'The Last Plantation'

wheat and other crops. He also raised his cows. I really was trained as a farmer by my dad and grandfather. My mother's parents were sharecroppers, and I also worked on their farm as a little boy, so I got to see it on both sides. You know what it was like to to own your farm, and I also got to see what it was like having grandparents as share croppers. John comes from a long line of black farmers whose legacy stretches back to the end of the Civil War.

His farm is located in a southern Virginia town called Baskerville. In eighteen sixty eight, the Fourteenth Amendment grantited citizenship to black people, and after the Civil War, despite many obstacles, black people were able to purchase some of the very land they've been forced to farm under slavery. By nine black men operated around four of all the farms in the US, but over the years that share of black farms declined, and in a big way. Today black people

operate less than two percent of farms in America. White people basically run the rest. So what happened to the black farming industry over the last century. Of course, I knew we had racial tensions in the country at that time, but I didn't see it as what I was about to run into this major brick wall and I waken in reality check with the government. It was a real break up call for me. They really let me know that there was a difference in the way many in

his country view black and white and race relations. In the late nineteen eighties, John Boyd had only owned his land for a few years, but he found himself on the verge of losing all of it and jeopardizing his family's legacy of ownership. There was a nine year period in which I was trying to get farm operating loans, so I was applying every year. I think I may have received one one loan and the rest were for denials, so totally last bit of the eighties and early nineties. Uh,

every every everything just blew up. The thing is what happened to John Boyd was also happening to tens of thousands of other black farmers. And it was happening because they were black. But those houses of farmers were about to take on the government, and their fight represents a long overlook chapter in the push for black equality. The data shows that the median white family has ten times more wealth than the average black family. One of the

drivers of that wealth gap is redlining. Economists often point to the absence of African American generational wealth forces. Be heard, and we're gonna not the United States, the problem of avriculture. No, that we're not leaving until we were seeing justice. I'll come on in. It's a trend propelled not just by economic forces, but by white racism in local white political

and economic power. It's much easier to integrate a lunch counter than it is to guarantee an annual income, for instance, to get rid of positive Welcome back to the paycheck. I'm Rebecca Greenfield and I'm Jackie Simmons. This week we're talking about land, specifically farmland. Today, when we think about wealthy dynasties, we don't usually think about generations of farmers. But for most of the twentieth century, farming was a huge part of life in America. It was a huge

part of black life. Running a farm was a good way to make a living, and owning the land meant farmers could pass wealth to their children. But over the last century, black people lost nearly all their farm land. We're talking about a huge amount of black wealth that assembly vanished. By one estimate, the land alone was worth three fifty billion dollars. So what made that wealth disappear. A lot of it goes back to farming loans, and it's the U. S Department of Agriculture that's responsible for

dispensing those loans. That's where John Boyd comes and Elizabeth Rembert has a story. John Boyd thought his first piece of farmland when he was eighteen. He wanted to follow in his parents and his grandparents footsteps, and as soon as he was old enough, he set out to carve out his own piece of property. I bought my first farm in from another black farmer by the name of

Russell sally Ah. He was having difficulties with then it was called the Farmer's Home Administration, and so he agreed to sell me as farm But what John didn't know was that the difficulties that Russell was having with the Farmer's Home Administration, those would foreshadow problems John himself was going to have down the line. The Farmer's Home Administration was a unit within the U s d A. The U s d A is the biggest provider of money

to farmers in the US. It has a one hundred and fifty one billion dollar federal budget, and part of its mission is to operate like a big bank for farmers. It lends money to pay for seeds, equipment, and labor. The us DA's roots date all the way back to Abraham Lincoln, who formally established the agency in eighteen sixty two. He called it the People's Department because back then half

of all Americans lived on a farm. But for a long time there was a problem at the U s d A. The agency, the so called People's Department, wasn't lending money equally to black and white farmers. In the nineteen nineties, the agency took an average of two hundred and twenty days to process a loan application for a black farmer versus the sixty days it took for a

