My previous beefs went back 100+ years. Cause, you know, it’s history. But this one is much more recent. The media been quiet on one of the most consequential civil rights battles of the twenty-first century and I felt obliged to fill a gap.
John Boyd Jr. was born in Queens in 1965. Like hundreds of thousands of Black farmers, John's daddy had left the countryside to try to make a life in the city. But John still spent his summers working on his grandpa's farm. And when John was "just beginning to get into trouble”, gramps got sick and the family moved back to Virginia to tend the hogs and harvest the tobacco.
John called the move out to the Virginia countryside the best move of his life.
Farming got into John's soul, and at 18 he fell in love with a run-down tobacco farm. He took out a $51,000 loan to buy it from the elderly African-American owner who was getting foreclosed on. The old man didn't get nothing from the sale – it all went to pay off debts from the Farm Service Agency of the USDA.
That's some foreboding shyt right there.
John picked up a corporate poultry contract and scratched out a decent living. But he wanted to do more with the land. Problem was, every time he went to the USDA to apply for loans, he was denied or delayed.
You see, farmers in this economy have to rely on loans to survive. You don't see the fruit of your labor until you've put in months of work and a lot of dough, and most farmers don't earn enough to build up a piggy bank for future growth. They gotta get loans to afford the inputs they need. For that reason the USDA has strong credit programs to support farmers, operating loans and improvement loans and all that shyt.
But in John's neck of the woods, they weren't giving nothing to Black farmers.
Every time John applied he got denied or delayed. He'd be told a program wasn't available and then one of his neighbors would cash out the exact same shyt. Once he sat in the USDA agent's office begging for an application to move forward and a White farmer waltzed in during the middle of his meeting and walked right back out with a check.
The USDA loan officer was on some real bullshyt. I mean Grade A fukked up shyt. His policy was that he only met with Black farmers on Wednesdays. Racist motherfukker. The fool would take naps during those meetings, or throw the applications in the trash right in front of ‘em. Racist motherfukker.
John was different from a lot of the other country farmers since he grew up in New York and was attending college, so he wasn't gonna keep his head down and take some of the bullshyt that the old school folk took for granted. John’s confidence only pissed off the loan officer, who told John that he better learn to talk to him like the other black folks did. Racist motherfukker.
Once the a$$hole spit tobacco onto John’s shirt and claimed it was an accident.
Because of this racist USDA field officer, the lifeblood of farming wasn't available to John. And he began to realize what had happened to that old Black man who got foreclosed on to get John his farm in the first place.
Treatment like this had repercussions. In the 1980s alone 43% of African-American farms disappeared, usually because of bankruptcy or because the aging owners couldn’t find anyone to carry on the farm. Nearly half of all Black farms gone in a single decade.
John discovered a backlog of discrimination cases against the USDA that hadn’t been resolved. How many times had those Black farms been lost due to the racism of the field officers? And he began to see levels to the officers' racism.
John filed six discrimination complaints against the field officer. Finally the USDA Civil Rights Office of Virginia investigated the fool, who admitted much of the behavior and was moved to a different location in response.
Boyd used the evidence from that investigation to file the first-ever discrimination lawsuit against the USDA.
After five years of fighting in the courts, he won that shyt.
The settlement helped make up for some of the years of not being able to get any help at all.
But little did they know he wasn't stopping there. The USDA had awoken a giant.
Even with the court victory John still wasn't getting the loans he needed. The USDA would take over a year to process an application that for a White farmer might be filled in just a couple months. Often nothing came at all. He scratched out help from family and friends to get by, but in 1996, 13 years after he bought the place, John went bankrupt. Someone put up an auction sign on his land.
John cut that sign in half with a power saw and tossed it into the country official’s truck.
This shyt was wrong, and he wasn’t going to take it sitting down.
John formed the National Black Farmers Association. He picked the motto, “We have our mule, now we’re looking for our 40 acres.” On December 12, 1996, John led 60 African-American farmers to the White House to protest decades of discrimination. They spoke of ending farm foreclosures, returning foreclosed land, and getting financial compensation for thousands of farmers who had been denied loans due to their race.
It stirred up enough attention that the USDA officials conducted ‘listening sessions’ across the country to investigate allegations of abuse. The NBFA gave them data showing massive disparities in loan distribution, forcing an investigation. The investigation confirmed decades of civil rights abuses and blatantly unfair outcomes for Black farmers.
