as admitted in its consent decree that it not only failed to help black farmers, it aided in their destruction. N E X T+P A G E+| The noose in the drawer - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Become a Salon member. Click here. | ||
