Just two generations out of slavery, Black farmers had amassed more than 16 million acres of land by 1910. Now, they have fewer than 4.7 million acres. What happened?
Farmer John Boyd Jr., poses for a portrait during a break from bailing hay at his farm in Boydton, Va., Thursday, May 27, 2021. Documents from a USDA internal review that Boyd provided to The Associated Press show investigators found his operating loan requests were not processed for years, despite explicit instructions from the agency’s state director.
The Virginia farmer who barely was able to keep part of his farm when the USDA threatened to sell it at auction. The Kansas man who lost the land his grandparents once homesteaded. The Arkansas farmer who is holding on by a thread, praying the federal aid will come through in time.“I think discrimination is still pervasive. I think that it’s done in a much subtler way,” Boyd says.
When Kara Boyd brought in another load from the same field, she got a better price. But when her stepfather, who is white, took a load out of the same field, she recalled that he was told: “Man, these are the best beans they’d seen and how many more could he bring them?”Boyd was just 18 years old when he assumed an existing USDA loan when he bought his first farm in the early 1980s. He says walking into his local USDA office was like a return to the Jim Crow era.
Documents from a USDA internal review that Boyd provided to The Associated Press show investigators found his operating loan requests were not processed for years, despite explicit instructions from the agency’s state director. It also found that his account was improperly referred to a credit bureau as delinquent when it should have been restructured, deepening his financial difficulties.
The settlement provided about $1 billion to 15,000 farmers who said USDA unfairly turned them down for loans because of their race between 1981 and 1996. A second round of $1.25 billion stemming from that lawsuit was approved by the court in 2011 for people who were denied earlier payments because they missed filing deadlines.
Little remains today of that farming heritage as even the few Black families who were able to hold on to their land now mostly lease their ground out to white farmers. Nicodemus farmers who once tilled hundreds of acres of farmland no longer actively farm, and much of their ground has been lost over the generations.
The 1980s were especially tough on the Bates farm. They suffered through a drought one year, a late freeze in another and then a hailstorm that wiped out their wheat crop. Their lender foreclosed. After they took everything, Bates says the family was forced to go on food stamps to survive. He worked a few odd jobs over the years, including a stint as a corrections officer. Every time they go to Nicodemus now, they drive alongside the edge of their old homestead to look at the land.Years later, the now 84-year-old Kansas man is still haunted by the memory of Nov. 7, 1986 — the day they went to the federal court hearing in Wichita where the foreclosure was finalized.
In places like coastal Georgia and South Carolina, popular vacation destinations, speculators would track down distant members of these families and buy their interest in the old family farm, which the heir may never have even seen. That outsider can then petition the court to sell the entire tract and divide the money, leaving the entire tract of land to be sold at auction, often at a fraction of its real value.
A bitter family fight ensued after his father’s death, and a local judge threw out the lease agreement and split the family farm among the son and his seven sisters. Rod Bradshaw says he ended up with about 350 acres of it that he still farms, while his sisters sold or leased their acres to white farmers.
The funding was intended to remedy past discrimination in USDA loan programs, and to provide $1 billion for outreach and technical assistance for what it calls socially disadvantaged farmers and ranchers — a group that includes not only Black farmers, but also Hispanic, Native American and Asian producers.
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