So you think all the U.S. Dept. of Agriculture does is (not) protect Fido from killer Chinese pet food? Actually, the USDA has its grubby little fingers in plenty of other pies (mad cow?), but I only had to write a paper about racial discrimination at the department, hence today’s topic:
The USDA exterminated the black farmer.
Before the First Great Migration, blacks (then almost all rural-dwelling) had made considerable headway in getting out from under the sharecropping system’s thumb and buying their own farms, with black farmers owning over 925,000 farms in 1920. After Pigford v. Glickman, a class action lawsuit (and largest civil rights lawsuit ever) alleging USDA discrimination toward thousands of black farmers between 1983 and 1996, was settled for $400 million in 1999, it was estimated only 20,000 black farmers remained.
Causes are, of course, legion, but I argue that the single greatest was discrimination by USDA farm reform programs designed to create a weed- and small farmer-free South starting during WWII:
- The three preeminent USDA programs (FHA, ASCS, FES) were in essence run by county committees comprised of local whites. No black was elected to a committee until 1964, and by a civil rights investigation five years later, there were two black committeemen among hundreds of thousands, thanks to voter intimidation and sham elections policy.
- USDA bureaucrats displayed a mastery of red-tape racism, making up problems on applications, withholding forms, and fabricating allotment numbers (gov’t decided how much of their land farmers could cultivate) to place black farmers at a disadvantage. Or they’d draw a farmer into debt and then “clean him out.”
- Nixon’s first secretary of agriculture filled his civil rights advisory committee with appointees chosen for their lack of interest in civil rights, his successor helped states in violation of antidiscrimination laws avoid losing their USDA funding, and Reagan’s stopped investigating black farmers’ complaints altogether.
Some of this racism is festering at the USDA even today: County committees are still in charge (a major reason why black farmers, including Pigford himself, spoke out against the $400 mil settlement), and now Native American farmers are alleging the same kind of discrimination in a pending suit. Will Obama live up to rhetoric about institutional racism?
In other words, pet food’s the least of it.
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