white farmers application. And between two thousand and six and two thousand and sixteen, black farmers represented less than three percent of the recipients of the U. S d A's direct loans, but they made up more than thirteen percent of the farmers who lost their land to foreclosure. Those discrepancies had major consequences, and John was about to find out that, as with many things in the US, landownership was completely skewed to white people. Skewed as in, black

people own less than one percent of American farmland. White people basically own the rest. Economists call this the land gap. A better name for it might be the land Chasm, the Grand Canyon of inequity. Black landownership began to fall off after its peak in nineteen ten. Many black farmers didn't have wills or estate plans, so banks, real estate companies, and other predatory actors were able to force property sales. When black landowners died, some stopped farming due to intimidation

violent race riots. One farmer told me she remembers racist neighbors burning crosses on the land her family owned, and then there was the U. S d A, which was locking black farmers out and causing them to lose their land. The impact of losing that land lasted generations. I talked to Thomas Mitchell, a law professor at Texas A and M about the cost of what black farmers were shut out of, not just the land itself, but the economic power it could have had to secure college educations and

build wealth over generations. He added all of that potential value that would have been built on the land to the three hundred and fifty billion dollars he estimates the farmland itself is worth, and he came up with a dollar figure that represents everything black farmers have lost over

the years. We're thinking that that additional impact could be, you know, somewhere between four hundred and five billion dollars, so that the overall negative net impact of this loss of land could be on the order of a trillion dollars. A trillion dollars. That's a really huge number to wrap your head around. But what Thomas is saying is that the gulf between black and white land ownership is a root cause of the gap between black and white wealth. Now.

John Boyd the farmer that we heard from earlier, he wasn't thinking about the wealth gap or the land gap or structural inequality back in the nineties. He just wanted to farm. And usually when a person wants to farm, the U. S d A can be a partner in that. It's purpose is to help farmers with the resources they need. One of those resources credit. Access to credit is a make or break issue for most farmers, especially for young farmers. Farmers often need loans to get the seed in the

ground and the equipment running. After they harvest and sell their crops, they can use that money to pay back the loan, and it's a cycle for every season. But if they never get that loan, or if they don't get it on time or get enough money, it sets their harvest back and then their ability to pay loans back. To start the process of getting credit and resources, farmers head into their local U. S d A office and

sit down with the loan officer. But in John's first meeting with his county's U. S d A loan officer back in the mid nineteen eighties, he could tell that borrowing wouldn't be easy for one The U s d A officer would own, you see, black farmers once a week, so we all had the same letters. Your apartment is at nine o'clock nine am Wednesday morning, and we would all come to the office with the with the same letter.

And what he experienced next was disturbing. It was, you know, a time period where he tore my application up and tossing in the trash can. This man spat on me. He left the door open, he talked boastfully loudly about what he wasn't gonna do, and uh, you know, if he was going to do something, this is all he was gonna do. And it was a real quick, all right opening experience for the way blacks were treated versus whites, especially in the South. John says that white farmers were

treated very differently. He says that once he was meeting with a loan officer when a white farmer walked in. John says the loan officer handed over a government check for one hundred and fifty seven thousand dollars. According to John, after exchanging pleasantries with the white farmer and making plans for dinner, the loan officer casually reminded him to come back and fill out the paperwork for the loan because

he'd estimated based on the previous year's numbers. John had been practically begging for a loan for a tiny fraction of that amount. So here this farmer have received a farm operating on for hundred fifty seven thousand dollars. He hadn't even done the paperwork, the correct paperwork on the loan, and I was pretty much big and pleading for five thousand dollar operating loan. And he had this conversation as

though I was invisible. John says the U. S d A operated like a whites only country club, where you had to be a part of the club to get the money that you need for your farm. And this discrimination against black farmers was so widespread that people called the U. S d A the Last Plantation in news articles, studies, and even in court documents. The U. S d A is a federal agency, but many loan decisions are made

locally by committee members. They're elected by their local communities, and the overwhelming majority of these committee members were white, So they were just your local guys, but they had a huge amount of influence and power. On a whim. They could reject, delay, or reduce loans to farmers. Here's John talking about the loan officer. He told me one time he was the next thing to God in his county. He controlled all the bank boards, and he said, nobody

lends more money in this county than I do. And if you don't learn how to speak to me, you're not going to get any any money, and you won't be and you won't be farming very long. That's what he said. And got into it, and I told him I didn't I didn't know what Jesus Christ, no God look like I said. But he can't look like you.

