Kansas News Service Bernard Bates holds a notebook of documents from the lawsuits he s been a part of while trying to get his farmland back.
The federal government plans to send payments to Black farmers this summer to compensate for loans and aid they lost out on during generations of discrimination. In Nicodemus, Kansas, farmers say the help has come too late.
NICODEMUS, Kansas At his home in northwest Kansas, Bernard Bates thumbs through a stack of faded color photographs nearly 40 years old.
One shows a group of men in county sheriff’s jackets standing in front of a combine. In another, two men inspect plowing equipment on a flatbed truck.
Federal payments to Black Kansas farmers come too late for generations hurt by discrimination
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Agricultural communities across the country have seen a steep decline in Black farmers for generations, and nowhere is more illustrative of that than Nicodemus, where Alexander grew wheat and other crops. Nicodemus was the most famous of the Midwestern settlements where former slaves known as “exodusters” migrated more than a century ago, hopeful that farming their own land would help them escape racism and poverty.
Black farmers made up 14% of the U.S. farming population in 1910 but today account for just 1.4%.
Dowdell was only able to keep Alexander s house and the original 120-acre homestead that was not part of the bank loan. He now runs a restaurant in nearby Hill City, and the acreage he was able to keep sits idle as grassland.