BY MAURICE WILLIAMS
ATLANTA - "The judge says I own nothing," said William
Miller, a 67-year-old Black farmer from Macon County,
Georgia. "They are trying to accelerate foreclosure of my
farm." Miller, born on a farm his family has owned since
1888, worked in an auto plant in New Jersey. He moved back
to the farm after his father died. Many Black farmers who
came to the NAACP convention explained how government
officials collaborated with corporations to steal their
land, block loans, and how the U.S. Department of
Agriculture (USDA) discriminated against them. The number of
Black farmers has fallen from more than 900,000 in 1920 to
18,000 today. In 1992 Blacks owned 1 percent of the
country's farmland - down from 14 percent in 1920.
The Black Farmers & Agriculturists Association (BFAA) filed a $2.5 billion federal discrimination lawsuit against the USDA on behalf of 400 farmers in July 1997. Another group of Black farmers filed a second class action lawsuit.
Attempting to thwart the farmers' fight, the U.S. Justice Department ruled in April that a two-year statute of limitation had expired, which the agency used to prohibit many of the discrimination claims backlogged at the USDA. The U.S. Senate passed an amendment July 20 that waived the federal statute of limitations under the Equal Credit Opportunity Act for farmers and applicants to the USDA's rural housing programs who have discrimination complaints.
"We want the American people to know about the violations being perpetrated against Black farmers," Eddie Slaughter, vice president of the BFAA, told reporters at the NAACP convention.
"These farmers are so upset that if [USDA secretary Daniel] Glickman does not resolve the suit, they will set up a tent city in front of his office until he resigns," J.L. Chestnut, an attorney for the farmers.
Jeff Woodward, a member of the United Auto Workers, whose family farms in Mississippi, attended the farmers press conference. He works at Mitsubishi Motors in Normal, Illinois, where there is "a racial discrimination lawsuit in the works. The situation is like what the Black farmers had to go through."
Dorathy Barker, a dairy farmer who along with her husband Phillip Barker lost their farm in 1981, said at the farmers' press conference, "We have lost our will to farm under bad conditions, but we have not lost our will to fight."