In Pigford, a federal judge decreed a settlement out of court. The government agreed to give each of the farmers who could provide minimal evidence of discrimination between 1981 and 1996 a $50,000 tax-exempt payment, debt forgiveness, and preferential treatment on future loan applications. In numerous public meetings over the last year, farmers have presented ample evidence showing that Washington didn’t come close to meeting those promises.

“Five years after the settlement and still no check,” said John Boyd from Virginia, who is president of the National Black Farmers Association (NBFA), shaking his head.

Two busloads of farmers and their supporters came from Virginia. Farmers also came from Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Tennessee, and Arkansas.

“This fight is not new,” Boyd continued. “It hasn’t changed from administration to administration. In regards to the Black farmers the Democrats and Republicans are both guilty.”

Thomas Burrell, president of the National Black Farmers and Agriculturalists Association (BFFA), Inc., castigated demands by USDA officials that the farmers should have one group the department could talk with. “The USDA recognizes hundreds of organizations of white farmers but they want to tell Black farmers they must have one group,” he noted. “We are all here today as one.”

A week before the rally, several farmers’ groups formed a new coalition called the Congress of Black Farmer Organizations. Among them, said Burrell, are BFFA, Inc., NBFA, the Federation of Southern Cooperatives, and the Arkansas Land Development Fund.

The group has filed a new class-action suit against the USDA seeking $20 billion in damages. The lawsuit charges the USDA with discrimination in loans and processing of credit applications, and failure to promptly investigate racist discrimination complaints of farmers between January 1997 and August 2004. Plaintiffs in the suit include BFAA, Inc., 13 individual farmers, and a class of nearly 70,000 farmers.

Later that day, farmers and their supporters packed the congressional hearing. Phillip Haynie, a Virginia farmer, described how they were kept out of final negotiations on the 1999 settlement, which was approved despite the opposition of farmers’ organizations leading the fight to defend their land.

Michael Lewis, the court-appointed arbitrator for the consent decree, said his office had disqualified an estimated 70,000 claims that he said failed to meet the Sept. 15, 2000, deadline stipulated in the consent decree. Democratic and Republican members of the House judicial committee speculated that Congress could approve legislation that would allow the 70,000 individuals to have their claims heard.

“They all lied,” said Jerri Williams-White, referring to the testimony by USDA officials. Williams-White was forced out of chicken farming when she was denied a loan by the USDA in 1976 because she was a woman. “They told me a woman couldn’t do farming,” she told the Militant. As a result, she moved to California and got a job at a General Motors plant. “They said I couldn’t farm but I put in 30 years on the assembly line building trucks, busses, and handling those heavy assembly guns,” she noted. “I even became a welder,” Williams-White said. “The women’s liberation movement hit the company so hard that they sent us to school to learn welding.” Williams-White has retired from GM-Saturn and hopes to return to farming.

Richard Pearson, a tobacco farmer from Virginia, told the Militant that the local USDA committee denied him a loan in 1972 because he supposedly lived in the wrong county. His farm borders on Brunswick and Greenville counties. “When I moved to the county they said I should live in they still denied the loan,” Pearson said. He was forced to take out a loan with a private bank. The interest rate for the USDA loan would have been 3 percent, Pearson said. “I paid 5 percent on the loan from the bank.”  
 
 
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