Racial Discrimination by US Dept of Agriculture

[sassa]

Racial Discrimination by US Department of Agriculture Threatens African American Farmers

January 21, 2003

This week, as the United States celebrates the life of slain civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Oxfam's US partners continue the struggle, calling for the US Department of Agriculture to end decades of damaging racial discrimination.

The USDA's record of racial discrimination is well documented. In 1997, the USDA Civil Rights Action Team (CRAT) revealed decades of racial discrimination that had put thousands of African-American farmers out of business. By denying or delaying loans essential to financing their crops, and by withholding other federal farm support on a widespread basis, USDA employees forced African American farmers to lose their land, their livelihoods, and their communities. According the CRAT report, "In the Southeast, for example, in several states it took three times as long on average to process African-American loan applications as it did non-minority applications." "In 1994, 94% of all county committees [that grant these loans] had no female or minority representation." That pattern of non-representation continues today.

Discrimination by the USDA has contributed to the dramatic decline in the number of minority farmers over several decades. In 1920, there were 925,000 African American farmers in the United States; by 1992, there were fewer than 18,000. Fifteen years before the CRAT report, the U.S. Civil Rights Commission had warned, "unless government policies of neglect and discrimination are changed, there may be no black farmers by the year 2000."

In 1999, on the heels of the CRAT report, a class action racial discrimination suit (Pigford vs. Glickman) was settled with an agreement to provide financial restitution. To date, more than $630 million has been paid out to farmers and former farmers who could document that they were unfairly denied loans. However, three years later, the USDA's delays and rejection of thousands of applications points to a continued pattern of discrimination in the grant approval process.

Since the 1999 suit, only four of the USDA employees accused of discrimination have been dismissed. As Congresswoman Eva Clayton in the House Agriculture Committee points out, "If any corporation paid out [even] $10 million for the behavior of their employee...they would be out of there...No one would have tolerated that."

"Has USDA settlement changed anything?" is the title of a December 15, 2002, article in the Richmond Times-Dispatch, citing numerous cases of on going discrimination. A particularly outrageous case involved a USDA employee, Arthur Hall, who greeted a new African-American secretary with a noose in his office. The USDA's general counsel for civil rights, Arlean Leland, who investigated the incident, dismissed his act as nothing more than "very poor judgment" and praised Hall as a "committed federal public servant." The message to USDA employees from her decision is that discrimination may continue as usual.

Two Oxfam partners, the Rural Coalition and the Federation of Southern Cooperatives/Land Assistance Fund, in alliance with the NAACP and unions representing USDA employees, have called for the dismissal of Arlean Leland. They demand that the USDA rout out discrimination against minority farmers throughout the organization. "The answer is not more taxpayer-funded sensitivity training for employees who have refused for more than six years to change," said the Rural Coalition's chairperson, John Zippert. "The President himself must tell federal employees that no more racism will be tolerated, and those who discriminate will suffer serious consequences. Then those consequences must happen."

To read more about the action visit the Rural Coalition website:

www.ruralco.org/html2/action/policycenter/statement.html

Read more about the class action law suit on the Federation of Southern Cooperatives website:

http://www.federationsoutherncoop.com/classaction.htm

To read the Richmond Times-Dispatch article, vistit their website:

http://timesdispatch.com/frontpage/MGB3ZA7DQ9D.html