As I understand it, my paternal grandfather was born on a plantation in East Feliciana Parish when it transitioned to sharecropping. He stayed there and farmed that land until his mother died. After her death, and at nearly 40 years old, he began farming his own land in Wilson, Louisiana.
He never had over a sixth-grade education because secondary education wasn’t available for black folks in the region he grew up. By my research, it wouldn’t have been available until 1939, when he would’ve been nearly 30 years old.
As part of the New Deal, the FHA began giving loans to farms to finance their expansion. To get the deal passed through racist legislators, it was agreed that the funding would be handled federally while being administered locally to ensure discrimination. Discrimination was a feature, not a bug.
The New Deal Congress desired and produced exactly this
Ohio State Law Journal: The Echoes of Slavery
result. Specifically, southern congressmen wanted to exclude black
employees from the New Deal to preserve the quasi-plantation style of
agriculture that pervaded the still-segregated Jim Crow South… President Roosevelt and his legislative allies recognized that in order to pass any New Deal legislation at all, it was necessary to compromise with Southern Democrats intent on preserving white supremacy.
As a result, in the 20 years after the bills were passed, along with industrialization and the expansion that comes from this capital infusion, the number of black farmers dropped by nearly two thirds or 400k farmers.
In 1982, the United States Commission on Civil Rights found that USDA’s Farmers Home Administration (FmHA)—then the nation’s leading public lending institution for rural communities—had been so unresponsive to the needs of black farmers that it “may have hindered the efforts of black small farmers to remain a viable force in agriculture”
The Counter
I’ve sat here many days thinking about this and its effects.
- While my grandfather was denied an education, his tax dollars were being spent to educate the people he was competing against.
- While my grandfather was denied access to capital… and remember the results of Thomas Piketty’s decade long 200-year study of capitalism, the primary determinant of success in a capitalist system is access to capital… his tax dollars were funding the increased access to capital of his competition.
- While my grandfather was denied equal protection under the law, his tax dollars were funding the predatory practices of the criminal justice system.
I grew up on 100 acres of land that were once used to farm Santa Gertrudis cows. Those cattle were how my father paid for my undergraduate education. In 1920, 925,710 black farmers, which included my grandfather, James Perry, worked the soil. By the time Obama offered recompense for the discrimination black farmers faced, only 6% of the farms that existed in 1940 were still going. In a hundred years, the number of black farmers has dropped from 925,710 to 45,508.
My friend and sometimes colleague, Sherman, helps to operate Lena Farms, a farm that has been operating in Clinton, Louisiana since the 1800s. I made this video for their farm.