He can't act like you. John applied every year for an operating loan, which was essential in getting seeds in the ground to be able to make money in the harvest, but nearly every single application was denied, and without those loans, John couldn't get the profit from his farm that he needed to pay down the debt he inherited from the previous owner. One day, John says, the USDA tried to

take some of the land away from him. John says his loan officer wanted him to sign over his land to a white landowner in the area, and then John could rent land from the white farmer, So basically, you wanted me to be a share crop. John says he refused to sign the paperwork because he refused to give up on his land. He was determined to fight to

keep it. He borrowed money from his family and friends, and that helped him scrape together enough to make the minimum payment each month for a while, until one day he couldn't. And then one night, at midnight, federal agents sent by the U. S d A showed up banging on his front door. They woke up his five year old son, who looked on as strangers loaded his father's

belongings into trucks. You know, they kept choosing to sell me out rather than to work with me to see what they could do to help me stay on the farm. John knew this wasn't just happening to him. He started calling up other black farmers in the area to talk about their experiences dealing with the U. S d A. And he found the discrimination by local loan officers was sort of an open secret. We would shake our heads,

but we didn't have a real conversation. Must Old Black pride is the definition of that Black farmers like John were losing their land, their operations and their ability to improve their lives and their children's lives because they couldn't get loans. So John decided to fight back. He started a group called the National Black Farmers Association to represent black farmers interests and to get people to take him seriously,

and he started suing the government. First, John tried to contest his own loan rejection with the U. S d A. Then he started finding lawsuits on behalf of other farmers for their discrimination at the hands of the U. S d A. And then in he led a group of sixty farmers to Washington, d C. That was campaigning and and protesting and cities around the country. And I took my mule there. I took my tractor there. John's message as he and a crowd of protesters led literal mules

around the seat of government. We have our mule. Now we're looking for our forty acres. I went over to the department for the first day and there were a group of black farmers picketing the Department of Agriculture. That's s Dan Glickman. Today he's a senior policy fellow at a think tank, but back in he had recently been appointed to be Secretary of Agriculture by President Bill Clinton.

He had served nine terms in Congress as a representative from Kansas, and he thought he was pretty well steeped on the issues farmers face until he got to the U. S d A. I was a congressman for eighteen years from Kansas, has served on the Agriculture Committee that entire time, and do not recall ever one hearing on this subject of discrimination against a minority or black farmers. He says his first impulse was to figure out what was going on. So I talked to my staff and I said, let's

get into this thing. Let's figure out what's happening. I talked to the farmers who are picketing for a short time, and I said, well, I'll get to work on it. I don't know anything about it. Then he went to the White House and talked to Bill Clinton personally. Essentially, he says, the President told him make this right. And it was complicated because the picketing didn't stop, and we had the open sessions that were pretty emotional, not only

in Washington and around the country. I took a team and we listened to farmers in various states, particularly in the South. We did open town meetings, and you could sense the high level of emotion and the belief that this system wasn't working for a large number of people. When Dan listened to the farmers stories, he said he knew these experiences weren't isolated loan denials or just random offenses. The stories traced back to a much bigger history of

racism and its hold on agriculture, property and opportunity. One farmer that Dan heard a lot from was John Boyd. By this time, John had filed a lot of lawsuits against the U. S d a's Civil Rights Office alleging that the U. S d A was discriminating against him and other black farmers, and Dan, as Agriculture secretary, was the defendant in many of those lawsuits. The movement was growing.

