Black Farmers in America

Written by Becca Williams, SBT Copywriter

Cover art:  "Cancel Pigford Debt Collage" Art by Walter Cruz for Haki Creatives.

As September comes to a close, I have been thinking a lot about harvest cycles and our reliance on the land.  I moved to Oregon a few years back and in that time have met a lot of folx who work and live off the land, and a lot of folx who want to work and live off the land.  The pandemic brought about a desire to be more self-sufficient after a lot of us realized how quickly the structures we rely upon can fall apart.   The pandemic also gave many of us the opportunity to learn more about where we live, to seek food and community closer to that space, and it gave some of us the time to garden, walk outside, and learn about where our food comes from, particularly as supply chains clogged and grocery store shelves emptied. 

Alas, that ideas of self-sufficiency and sustainability grew during the pandemic is yet another reflection of my whiteness.  Farming, land ownership and access, and growing food for oneself and the community have been entrenched in Black and Indigenous cultures for centuries.  There is a certain privilege among myself and my white friends who want to live communally, live off the land, or even as I myself have said many times, “just have some land with some chickens and goats, maybe a garden.”  During the pandemic, that privilege emerged as a sense of idealized escapism – the brilliance of having everything one needed within reach. 

I wanted to focus this post on Black farmers initially as a way to better understand those experiences as I had been hearing about the congressional funds set aside specifically to relieve the debts of marginalized farmers. I wanted to learn more about this as I begin to interrogate and locate white supremacy within my own desire to live more fully in tuned with the land around me. As usual, I uncovered a lot more than what I initially sought.  To be clear, I am not saying that white farmers have a particularly easy life; farming is strenuous, particularly as climate change, inflation, increased food prices, and supply chain interruptions wreak havoc on our food system.  What I am saying is that farming, food access, food security, food deserts, the construction of communities, and even our farming techniques cannot be fully understood and appreciated without a deeper respect for the history, structural racism, land rights disputes, violence, broken promises, and theft endured by Black and Indigenous groups as they seek out and maintain autonomy over their land and sustenance. 

Farming and land ownership cannot be separated out from discussions around reparations and inheritance.  As this article writes, “For a once-enslaved people forced to work the land of their oppressors, land ownership has always symbolized freedom. Black farm owners argue that possessing land enables them to be their own boss, grow their own food, and live on property they control.”  This truth is complicated by the fact that all of the land I am speaking about was stolen from the Indigenous communities who first inhabited this country and who continue to live on this land today.  The Landback movement more clearly elucidates the idea of giving land back to Indigenous and Black folx as a political framework steeped in collective liberation and divestment from white supremacy.  I encourage you to take a look at their work. 

As for inheritance – white family units passing along their financial wealth, land, and assets is the main catalyst for maintaining white economic control and power.  In many cases, inheritance is the passing along of assets that the recipients did not do much to personally acquire for themselves. This conversation is critical as it relates to Black and Indigenous communities who for centuries had their land, labor, and livelihoods taken away and exploited for capital that they did not reap the benefits of.  Take the next few minutes and listen to activist Kimberly Jones explain this in the video below. 

Reparations, inheritance, structural racism, the end of the Civil War, the Great Migration, Tulsa, Rosewood - there is so much wrapped up when thinking about the historical and present-day significance of Black farmers owning land.  Over the last century, the number of Black farmers has decreased from representing about 14% of farmers to just 1.4% - a drop from over a million farmers in the 1920's to about 40,000 Black farmers in 2017.   Further, Black farmers have lost about 90% of their land due to various issues: Underfunding the Freedmen’s Bureau, systemic racism at the hands of the United States Department of Agriculture, failures in rural zoning and inheritance laws that enabled larger corporations to more easily buy out marginalized landowners, and so much more. 

After Robert E. Lee surrendered in 1865, General Sherman issued Special Order No. 15, which set aside land along the Atlantic Coast so that formerly enslaved Black families could each receive “40 acres and a mule.”  When President Johnson was sworn in after Lincoln’s assassination, however, he reversed that order, declaring that land seized by the federal government be returned back to the Confederacy in exchange for loyalty. The Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen and Abandoned Land (also known as the Freedmen’s Bureau) was established in 1865 as a way to support refugees and formerly enslaved communities.  As we learned about in the Juneteenth blog post, formerly enslaved folx and enslavers had to quickly navigate moving from enslavement into employee/employer relationships, and this took a significant amount of work.  The Bureau, however, closed in 1872 and was not entirely supported by the federal government as President Johnson felt it infringed upon state’s rights.  Enabling structural racism through the support of state’s rights has created a lasting divide and we see the lingering impacts through recent regulation around abortion, school textbooks, critical race theory, and climate change.