Ninety-three changes were recommended in the final report but little was actually done. Non-white staff at the USDA started taking heat if they supported the NBFA's efforts. One small solace was that John’s work got those old discrimination cases looked at, leading to 200 outstanding cases getting addressed and closed including 11 major settlements totaling $3.5 million.
But it was clear that the USDA was still dragging its feet.
In 1997 Boyd and 400 other Black farmers sued the USDA in a landmark lawsuit. They demonstrated that Black farmers had been denied loans and other support due to rampant discrimination and USDA officials had repeatedly ignored their complaints.
It took years of work to push the lawsuit to fruition:
Step One: In 1998 the NBFA’s lobbying efforts forced the Senate to waive the two-year statute of limitations that would have prevented most Black farmers from getting justice.
Step Two: After a special hearing of the Congressional Black Caucus was organized and 200 Black farmers participated in a White House rally, the Secretary of Agriculture promised that the culture was going to change under his watch. Another 225 outstanding discrimination cases were settled.
Step Three: John led another rally, this time with tractors going right up to to the White House, John in the front with a mule named "Struggle." They earned a three hour meeting with President Bill Clinton, who promised $600 million in farm assistance and a permanent reinstatement of the USDA’s civil rights enforcement unit. All foreclosures where the owner had filed a discrimination complaint were halted.
Step Four: John Boyd Jr. and the NBFA expanded their lawsuit to a class action covering ALL Black farmers in America. Over 16,000 Black farmers signed up.
This shyt wasn’t born from a rally here and there, it took a LOT of ground work. John was now spending half of his time running his farm with the help of his dad and a couple cousins, and the other half of his time lobbying those a$$holes in D.C. He also ran an outreach program for minority youth at local agricultural colleges and a technical support program for farmers, helping them complete loan applications and other documentation.
In January 1999 the USDA settled the NBFA’s suit for $1,000,000,000 in cash, agreeing to pay $50,000 to every Black farmer named in the class action.
One billion dollars for Black farmers.
That suit brought a leg up for over 16,000 Black farmers. But there were tens of thousands more who hadn’t heard about the lawsuit until it was too late.
John went back to work fighting for the farmers who hadn’t gotten into the first suit, sometimes going the 200 miles to D.C. two or three times a week. When he made a statement by riding a mule and wagon it took 17 days to get to Washington. He slept in the wagon right outside the White House lawn.
After nearly a decade of leg work, in 2008 senator and presidential candidate Barack Obama agreed to be the lead sponsor of the measure to reopen the excluded farmers’ case.
In 2009, John led a march down Independence Avenue with his mule “40 Acres”, demanding the farmers get their cases heard. They pressed the White House and Congress for $2.7 billion total to settle all 80,000 remaining Black farmers in the country.
In 2010, John led a 7-state campaign through the south, riding his tractor right up to the USDA headquarters in D.C. to plead for settlement funds.
In December 2010, Congress approved the $1.25 billion to cover 25,000 additional claimants. President Obama signed the bill into law, with John in attendance. The pen Nancy Pelosi used to sign the bill now belongs to John, and a picture of John shaking hands with Obama hangs over his fireplace.
A movement initiated by one man, fighting against a broken and racist system that nearly caused him to lose his land, ended up with the reorganization of the USDA, the settlement of hundreds of discrimination cases, easier access to USDA programs going forward, the passing of laws that made it easier for poor farmers to hold onto their land, and two and a quarter billion dollars in reparations for Black farmers. You can never say that any form of racism/discrimination has "ended", but John's work made the relationship between Black farmers and the USDA fundamentally different than when it started. He achieved true change.
And it only took 20 years of fighting for what was theirs.
That's an American hero right there.
John Boyd Jr. was born in Queens in 1965. Like hundreds of thousands of Black farmers, John's daddy had left the countryside to try to make a life in the city. But John still spent his summers working on his grandpa's farm. And when John was "just beginning to get into trouble”, gramps got sick and the family moved back to Virginia to tend the hogs and harvest the tobacco.
John called the move out to the Virginia countryside the best move of his life.
Farming got into John's soul, and at 18 he fell in love with a run-down tobacco farm. He took out a $51,000 loan to buy it from the elderly African-American owner who was getting foreclosed on. The old man didn't get nothing from the sale – it all went to pay off debts from the Farm Service Agency of the USDA.
That's some foreboding shyt right there.
John picked up a corporate poultry contract and scratched out a decent living. But he wanted to do more with the land. Problem was, every time he went to the USDA to apply for loans, he was denied or delayed.
