African American Farmers and Civil Rights

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FORTY ACRES AND A MULE." JUDGE PAUL L. FRIEDMAN BEGAN HIS 1999 decision in Pigford v. Glickman, the successful class-action suit brought by African American farmers, with that familiar broken promise from the Civil War/Reconstruction era. The case concerned the sorry civil rights record of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and its denial of federal benefits to black farmers in the years after World War II and in particular the thirty-five years since the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The decline of black farmers alter World War II contrasted dismally with their gains in the half century after emancipation when, demonstrating tremendous energy and sagacity, they negotiated a maze of racist law and custom and--during the harshest years of segregation, peonage, and violence--gained land and standing in southern communities. By 1910 African Americans held title to some sixteen million acres of farmland; by 1920 there were 925,000 black farms in the country. In the teens and twenties, however, the graph of rising ownership faltered and then plunged downward. Depression, mechanization, and discriminatory federal programs devoured black farmers, but their fate was eclipsed by press coverage of school segregation, voting rights, and public accommodations. They almost disappeared without a trace. (1)

Racism circulated through federal, state, and county USDA offices, and employees at every level bent civil rights laws and subverted government programs in order to punish black farmers. Judge Friedman admitted that the Pigford case would "not undo all that has been done" but insisted it was "a good first step." By 2000, of course, it was too late for hundreds of thousands of black farmers. When Judge Friedman handed down his decision only months before the end of the millennium, there were but eighteen thousand black farms left, and many of those were endangered. Underlying Friedman's decision was a disturbing contradiction: black farmers suffered their most debilitating discrimination during the civil rights era when laws supposedly protected them from racist policies. While white farmers also lost land, black farmers endured not only similar economic forces but also USDA racism. The increase in USDA programs had an inverse relationship to the number of farmers: the larger the department, the more programs it generated, and the more money it spent, the fewer farmers who survived. (2)

For a century and a third, the U.S. Department of Agriculture presided over monumental changes in the U.S. countryside. Since its founding during the Civil War, the USDA has encouraged better farming methods, and over time its staff has swelled and its reach has extended to every crossroads and farm. Early in the twentieth century the Extension Service became a conduit for feeding farmers advice on the latest science and technology from experiment stations and corporations. Some farmers welcomed and utilized research findings, but others were skeptical of experts and outsiders. The USDA and its supporters denigrated farmers who did not accept the gospel of progress. Yet the substitution of science and technology for human experience and expertise deskilled farmers who relied increasingly upon formulaic methodology rather than husbandry. Knowledge handed down or gained by trial and error laded away. The human cost that accompanied the rise of agribusiness was eclipsed by the story of tractors and picking machines, insecticides and herbicides, and hybrids and genetically engineered crops. (3)

The term agribusiness came into vogue during the World War II era and in its broadest context refers to the farms, firms, and lobbying groups that thrive on the production, processing, storing, shipping, and marketing of food and fiber. Agribusiness's counterpart in the public sector, agrigovernment, often worked from a similar agenda and included the USDA's headquarters bureaucracy, complex of experiment stations, research facilities, regulation units, and acreage policy divisions; the land-grant universities; state agricultural offices; and county agricultural employees and committees. Agribusiness and agrigovernment cooperated--conspired, some might argue--to replace labor-intensive with capital-intensive farming operations. Federal agricultural policy and laborsaving science and technology became tools that ruthlessly eliminated sharecroppers, tenants, and small farmers. The human dislocation caused by this transformation was masked by an upbeat and sterile bureaucratic vocabulary of progress that eroded, even insulted, the more prosaic language of farmers and by rules and regulations that changed annually and that unnecessarily complicated farm life. (4)

President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal agricultural policies greatly expanded the reach and power of the USDA. While some programs aided poorer farmers during the 1930s, by World War II conservative farmers and interest groups eroded such initiatives. Increasingly, powerful farmers and pliant bureaucrats operated the machinery that disbursed federal funds and information. The Farmers Home Administration (FHA, later FmHA), the lender of last resort, disbursed credit, but not necessarily to the most needy. The Agricultural Stabilization and Conservation Service (ASCS) awarded acreage allotments (acreage ASCS committees assigned to farms based on their historical production), heard appeals, supervised conservation programs, and even approved some categories of loans. The segregated Federal Extension Service (FES) provided the latest information on relevant science and technology, organized and supervised 4-H clubs for youth, taught better farming techniques, and offered household advice through demonstration clubs for women. The county committees of these three powerful pseudo-democratic committees hired extension and home demonstration agents, controlled information, adjusted acreage allotments, disbursed loans, adjudicated disputes, and, in many cases, looked after family and friends. Through the FES, land-grant universities, and experiment stations, county elites drew on science and technology and became collusive partners of agrigovernment. African Americans had no voice in USDA decisions, nor did many poor whites. Prior to 1964 no African American served on a county committee, and whites hoped to keep it that way. (5)

On April 22, 1965, Secretary of Agriculture Orville L. Freeman issued a memorandum demanding that the USDA staff "put into effect with dispatch" comprehensive policies that would ensure an end to discrimination. "The right of all of our citizens to participate with equal opportunity in both the administration and benefits of all programs of this Department is not only legally required but morally right," he insisted. Despite Secretary Freeman's ringing words, black farmers lost ground in the 1960s, primarily because of Freeman's failure to control vindictive white bureaucrats but in part because the press spotlighted voting rights, school integration, and major demonstrations while the discriminatory treatment of black farmers remained in the shadows. (6)

Civil rights laws theoretically offered the promise of equal rights that would give African Americans parity with whites in obtaining allotments, credit, information, and access to government largesse. Over the years, however, whites had amassed enormous resources and built strong defenses. It was as if agribusiness accelerated around a supercollider track gaining speed and bulking up on machines, chemicals, research, government subsidies, and racial prejudice, and when it collided with the stalled civil rights target, it blew apart African American aspirations for rural life and created new elements that reshaped the countryside. Historians are still attempting to discover what was created and what was destroyed in that impact.