The protests John led and the lawsuits he filed were getting national media attention, and that media attention led more and more black farmers to go public with their own experiences of discrimination at the hands of the U. S d A. John got an update from Washington the U. S d A's Civil Rights Office was going to settle the complaint that he had filed against the agency over discrimination. John saw it as a victory after so many years of fighting for him. It confirmed what he had always

known he had been treated unfairly. It included a twelve page document that stated outright that the U. S d A had discriminated against John. He wouldn't tell me exactly how much he got, but it was enough to buy some land back. But the loan officer in Virginia, who John says, spat on him and tore up his loan application. John says, he retired, so there there was no no act of pity for anyone who discriminated against any of us.

John's case turned out to be bigger than him. His settlement and all of his activism set the stage for something that would go way beyond him and put more than two billion dollars in the hands of thousands of black farmers. Soon after John's own case was settled with the U. S d A, he worked with a farmer from North Carolina named Timothy Pickford to file what would become the largest class action lawsuit in US history. The

lawsuit became known as Pigford Versus Glickman. Timothy Pigford's lawyers claimed the U. S d A had discriminated against black farmers when doling out loans and assistants. It was a familiar complaint by now, but the Pigford case took things further. It also said the U. S d A had not properly handled complaints of prejudice. In fact, the agency wasn't handling the complaints at all. The U. S d A Civil Rights Office, which was supposed to investigate reports from farmers,

hadn't functioned properly for more than a decade. That meant submissions were ignored and complaints of racism were just collecting

dust for years while farmers lost their livelihoods. Pigford recruited more than four hundred other black farmers to join the class action lawsuit, and the case landed in the hands of a federal judge named Paul Friedman, who approved the landmark settlement, and in the order he released in court, he traced the legacy of racism and agriculture all the way back to the U. S. Government's original reparations promise, when Union generals pledged those forty acres and a mule

to freed slaves at the end of the Civil War. He called the dysfunction of the agency's civil rights office the quote culmination of a string of broken promises that had been made to African American farmers for well over a century. Paul Friedman's decision provided a starting point for any black farmer who felt they'd experienced discrimination between nine and nine. They could now come forward to try and prove their case for damages. Some people wanted the money

because of just compensation for past wrongs. Some of the people wanted money to use for operating their existing farms, operating loans, and some of the people wanted it to buy additional farm land. Black farmers were struggling with economic problems and agriculture that it was that were affecting almost all farmers. That's Dan Glickman again. He says the way the settlement was structured was probably the closest thing the US has come to issuing real reparations to Black Americans.

When black farmers around the country heard about the lawsuit, they started coming out in droves, each with their own personal story of racism at the hands of the U. S d A. Now came the question of who was entitled to payments and how much? How do you prove that as a black farmer you lost your land because of systemic discrimination and how much money can really make that right. The court appointed a monitor named Randy Roth to review every claim of discrimination and determine who was

eligible for compensation. Randy and her team traveled the country and processed tens of thousands of those farmers claims to determine if the U. S d a Had discriminated against them. So for a farmer to win in the case, the farmer had to specifically identify similarly situated white farmer who was treated more favorably. The way they did that was

by digging through old public documents. One of the ways that they found the information was to go to their county courthouse and see what loans white farmers had recorded. You record a security interest in a loan, and that was for many people a very fruitful way to get information about white farmers loans. By the end of the settlement and a subsequent class action suit known as Pigford, two over two billion dollars was paid out by the

US government to black farmers across the country. The thing about Pigford was, by the time of the settlement, a lot of the damage had already been done from nineteen ten, which is largely considered the peak of black land ownership.

