A Name And A Face

If you want to know what Black farmers are thinking and how they feel about issues like discrimination by USDA, unfair lending practices and how this has impacted their families, your most credible source is a  working Black farmer.  Period.  Paragraph.  End of Sentence.  Watch and  listen to this group of Black farmers to learn more about their fight for equal treatment and justice by the United States government. 

Listen to this proud farmer talk about how he did not miss one payment to the USDA and still lost 650 acres and how he has been trying for years to get into the slaughtering business.

Michael Stovall, a fourth-generation Black farmer, owns a farm in Town Creek, Alabama. Stovall has decades of history battling  the USDA on discrimination because of his race.

Pigford v. Glickman (1999) was a class action lawsuit against the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), alleging that it had racially discriminated against African American farmers in its allocation of farm loans and assistance between 1981 and 1996. The lawsuit was settled on April 14, 1999, by Judge Paul L. Friedman of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. To date, almost $1 billion US dollars have been paid or credited to fewer than 20,000 farmers under the settlement's consent decree, under what is reportedly the largest civil rights settlement to date. Due to delay tactics by the U.S. government, more than 70,000 farmers were treated as filing late and thus did not have their claims heard. The 2008 Farm Bill provided for additional claims to be heard. In December 2010, Congress appropriated $1.2 billion for what is called Pigford II, settlement for the second part of the case.