Continued from last week’s Business page.
The most significant reparations law suit to date involved claims for relief under the 2008 Farm Bill filed by the Black Farmers And Agriculturalist Association in a class action lawsuit of Pigford, Brewington v. Glickman and the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
Although this lawsuit was not meant to specifically address the taking of land promised pursuant to the government’s unfulfilled grant of 40 acres and a mule, it did seek compensation for an alleged USDA denial of loans to these black farmers on the basis of race discrimination. The class of black farmers prevailed in a consent settlement agreement signed by Judge Paul Friedman.
By way of dicta but one of the only federal decisions to recognize the broken promise of 40 acres and a mule, Judge Friedman in the order approving the consent settlement decree stated:
“As the Civil War drew to a close, the United States government created the Freedmen’s Bureau to provide assistance to former slaves. The government promised to sell or lease to farmers parcels of unoccupied land and land that had been confiscated by the Union during the war, and it promised the loan of a federal government mule to plow that land. Some African Americans took advantage of these programs and either bought or leased parcels of land.
“During Reconstruction, however, President Andrew Johnson vetoed a bill to enlarge the powers and activities of the Freedmen’s Bureau, and he reversed many of the policies of the Bureau. Much of the promised land that had been leased to African-American farmers was taken away and returned to Confederate loyalists. For most African Americans, the promise of 40 acres and a mule was never kept.
“Despite the government’s failure to live up to its promise, African-American farmers persevered. By 1910, they had acquired approximately 16 million acres of farmland. By 1920, there were 925,000 African-American farms in the United States. …
“Forty acres and a mule: The government broke that promise to African-American farmers. Over 100 years later, the USDA broke its promise to Mr. James Beverly. It promised him a loan to build farrowing houses so that he could breed hogs. Because he was African American, he never received that loan. He lost his farm because of the loan that never was. Nothing can completely undo the discrimination of the past or restore lost land or lost opportunities to Mr. Beverly or to all of the other African-American farmers whose representatives came before this Court. Historical discrimination cannot be undone.”
W.E. DuBois noted that only through control over their own economic and political life would black Americans gain true equality. He observed that the main weakness of black Americans was that although physically emancipated there was no economic emancipation. He addressed this discrepancy in his book Black Reconstruction.
One cannot help but speculate as to the economic turn of events had blacks been able to retain their ownership in this 40 acres and a mule. Even taking into account that all freed blacks would not have acquired the promised land and mule and the fact that a percentage of those who might have obtained land ownership would not have maintained and continued to own the land, a substantial number of freed black Americans would have for the first time acquired land and like their white counterparts prospered in real estate ownership and the wealth of inherited real estate to this day.
Even with the betrayal to freed blacks of land ownership, blacks nevertheless acquired more than 15 million acres of land in the South in the 50 years following freedom. As author Thomas W. Mitchell observes in his article “Undermining Black Land Ownership,” “These landowners embraced the republican ideal of the rural small hold and widely distributed ownership, and believe that only through such ownership could real economic and political independence be achieved.”
“The denial of black people of an equity base in land ownership has consistently been at the heart of black economic impoverishment and political powerlessness in the United States,” as William F. Nelson notes in Black Political Power And The Decline Of Black Land Ownership.
“In a society based on capitalism, land ownership becomes an essential and unalterable prerequisite for economic development and the exercise of substantial political influence. The continuous insulation of blacks from those aspects of the marketplace wherein land can be obtained and translated into significant capital has been the sine qua non of American domestic colonialism…Limited black control over land has deprived the black community of a major source of wealth in this country.”
Had blacks owned land in the South, there most likely would not have been the Great Migration of blacks to the North. Black inheritance of land rather than tenancy would have shaped the South in an entirely different way than it now exists and would have in the course of time provided needed resources to an otherwise impoverished community.
It is not too late for black land ownership, however difficult in these economic times. The price to the black community in failing to own land far outweighs the monetary resources initially required in acquiring real estate.