Jackson Free Press

About 24,000 Mississippi black farmers could benefit from a decision by the Obama administration to include a $1.25 billion discrimination settlement in the 2010 federal budget.

This week the president, after meeting with farmers and John Boyd, founder of the National Black Farmers Association, approved a second phase of restitution payments to counter years of federal discriminatory loan activity against black farmers.

In 1983, former President Ronald Reagan abolished the USDA's Office of Civil Rights, an agency that monitored complaints of lending discrimination against minority food producers. Black farmers immediately launched complaints of lending abuse in the wake of the Reagan decision, charging that the USDA had engaged in a pattern of historic discrimination against black farmers. Former president Bill Clinton settled a class-action lawsuit in the 1999 Pigford v. Glickman consent decree addressing the complaint, agreeing to give to farmers who could provide minimal evidence of discrimination between 1981 and 1996 a $50,000 tax-exempt payment, debt forgiveness and preferential consideration regarding future loan applications.

Boyd led a 300-member rally of farm owners in Jackson this month, complaining that only a fraction of the farmers who suffered discrimination received any sort of payment.

"The Justice Department filed motions not to release information to the black farmers
who had filed complaints, so thousands of people missed the filing deadline," Boyd said.
USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack said in a Feb. 18 statement that the USDA requested the money in the 2010 budget, on top of the $100 million already provided by Congress, to facilitate a settlement, adding that the USDA made fair treatment of farmers "a top priority."

The president's decision must also be approved by Congress, however, and Vilsack urged Congress to agree in order "to ensure that that these farmers and USDA can close this sad chapter and move on."

U.S. Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., who supported the restitution early on, said he remains fully in support because of the rate at which black farmers are losing their fields to debt and high interest rate loans from sub-par lenders.

Mississippi farmer Clyde Henricks, of Neshoba County, lamented that the children of many farmers have chosen other careers, rather than contend with local banks' unwillingness to loan money to minority farmers for tools and cultivation costs.

"Farming is never easy, but the way it is now, the banks don't loan to (black farmers), even though some of us have had this property in our families for generations. My grandaddy farmed that land, and my daddy farmed that land. We've had it just as long or longer than my white neighbors, who get their loans when they need them."