In the 20th century, mechanization and industrialization transformed farms from “labor-intensive to capital-intensive operations,” as the historian Pete Daniel writes. Debt became endemic, with farmers borrowing money during planting season and recouping the funds when crops were harvested and sold. “If you don’t get your money on time, then you’re not going to be able to be successful,” Lucious Abrams, one of the six original Pigford litigants, told me. “In order for you to have a successful crop, you need to start the first of the year putting out your lye and fertilizer, preparing your land, and seeing what type of nutrients you need to put out there. If you get your money in May or June, it’s almost time to start gathering your crop again.” For Abrams, the USDA’s loan disbursements often didn’t come in time: “They just stretch it out, and you don’t get your money till late. You don’t get enough money to operate—just enough to hang yourself.”
Abrams’s experience was not unique. As the House Committee on Government Operations concluded in a 1990 report, the USDA “categorically and systematically denied minority farmers access and full participation in the multitude of Federal Government programs designed to assist them” and therefore is “directly responsible for the loss of land and resources these farmers have experienced.”
A 1996 USDA-commissioned study found that “97 percent of disaster payments went to white farmers, while less than 1 percent went to black farmers,” and that white men were given thousands more in loan packages than Black men. The agency’s Civil Rights Action Team (CRAT) in 1997 determined that the USDA “took three times as long” to process Black farmers’ loans as those of white farmers, and even when a loan was approved, it often “never arrives…making it impossible for the farmer to earn any money from the farm.”
The CRAT study also found that Black farmers who appealed “well in advance of planting season” to their local FSA office for loans were often falsely informed that no applications were available or were denied critical information required for the application to be processed. In 1998, the USDA’s National Commission on Small Farms reported that Black farmers were subjected to “indifference and blatant discrimination…in their interactions with USDA programs and staff.”
Local control over USDA loan disbursement is at the heart of the problem, Wright and others said. Three- to 11-person elected panels called county committees essentially control every aspect of FSA financial aid distribution at the local level, including hiring the staffers in agency offices. “The county committee system is set up to take care of their family, their friends, and themselves. And Blacks are not one of the above,” Wright told me. “They need to eliminate the county committees and…[hire staffers] federally like the rest of the government. Local control is great in most environments, but it has never worked for Black folks.”