March 4, 2021
Many white people have become aware in the last year of the discrimination that Black Americans face in policing, voting, health care and more. Few, however, may recognize that systemic racism led to another grave injustice, one that underpins many other forms of exploitation: More than a century of land theft and the exclusion of Black people from government agricultural programs have denied many descendants of enslaved people livelihoods as independent, landowning farmers.
African-American labor built much of this country’s agriculture, a prime source of the nation’s early wealth. In the years since the end of slavery, Black Americans have been largely left out of federal land giveaways, loans and farm improvement programs. They have been driven off their farms through a combination of terror and mistreatment by the federal government, resulting in debt, foreclosures and impoverishment.
Covid Relief Package to Include Billions for Black Farmers lmtonline.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from lmtonline.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
The House Budget Committee approved an estimated $4 billion of debt relief for minority farmers on Monday as part of a $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief package.
11:13 pm UTC Feb. 24, 2021
Billy Gibbons intends to die on this land.
At 70, the bespectacled Black farmer may very well be the last heir to work the family plot; 80 acres of black soil in Browntown, Alabama, an unincorporated community less than 20 miles north of Prattville.
Gibbons’ parents pinched and scraped to purchase the acreage for $850 in 1940. They intended to pass it down to him and his brother; but he died in 1976 after contracting meningitis while away at military training in Fort Polk, Louisiana.
“I can remember all of this was woods,” Gibbons said, waving his arm over the crop land that extended before him. It was a brooding morning that had already spilled rain and left his feet besieged by shallow pools of muddy water.
A significant focus will be on rectifying what some lawmakers believe has been racial injustice on the part of the U.S. Department of Agriculture over the years.