Barack Obama’s electoral victory is destined for the history books. The election of a Black person to the highest post of the U.S. capitalist state is a major achievement in the struggle against racism—one that many who participated in the civil rights struggle of the 1960s did not expect to see in their lifetimes. Millions of white voters overcame internalized racist preconceptions to cast a vote for the Democratic candidate.
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The roots of their struggle date back to the expansion of sharecropping following the liberation of African Americans from the bondage of plantation slavery. Sharecropping created a form of neo-slavery that ensured African Americans could not own their own property and remained indebted to their white land-owning masters. Ultimately, a huge number of Black sharecroppers migrated to the North following World War II, where they hoped to secure jobs and a share of the economic prosperity of the time.
But what of the African American farmers who stayed? Where are they and what are they doing today? Thousands of Black farmers have been engaged in a struggle for equality against the institutionalized racism of the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
Black farmers must wait substantially longer to get loans in comparison to their white counterparts. “Four, Five, eight months—even a year—to get a loan,” said Ben Burkett in a 2001 interview with Yes! Magazine. Burkett, the Mississippi state coordinator for the Federation of Southern Cooperatives/Land Assistance Fund, was elected president of the National Family Farm Coalition in early 2008.
Sam Cooper spent $5,000 on fencing after the Farmers Home Administration approved his loan request for a land purchase. But the FmHA then went back on the loan, leaving Cooper with no land and down $5,000.
Others have even faced life threats just for applying for financial assistance. A USDA staffer brought a gun to work to intimidate Phil Haney from trying to get a loan. The staffer’s punishment? A one-day suspension with pay.
Years of oppression pushed Black farmers into struggle. In 1997, the Pigford v. Glickman class action lawsuit was filed against the USDA and its then-secretary, Dan Glickman. Altogether, a little more than 20,000 Black farmers would file claims under the lawsuit. The evidence of the leading plaintiffs is supported by their case and the government’s own reports.
Nothing might have come out of the case had Black farmers let the racist justice system decide their fate; instead, mass action supplemented the legal struggle.. For three years, there were rallies and protests in the South and in Washington, D.C., as well as two separate situations in which demonstrators were jailed for trying to enter the Department of Agriculture building in D.C. to speak with Glickman. Through struggle, they secured a settlement estimated at $450-$600 million—the largest civil rights settlement in history.
Their victory, however, would be bittersweet. Though lawyers for both sides were present in court, the thousands of plaintiffs were not. Implementation of the settlement has fallen far short of what had been agreed.
As Ben Burkett put it in an Oct. 17 Democracy Now interview: “I think about 15,000 have been successful in their effort to bring about some justice, and it’s more or less $50,000, which is not a great amount of money. So, we’re trying to get that case reopened, where more farmers can be involved in it.”
When asked about foreclosures, Burkett added, “I can see that the issue of credit being a major crisis in the farm community in the spring. And it always has been for small African American farmers.”