Black people had lost nine of their land, and even the two billion dollars that the Pigford suits doled out, mostly in fifty dollar increments to individual farmers, didn't come close to the amount of money that black farmers really lost at the hands of the U. S. D As discriminatory practices. But John Boyd says that the money did help a lot of people. Fifty dollars to struggling in farmer who has no money is a real shot in the arm up. So it did help. Did it give

the land back? No? Was the enough settlement to to make all of the discrimination go away from U? S toda to answer is no, But did it help the people who got the money? Absolutely? So you know, here again I see it. I see it on both sides of the coin for farmers who were were treated brutally and awful by the government. No, it was not enough money for settlement, but it was a building block. And you know, if you're building the building, you build it

in blocks. John sees the Pigford settlements and all of the organizing it took to get there, as a crucial chapter in the long fight for equality. For Black Americans. There's a huge gap in the history when people, when these experts talk, they go from the sixties two the Black Lives Matter, and and the Black farmer movement, like I said, was is absent from that conversation. John's payout came after decades of fighting, decades of hard times, and

the money came at a personal cost. He'd been traveling around the country talking to farmers and lobbying politicians. He'd gotten divorced, he spent time away from his son, and then he got a victory that he knows wasn't enough, but it's still got him land. These days, John spends most to his time on the three acre Virginia farm that he was able to hold onto in part with the settlement money. He spends his days like any farmer.

He wakes up early in the morning to feed the cows, plant seed or plow fields, fix equipment, and check on his crops and livestock. He's trying to impart his love of the land on the young farmers he works with as the president of the National Black Farmers Association. In all my interviews, the Pigford case has come across as something that's set a huge precedent while failing to make

black farmers whole. It's a big deal that a federal agency literally paid retribution for its discrimination and that the nation's largest class action lawsuit attempts to atone for racism. But is that really enough? Two billion dollars is a lot of money compared to the hundreds of billions black landowners lost or were denied over a century. Well, as John says, it's a drop in the bucket, and it didn't bring about the systemic changes to bridge the land gap.

So John is still fighting because he says that land in America tells a bigger story about race and power, and that as long as there's an unequal landownership, wealth and power will be out of balance as well. I hate to keep going back to my dad and grandfather, but they taught me the land is the most powerful tool that you can possess. Uh. Landless culture as a powerless culture. If you don't own any land as a

group of people, you don't have any boggaining power. You don't have any power as a as a group of people. My grandfather said, Uh, you can't leave your pH d to your children, but I can leave my whole raggedy farm. You know, the give them some financial stability, land is it? Listening to John Boyd got me thinking about the obstacles black people face back when my family farmed their land

in East Texas in the early twentieth century. But his story also jolted me into realizing that black people even today struggle to hold onto their farms. The upshot is Black involvement in what used to be a cornerstone of the US economy has been stripped to almost nothing. Owning a farm is only one way to make money from land. Today, there's a far more common wealth building tool that, at

least in theory, is accessible to far more Americans. Hopes next week on the paycheck we dig into the way as black people are still being left out of the housing market. It's embarrassing right there. I feel like there is no safe place for me to have this conversation because I'm going to get judge one way or another. Oh, you know, it's it's a lot. I feel betrayed to Yeah, I feel left behind. I feel left behind. Before we go,

we have a request for you. Experts estimate that closing the racial wealth gap would take around thirteen trillion dollars give or take a trillion or two. That works out to about three hundred thousand dollars for every black American. We'd like to know what would you do with that three hundred thousand dollars? How might it change your life?

How might your life stay the same? Record a voice memo with your answers to these questions and email it to me at our Greenfield at Bloomberg dot net, or leave a voicemail for us at six or six three two or three four nine. Oh. We may use your voice on the show. Thanks for listening to the Paycheck. If you like the show, please rate, review, and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. This episode was hosted by Me,

Rebecca Greenfield and me Jackie Simmons. Today's episode was edited by Francesco Levi and reported by Elizabeth Rimbert and Shelley Banjo. This episode was produced by Lindsay Cradowell. We also had production help from Magnus Hendrickson and Ethan Brooks, an editing help from Janet Paskin Rocksheeta Solujia, Jackie Simmons and me. Our original music is by Leo Sidron. Francesca Levi is Bloomberg's head of podcasts. We'll see you next time.