Justice for Black Farmers Act

On November 19th, U.S. Senators Cory Booker (D-NJ), Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), and Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) announced landmark legislation aimed at addressing and correcting historic discrimination within the U.S. Department of Agriculture in federal farm assistance and lending that has caused Black farmers to lose millions of acres of farmland and robbed Black farmers and their families of hundreds of billions of dollars of inter-generational wealth.

The Justice for Black Farmers Act will enact policies to end discrimination within the USDA, protect remaining Black farmers from losing their land, provide land grants to create a new generation of Black farmers and restore the land base that has been lost, and implement systemic reforms to help family farmers across the United States.

Why is this important? (excerpt from Mother Jones)

After the US Civil War, newly emancipated Black growers won a share of the agricultural landscape. They did so despite fierce backlash and the ultimately failed promises of Reconstruction. By the 1910s, around 200,000 Black farmers owned an estimated 20 million acres of land, mostly in the South. * That turned out to be a peak. Since then, due largely to lingering white supremacy and racist machinations within the US Department of Agriculture, the number of Black farmers has plunged by 98 percent. The remaining few managed to hold on to just 10 percent of that hard-won acreage.

The bill would, among other things, create an Equitable Land Access Service within the USDA, including a fund that devotes $8 billion annually to buying farmland on the open market and granting it to new and existing Black farmers, with the goal of making 20,000 grants per year over nine years, with maximum allotments of 160 acres. It would also fund agriculture-focused historically Black colleges and universities as well and nonprofits like the Northeast Farmers of Color Land Trust to help identify land for the USDA to purchase, and “help new Black farmers get up and running, provide farmer training, and provide other assistance including support for development of farmer cooperatives,” the bill’s summary states. 

If the land transfer sounds like a generous giveaway, consider that “we’ve done this before—we have seen massive land grants in US history,” Booker said. Indeed, the westward expansion of the United States was largely driven by land grabs followed by handouts. The 1850 Donation Land Claim Act delivered the Oregon territory to white US settlers in 320-acre chunks. The biggest of them all was the Homestead Act, signed into law by Abraham Lincoln in 1862, which ultimately delivered about 270 million acres—about 10 percent of the US land base—to smallholders.

The 19th century’s great land transfers, which generated trillions of dollars in wealth for beneficiaries and their heirs, “effectively precluded African Americans from participating,” said Thomas Mitchell, a law professor at Texas A&M and 2020 MacArthur fellow, who participated in the bill’s drafting. Meanwhile, the near-complete wipeout of Black farmland ownership since the early 20th century—driven largely by racist federal and state policies—represents a transfer of wealth from Black to primarily white Americans “conservatively” worth $300 billion, Thomas added. That handover contributes to a persistent racial wealth gap—today, the median white family is 12 times wealthier than its Black counterpart. 

In addition to the land-grant program, the bill would create a Farm Conservation Corps, which would focus on young adults from socially disadvantaged communities with USDA-funded apprenticeships on farms, with the goal of providing “academic, vocational and social skills necessary to pursue careers in farming and ranching.” While the program would be open to anyone from a disadvantaged background, Black trainees would be given priority for land grants from the Equitable Land Access Service.

Getting it through Congress and onto President-elect Joe Biden’s desk will be an uphill task, but things can change fast. “I’m now some years in the Senate,” Booker said. “When I got here, a lot of folks indicated to me that issues of racial justice could not get done.” Since then, he said, conversations about criminal justice have changed dramatically, leading to the First Step Act, which passed in 2018 with bipartisan support, addressing stark racial differences in sentencing over cocaine charges and other issues. Leah Penniman, a New York–based farmer, educator, and advocate for Black agrarianism, called the bill an “opportunity to reverse and correct the millions of acres of land loss within the Black farming community and fortify the next generation of Black farmers with the foundation they need for successful careers in agriculture.” She added, “I never dared to imagine that such an elegant, fair, and courageous piece of legislation as the Justice for Black Farmers Act could be introduced.”  

With recent protests against police killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, “I think there is growing momentum for addressing the legacies of overt discrimination in our country,” Booker said. And a strong push for the Justice for Black Farmers Act, while it won’t likely pass through the current Congress, could succeed in embedding its key provisions in the next farm bill, the twice-a-decade omnibus food and farm policy legislation that’s set for renewal in 2023. 

A summary of the Justice for Black Farmers Act is available here.

The text of the bill is available here.

How to Support

If your organization would like to endorse the Justice for Black Farmers Act:

Contact your local senator and tell them to SUPPORT THIS BILL:

PREVIOUS ACTIONS:

RETURN NORTH CAROLINA FARM UNJUSTLY SEIZED BACK TO BLACK FARMER

TO: USDA SECRETARY OF AGRICULTURE TOM VILSACK

We understand the entire process that Farmer Eddie Wise endured with Farm Services Agency was and continues to be highly problematic and a potential threat to small and Black farmers everywhere. We, the undersigned, thus demand: 
1. Return Farmer Eddie Wise and Dorothy Wise’s farm to them immediately. 
2. Halt all proceedings around the auctioning of their farm (scheduled for April of this year). 
3. Conduct a FULL independent investigation to uncover how Mr. Wise’s case escalated so rapidly and so unjustly and investigate how Mr. Wise was forcibly removed. 
4. Ensure that all measures are taken to protect small farmers so no other farmer will be treated as violently, inhumanely and unjustly as Mr. Wise.

