I know ten minutes worth of research on this case...info can be found here...http://www.yesmagazine.org/article.asp?ID=433
Money quote: “The lawsuit against the USDA was a hard-fought, confusing, three-year battle. Black farmers’ traditional allies, like Democrats in Congress, the NAACP, and Jesse Jackson, were either late in offering support or remained silent, while unlikely allies Newt Gingrich and congressional Republicans cleared away the most formidable legal barrier: the two-year statute of limitations on civil rights complaints.”
So I don’t get the quote in the St. Louis paper:
“While thousands of those claims have been adjudicated, thousands of other black farmers never had a chance for their claims to be considered on the merits because of problems with the notification and claims process that made it very difficult for many farmers to participate,” said a White House statement.
Again it’s only ten minutes and I’ve probably missed something...
The emphasis of this episode....was that the US Department of Agriculture sat and rigged up various loans, grants and subsidies....and didn’t readily include black farmers into this base of knowledge. This went on for years and years. I won’t say it was discrimination....but you have to remember the 1960s and 1970s version of a farmer...was that he wasn’t highly educated and typically needed a fair amount of help filling out the forms and making claims to get various checks from the government.
My dad, who was a soybean farmer in Bama in the 1970s-80s...took advantage of one program to do erosion control. This involved around $5k of work with a earth mover. My dad had to put up around half of the money and the agriculure folks ended up paying the other half. The Ag agent had to come out....check out the area....sign the forms that my dad filled out (a six-pager). I knew several farmers who had other programs that they took advantage of in this era. No one got rich and it was merely a year by year thing where you might fix this problem or collect an extra $1000 for nothing.
I believe the black farmers are pretty justified in the fact that the Ag department didn’t readily come and explain things to them or advertise programs readily. Today, its quiet different...with half the farmers having a year or two of college....and they all have networks where they share information. They all know how to milk the system that exists today.