The plight of farmers

I met Joel Schor in Washington, DC, where he was a historian with the US Department of Agriculture. We used to have lunches together and speak on the phone. We shared our concerns. I kept talking about corruption at the EPA, and he complained about racism at USDA.

He was courageous enough he reminded his supervisors of the destructive policies of USDA toward black farmers.

He gave me an unpublished paper he had written for USDA (‘Black Farmers/Farms: The Search for Equity’, Spring 1995), in which he said that, by 1995, the vanishing black farmers were, at the most, one percent of the country’s farmers. Agriculture for blacks was becoming ‘a cultural memory’. It was no longer a way of life or a source of employment. The number of black farmers told their tragic history: They declined by 51.3 percent in the 1950s, 50.8 percent in the 1960s, and 57.3 percent in the 1970s. By 1997, the brave new rural world of America had cleansed itself of black farmers. Less than 18,000 black farmers were still farming in the year 2000, their numbers hitting the catastrophic level of 98 percent decline in the twentieth century.

I remember walking with a few black farmers protesting the discriminatory and racist policies of USDA. The silent protest took place in Washington, DC on September 28, 2004. We were walking from the headquarters of USDA to Capitol Hill where the Constitutional Subcommittee of the House Judiciary Committee was preparing to have a hearing about the legal problems of the black farmers suing USDA.

What startled me was that there were so few people in the protest march, and those who marched, were overwhelmingly old and black. The Congressman who chaired the hearing, Steve Chabot, captured the tragedy of the black farmers, saying:

“When slavery was ended in the United States, our government made a promise – a restitution of sorts – to the former slaves that they would be given 40 acres and a mule…what is clear is that promise was intended to help freed slaves be independent economically and psychologically, as holders of private property rights. What also is clear is that the very government that made this promise, the ‘People’s Agency’ [US Department of Agriculture] established in 1862 under President Abraham Lincoln, has sabotaged it by creating conditions that make sovereign and economically-viable farm ownership extremely difficult.”

It’s never too late to undo wrongs. Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are potentially moving into the White House this November. They can finally fulfill the promise of the government to the black farmers: assist them with enough land and agroecological knowledge to become successful small family farmers.

Excerpted from: ‘40 Acres and a Mule: the Plight of Black Farmers’

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