USDA to Pay Black Farmers $1.25 Billion

(Feb. 23) -- Some 70,000 black farmers have reached a $1.25 billion settlement with the U.S. Department of Agriculture for years of discrimination in farm loans and subsidies. But after generations of disappointment, this group of farmers knows the fight isn't over until the check arrives.

Though President Barack Obama asked for $1.15 billion for the farmers in anticipation of a settlement, Congress has yet to approve any funds for the payout. And until it does, black farmers and their supporters say the class-action lawsuit that has plagued the USDA for more than a decade cannot be put to rest.

"The crop ain't in until it comes across the scales," Samuel D.B. Jackson of Wallace, S.C., told The Root. "You can have a full cotton field and a cotton picker waiting, and a storm can wipe you out before the harvest. The [settlement] deal has been struck, but how long can you wait for the money? It isn't real until the check clears."

John Boyd Jr., president of the National Black Farmers Association, said the outcome was bittersweet. "The farmers are older," he told AOL News. "Many have died waiting and are not here to see this day."

For black farmers, the discrimination has been longstanding, systematic and withering. For more than half a century, the USDA delayed or denied loans and subsidies to black farmers, causing thousands of them to lose their land and livelihoods, according to the settlement. By 1997, 1 million acres of farmland were black-owned, down from 15 million in 1920.

In the 1999 case Pigford v. Glickman, the USDA agreed to pay 16,000 black farmers $1 billion after a judge held the federal government responsible for the decline in black farmers. Critics argued that more than 70,000 farmers were shut out of the lawsuit. In 2008, then-Sen. Barack Obama and Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley got a law passed to reopen the case, and the settlement talks moved forward.

The $1.25 billion settlement, announced Thursday, comes on top of the money paid out a decade ago. The new agreement would provide cash payments and debt relief to farmers who applied too late to participate in the earlier settlement, The Washington Post reported. Authorities say they are not certain how many farmers might apply this time, but analysts say the number could be higher than 70,000.

Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack said he hopes the new settlement will end a "sordid chapter in USDA history." And Obama heralded the payout as helping to bring "these long-ignored claims of African-American farmers to a rightful conclusion."

But from the editorial boards of newspapers, and the pages of black blogs, the message was clear: The farmers need to see the money before this case can be over. And the sooner, the better.

"With many of the farmers past 60 or now dead, Congress owes America's black farmers a swift approval," said an editorial in today's Boston Globe.

The Chapel Hill, N.C., News & Observer noted Monday that "for the descendants of some farmers who have died, this may be regarded as too little, too late."

For some, there were mixed emotions. Mary Mitchell, a columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times whose parents were Mississippi farmers, said the payout could not undo the past. "There's no way to make up for the harm that was done to black farmers because there is no real way to compensate people for killing their dream," she wrote.

Dan Glickman, secretary of agriculture in the Clinton administration, acknowledged that for years, even he was unaware of the discrimination claims. "Even after serving 18 years on the House Agriculture Committee, when I became agriculture secretary in 1995, I was scarcely aware of this chapter in the history of USDA," he wrote in The Huffington Post.

The Bush administration largely ignored the civil rights claims against the agency. In 2009, The Root reported that "during the eight years of the Bush administration, there were more than 14,000 civil rights claims filed against the USDA, with very few of them getting favorable attention."

The settlement is also being regarded as another sign of the changing priorities of the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division under Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder. And with Obama in office, some black farmers are hopeful that an end to the case is near. Boyd said Obama "has been on board a long time with the issue. I just need his help to help finish the deal on Capitol Hill."