Sounds like a great payday for black farmers, but this is hopefully the culmination of decades of wrong doing, injustice, and standing up for yourself. To say this has been an exasperating experience for the black farmers would be an understatement.
Finally, black farmers from the south will start to receive payments on their $1.2 billion dollar settlement with the federal agriculture official. This was the result of their discrimination case against the government. If all goes well, 18,000 black farmers should start receiving their checks over the next few days.
This isn’t the first payout on this settlement, just the next one. There has been a 14 year separation between these payments and the first payments in 1999 when the class-action suit was settled. There were thousands of people who received payments at that time. The actual suit was over the widespread discrimination by federal officials who denied loans and other assistance to black farmers because of their race.
But like all of these agreements and settlements, I often wonder how much money could have been made or was made by those that were not discriminated against?
According to Black Enterprise: “After all these years and all the fighting, this is what it’s all about,” says John Boyd, president of the National Black Farmers Association, which pushed Congress for the settlement. “It doesn’t take away what the government has done to us, but for those who receive the payments it will make a difference in their lives.”
About 40,000 black farmers filed claims in the $1.2 billion settlement, which ended a discrimination case against the United States Department of Agriculture. In 2010, President Obama signed the bill authorizing compensation for discrimination in farm lending by federal officials.
Black farmers will receive settlement payments of $62,500, including $50,000 for the claim and $12,500 for taxes. Of the $1.2 billion, about $91 million was approved for attorney fees.
“I am pleased this chapter of discrimination in the history of the Department of Agriculture is closed and bureaucracy will no longer keep these farmers from receiving their due justice,” says Democratic Rep. Marcia Fudge of Ohio, chairwoman of the Congressional Black Caucus.
The payments could lead to an infusion of money back into farming, adds Adell Brown Jr., vice chancellor for research at Southern University Agricultural Research & Extension Center. The center has worked with black farmers in Louisiana who filed claims in the first and second cases.
The sad part of all this delay in payment and even the settlement, many of those black farmers have died since it all started. They were not able to see the positive moment of the federal government and agriculture department each crow and admit the wrong they were putting these people through.
This may not seem like much to the younger generations, but if you know any elderly people who actually lived through much of the overt struggle we read about, you know they are very proud. And hearing the federal government admit they wronged them would mean so much to comfort their souls.
However, of the 18,000 claims approved in the settlement, 4,000 to 5,000 of them were estate claims. The National Black Farmers Association is working with these families to ensure their estate claims are filed and received.
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