That was Then

"Right as we speak, our farm land is being stolen; black farmers are driven off the land, Native American farmers are dispossessed, family farmers of all ethnic groups are even arrested for refusing to lie down and disappear."--Monica Davis, journalist

In 1920 there were close a million black farmers in the United States. They owned nearly 16 million acres of land-- eighty years later they owned a mere 2 million, and their remaining farmland is still dropping by @1,000 acres per day. 18,000 stalwarts struggle on but they are nearly extinct, their demise six times the rate of their white counterparts.

The USDA, like most American institutions has an ugly history vis a vis race. And if that wasn't bad enough for most black farmers their holdings were largely in the former confederacy. (There is a quiet irony here in that in Louisiana after Reconstruction it was the colored gentry many of whom also owned slaves that the electorate appealed to for help rooting out the state's crippling political corruption.)

Farming is a fickle undertaking at best, and few farmers survive without reliable credit. For black farmers that credit can be especially hard to come by since the USDA and its agency, the Farmers Home Administration (FmHA) who are supposed to be in the business of helping farmers have been indifferent and even hostile towards black farmers seeking assistance.

For them dealing with the USDA has been like turning the clock back 60 years to the South of the 1940s. For example:

Ben Burkett, Mississippi state coordinator for the Federation of Southern Cooperatives/Land Assistance Fund, managed to borrow from the FmHA from 1978 to 1985. But he says it always took "four, five, eight months -- even a year -- to get approved." It's supposed to take 30 days. The last time he applied for an operating loan was in February. He didn't get it until July. By then it was too late to do him any good.

On three separate occasions, the white FmHA loan officer grabbed farmer Lloyd Shaffer's loan application out of his hand, crumpled it up and threw it in the wastebasket. Other times Lloyd was kept waiting to served for the entire eight hours the office was open. Meanwhile white farmers came and went the whole day long, filling out their forms and conducting other business.

The landmark Pigford settlement was supposed to bring folks like Lloyd a bit of justice. $730 million was paid out as part of that agreement but many including Senator Obama charged that thousands of eligible farmers had been denied relief, having missed the cut-off date for claims. Candidate Obama made it an issue during the Southern primaries. Now President Obama, facing the country's worst recession since the 1930's is not so gung-ho about his own legislation.

Sure the black farmer got a real rotten deal. That was then... this is now.