Why is this important?

We are very concerned what appears to be a glaring and very violent assault on small farmers, Black farmers, and the right to self-determination in this country, via the recent seizure of North Carolina Farmer Eddie Wise’s land. On Wednesday, January 20, 2016, around 7:30 a.m., at least fourteen (14) Federal Marshals in full military gear with full-scale military guns drawn, along with several county sheriff officers, descended on the 106 acre farm in Nash County, NC, and forcibly escorted Eddie Wise and his wife, who was still in bed and suffers from a debilitating medical condition, out of their home and off the land that they have owned for more than 20 years.

Reportedly, farmer Eddie Wise had been working on his loan with Farm Service Agency (FSA) until Farm Services Agent Paula F. Nicholls and Mike Huskie took over his case. Not soon after, Mr. Wise’s loan increased and sky rocketed to almost $60,000 more within only a month’s span of time, thus lending to an escalated foreclosure process and, the seizure of property and an incredible number of subsequent questions and outrage from people all across the country.

Mr. Wise and his wife Dorothy have suffered the height of indignity and racist degradation. This process is highly problematic and we see this seizure as a major threat to family farms nationwide.

Not only did the Federal Marshals render Eddie and Dorothy immediately homeless and landless, they did not allow them to take any of their belongings except the clothes on their backs. They also insisted on “securing” every firearm legally owned by Mr. Wise. Mr. Wise was in fear of his life and the life of his wife. “I believe if I had shown one ounce of resistance, the Federal Marshals would have killed me. I actually believe that’s what they came to do” said Mr. Wise, his eyes moist with tears.

Saving their land has been a long and exhaustive process for the Wise family. The ugliness of the one dimensional unfairness, racial characterization, and mental traps set for this family and thousands of other Black farmers by USDA, and a corrupt legal system, defy reason and logic. Black farmers are a racial minority and do not represent a large political power block, therefore they are unfairly treated like terrorized slave captives in their own country, a country they were vital in building.

MORE BACKGROUND ON FARMER EDDIE WISE:

1. In 1993 the Wises applied for a loan to purchase a 106-acre hog farm. Wise said that at first the FmHA (now FSA) County Loan Officer didn’t let him know that the farm had been “earmarked for minority farmers.” Then officials tried to reappraise the farm to increase the value, but the value actually dropped. Last, a White farmer who wanted the farm paid a Black woman to apply for him. She was one of the final two applicants whose names were drawn from a hat. “We won the draw,” Wise said.

Wise continued to face resistance from the county loan office, which is now demanding that he provide a production history going back five years and a production plan for the new farm.

2. Eddie and Dorothy Wise raise hogs on 106 acres near Whitakers, in east-central North Carolina. Eddie is a fourth-generation hog farmer but the first to own a farm; his father and grandfather were sharecroppers. During a 20 plus career in the military, and as an ROTC instructor at Howard and Georgetown Universities, Eddie raised hogs in his spare time. It was his dream to return home to North Carolina and farm full-time. When he retired from the Army in 1991 at the age of 48, that’s what he set out to do. Dorothy Wise grew up in Washington, D.C., but she too hoped to one day live on a farm. When she and Eddie met at Howard University in the 1980s and she discovered he was a farmer, it seemed that her wish had come true.

Still, it took the Wises five years, until 1996, to secure the loans they needed to buy their farm. They were repeatedly turned down by local government loan officers who, the Wises are convinced, did not want African-American farmers to succeed. It was only through determined effort and much research and legwork that the Wises were able to receive the financial help for which they qualified.

Prior to them being ordered off their property, the Wises had 250 hogs, which they raised from birth and would sell to a black-owned pork processor in the area. Eddie’s lean pork, raised without hormones or antibiotics, is sold at a premium in area supermarkets. Finding such a market niche is the only way the Wises can compete with the much-larger farms that mass-produce hogs for the large meatpacking companies.

For the last 40 years American Black farmers have lived a hellish nightmare deliberately orchestrated by the USDA and its local Farmers Home Administration (FmHA – now the Farm Service Agency, FSA) offices to confiscate Black-owned land and homes. A review of the now historic Pigford v. Glickman Class Action by Black farmers will help one to understand the extremely vicious attack against black farmers and the USDA’s own Civil Rights Action Team report, (CRAT February 1997).

GET DETAILS ON THE BLACK FARMERS CLASS ACTION

We demand a full investigation, a halt to all land seizure and illegitimate farm sales and to return Eddie and Dorothy Wise’s farm and property to them immediately.

For more information, contact tillery@aol.com.

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