In the century-and-a-half continuum of USDA racism, an opportunity appeared in the mid-1960s that could have moved the department toward equal rights. In 1965 Secretary Freeman appointed African American William M. Seabron as assistant to the secretary for civil rights and established a citizens' advisory committee on discrimination. The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, an independent agency created by the Civil Rights Act of 1957 to investigate and report on a broad spectrum of discriminatory practices, focused on USDA programs and in 1965 released a highly critical study, Equal Opportunity in Farm Programs, revealing how the ASCS, the FHA, and the Federal Extension Service bitterly resisted demands to share power with African Americans. The commission also cooperated with the Sharecroppers Fund and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), sharing complaints and suggesting approaches to end discrimination. These initiatives challenged white hegemony and provoked USDA racists at the county, state, and federal levels first to resist implementing civil rights and ultimately to drive black farmers from the land. The tracks of racism and discrimination led from local committees and agriculture offices to state offices, to land-grant schools, to experiment stations, and on to Washington to disappear into the trackless bureaucratic wilderness where untamed racism flourished, where men and women alienated from the land punished the clientele they were hired to help. (7)

Confronting such dedicated racists presented a challenge to William Seabron, who coordinated the equal rights policies of twenty USDA agencies. A native of Chicago, Seabron had graduated from the University of Iowa with a degree in chemistry and also attended DePaul University and the University of Michigan. From 1945 until he arrived in Washington in 1962, he had worked for the Urban League and the Michigan Fair Employment Practices Commission. In the aftermath of the report by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, Seabron attempted to implement Secretary Freeman's edicts. His agenda seemed bold--integration of the Federal Extension Service, appointment of blacks to several state ASCS committees, temporary jobs for blacks in ASCS offices, and the prediction that by July 15, 1965, the Farmers Home Administration would have biracial committees in all states where a significant number of black farmers resided. (8)

William Seabron had good intentions but little power to carry them out. He could seek compliance with civil rights laws and hold hearings, but only the secretary of agriculture could implement and enforce policy. Seabron attempted to curb racist policies of the Federal Extension Service but was frustrated at every turn. According to a 1968 study by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, Seabron's staff "cited occasions when their requests for action by an agency have been ignored altogether." Seabron not only was hindered by truculent agency administrators but also was sabotaged from within the USDA bureaucracy. He did not report directly to Secretary Freeman but answered to an assistant secretary. Seabron admitted that only by hand-carrying memos to the secretary's office could he assure their delivery, because if he used the internal mail system "somebody else usually decides if the Secretary should see it." Seabron had a staff of two in Washington and four in the field but depended on state and local "entities," some of whom possibly had interests in the outcome, to conduct investigations. The Office of Inspector General (OIG) handled complaints and sent reports to agency heads and to Seabron's office. The system failed "when agency heads [did] not take appropriate action based on the findings of the investigation report." Clearly, too much power resided in the agencies and not enough in Seabron's office. Seabron sincerely attempted to implement civil rights laws, but under subsequent administrations the USDA civil rights office became a byword for indolence and hypocrisy. (9)

Despite pressure from Seabron's USDA civil rights office, bureaucrats continued business as usual. In one of the most egregious examples, early in 1965, NAACP counsel J. Francis Pohlhaus inquired if the Federal Extension Service had established desegregation plans for Alabama--to comply with Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964--at a meeting "from which Negroes were excluded." He was incredulous that the USDA "could approve plans to implement Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, when the plans are drafted in violation of Title VI." USDA assistant secretary for administration Joseph M. Robertson boldly replied, "In all candidness, the answer to your question, as to whether in fact the Alabama State Plan to achieve compliance under Title VI was drawn up at a racially exclusive meeting, is yes." Robertson's unabashed reply reflected the unconscious assumption that whites knew best. (10)

Since the Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954, county bureaucrats had twisted federal programs to intimidate African American activists. Bureaucrats squeezed first those black farmers who advocated civil rights, who registered to vote, who sent their children to white schools, or who belonged to the NAACP. Denying production credit and home loans and chipping away at acreage allotments, committees drove activist farmers off the land. County bureaucrats cited vague regulations, invented application inadequacies, delayed payments, and even refused to provide forms and information, hurdles that African American farmers had difficulty overcoming. To appease Secretary Freeman and buy time, the FES promised acquiescence to civil rights laws even as it partitioned southern offices by color, assigned demeaning job titles to African Americans, and patronized black agents by assigning them vacuous duties. Black agents might have taught African American farmers better methods and distributed information, but instead they were consigned to pointless chores. When the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights released Equal Opportunity in Farm Programs in 1965, it revealed that between 1935 and 1959 white full owners declined by 28 percent and black by 40 percent. The lack of equal opportunity for African Americans showed up in 1959 statistics: black farms averaged 52.3 acres, and white ones averaged 249 acres. Whites earned $2,802 per year; blacks $1,259. (11)

In revealing glaring racism within USDA programs, the Commission on Civil Rights report was a cautionary document, but it did not anticipate the power of bureaucrats and southern congressmen to nullify civil rights regulations. In mid-April 1965, Mississippi's ASCS director reported that powerful Mississippi congressman Jamie L. Whitten advised county committees to ignore federal pressure to integrate. Some USDA administrators were reluctant to cross Whitten for fear he would slash appropriations. Thomas R. Hughes, executive …