(2012 map showing the prevalence of Black farmers in the US.)

The slow disintegration of enslavement led to the emergence of sharecropping as employee contracts were not honored, wages went unpaid, and land was not redistributed.  In a sharecropping system, landowners allow tenants to use their land for a share of the crops produced on that land.  The tenants, Black families, would contribute the labor and the cost of production would be covered by the landowner, typically a former enslaver.  The cost of production and the landowner’s share would be taken from the profits, leaving the tenant with their share.  This gave landowners a significant amount of power over tenants, and coupled with a de-fanged Freedmen’s Bureau, led to rampant exploitation that cut into the ability of formerly enslaved Black folx to financially get ahead, purchase land, and fully experience life free from exploitative, racist, violent, and illegal labor practices. 

The 1920’s saw the peak of Black land ownership and farming.  For formerly enslaved folx who were once considered property, did not have the right to vote, and were forced to turn a land-based profit for enslavers, land ownership and farming indicated a sense of power.  During the civil rights movement, however, white folx recognized that one way to limit or stop the momentum of the Black community was to get rid of Black land ownership.  This happened in a variety of ways, and I’ll focus here on the role that the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) actively played in discriminating against Black farmers.  The USDA has acknowledged their racism and the significant ripple effect it has had on the Black community as well as the direct impact it has on the reduction of land owned by Black farmers.  

How does structural racism look in the agricultural realm?  The notion that racism is embedded in the systems and institutions that guide aspects of our daily life can be difficult to grasp in its entirety as it represents an uglier truth than what White Supremacy wants us to see.  In our binary system where punishment is justified when there is enough evidence that one person hurt another, it can be near impossible to “prove” that massive entities (entities that benefit from white folx trusting them) have inherently racist policies or practices.  For the USDA, this racism often begins at the local level with employees at county-based Farm Service Agencies, many of whom are elected officials capable of making decisions about funding and resources.  This leads to: Black vendors being denied permits at local farmer’s markets, denying loans to Black farmers, not investigating civil rights complaints when they are filed, delaying the loan approval process, foreclosing Black farms, and excluding Black farmers from disaster relief and land subsidies. The USDA itself acknowledged that loans to Black male farmers were 25% lower than loans to white male farmers, and on average took about a year to receive.  For white farmers, it took about 30 days to receive a loan from the USDA.   Black farmer picketed the USDA in 1956 after writing in thousands of complaints only to discover that the civil rights branch of the USDA had been closed for years – their letters and complaints had never even been opened. 

In 1999, a successful class action lawsuit was filed against the USDA on behalf of Black farmers.  The case, Pigford vs. Glickman, offered over a billion dollars in payments to farmers who applied or attempted to apply for a USDA loan. A few issues arose:  After learning about the experiences of other Black community members seeking out aid from the USDA, many Black farmers bypassed that process altogether – meaning that this money didn’t support those who lost or sold their land as a result of not wanting to engage with the USDA’s racist policies in the first place.  Secondly, there wasn’t much press about this settlement and many farmers did not receive the proper notification that the settlement had even occurred.  When they went to submit their applications for payment, they were denied yet again because their applications were late or considered fraudulent.

(Black farmers protesting the USDA in Lafayette Park, 1997.)

In March 2021, the Biden Administration passed a multibillion-dollar loan forgiveness package aimed at assisting Black and other minority farmers.  By June of 2021, however, that relief was suspended pending lawsuits filed by several groups of white farmers claiming the relief package was racist. 

For the purpose of this post, I watched a few interview clips from white farmers who claim that the aid represents “reverse racism”, that white and Black farmers were hit equally as hard during the pandemic, and that if an institution as large as the USDA admits their racism, then the USDA is responsible for fixing it in a way that doesn’t penalize white farmers.  They brought up questions around equal protection under the law and the perceived benefits of “race-neutral” policies.  These comments represent the pervasiveness of White Supremacy and indicate to me that White Supremacy is working as intended and that the realities of institutional racism are buried under whiteness tightening its grip on economic control. 

Black farming and land ownership doesn’t solely exist in relationship to the harm inflicted by history and continuing structural racism. Recently, there has been an increase in young Black folx transitioning into farming and returning to the land.  Since food deserts are more prominent in Black and brown communities, this represents a significant positive shift in building more access and availability of culturally significant and fresh food, in addition to shifting how wealth gets passed between generations.  Take a look here if you’re interested in learning more about the experiences of Black farmers or are interested in donating to support.  Alternatively, search here if you want to receive fresh produce and goods from Black-owned farms.  Lastly, stay up to date on issues pertaining to Black farmers, including updates regarding the loan forgiveness bill, by following along here.