You see, farmers in this economy have to rely on loans to survive. You don't see the fruit of your labor until you've put in months of work and a lot of dough, and most farmers don't earn enough to build up a piggy bank for future growth. They gotta get loans to afford the inputs they need. For that reason the USDA has strong credit programs to support farmers, operating loans and improvement loans and all that shyt.
But in John's neck of the woods, they weren't giving nothing to Black farmers.
Every time John applied he got denied or delayed. He'd be told a program wasn't available and then one of his neighbors would cash out the exact same shyt. Once he sat in the USDA agent's office begging for an application to move forward and a White farmer waltzed in during the middle of his meeting and walked right back out with a check.
The USDA loan officer was on some real bullshyt. I mean Grade A fukked up shyt. His policy was that he only met with Black farmers on Wednesdays. Racist motherfukker. The fool would take naps during those meetings, or throw the applications in the trash right in front of ‘em. Racist motherfukker.
John was different from a lot of the other country farmers since he grew up in New York and was attending college, so he wasn't gonna keep his head down and take some of the bullshyt that the old school folk took for granted. John’s confidence only pissed off the loan officer, who told John that he better learn to talk to him like the other black folks did. Racist motherfukker.
Once the a$$hole spit tobacco onto John’s shirt and claimed it was an accident.
Because of this racist USDA field officer, the lifeblood of farming wasn't available to John. And he began to realize what had happened to that old Black man who got foreclosed on to get John his farm in the first place.
Treatment like this had repercussions. In the 1980s alone 43% of African-American farms disappeared, usually because of bankruptcy or because the aging owners couldn’t find anyone to carry on the farm. Nearly half of all Black farms gone in a single decade.
John discovered a backlog of discrimination cases against the USDA that hadn’t been resolved. How many times had those Black farms been lost due to the racism of the field officers? And he began to see levels to the officers' racism.
John filed six discrimination complaints against the field officer. Finally the USDA Civil Rights Office of Virginia investigated the fool, who admitted much of the behavior and was moved to a different location in response.
Boyd used the evidence from that investigation to file the first-ever discrimination lawsuit against the USDA.After five years of fighting in the courts, he won that shyt.
The settlement helped make up for some of the years of not being able to get any help at all.But little did they know he wasn't stopping there. The USDA had awoken a giant.
Even with the court victory John still wasn't getting the loans he needed. The USDA would take over a year to process an application that for a White farmer might be filled in just a couple months. Often nothing came at all. He scratched out help from family and friends to get by, but in 1996, 13 years after he bought the place, John went bankrupt. Someone put up an auction sign on his land.
John cut that sign in half with a power saw and tossed it into the country official’s truck.
This shyt was wrong, and he wasn’t going to take it sitting down.
John formed the National Black Farmers Association. He picked the motto, “We have our mule, now we’re looking for our 40 acres.” On December 12, 1996, John led 60 African-American farmers to the White House to protest decades of discrimination. They spoke of ending farm foreclosures, returning foreclosed land, and getting financial compensation for thousands of farmers who had been denied loans due to their race.
It stirred up enough attention that the USDA officials conducted ‘listening sessions’ across the country to investigate allegations of abuse. The NBFA gave them data showing massive disparities in loan distribution, forcing an investigation. The investigation confirmed decades of civil rights abuses and blatantly unfair outcomes for Black farmers.
Ninety-three changes were recommended in the final report but little was actually done. Non-white staff at the USDA started taking heat if they supported the NBFA's efforts. One small solace was that John’s work got those old discrimination cases looked at, leading to 200 outstanding cases getting addressed and closed including 11 major settlements totaling $3.5 million.
But it was clear that the USDA was still dragging its feet.
In 1997 Boyd and 400 other Black farmers sued the USDA in a landmark lawsuit. They demonstrated that Black farmers had been denied loans and other support due to rampant discrimination and USDA officials had repeatedly ignored their complaints.
It took years of work to push the lawsuit to fruition:
Step One: In 1998 the NBFA’s lobbying efforts forced the Senate to waive the two-year statute of limitations that would have prevented most Black farmers from getting justice.
Step Two: After a special hearing of the Congressional Black Caucus was organized and 200 Black farmers participated in a White House rally, the Secretary of Agriculture promised that the culture was going to change under his watch. Another 225 outstanding discrimination cases were settled.
Step Three: John led another rally, this time with tractors going right up to to the White House, John in the front with a mule named "Struggle." They earned a three hour meeting with President Bill Clinton, who promised $600 million in farm assistance and a permanent reinstatement of the USDA’s civil rights enforcement unit. All foreclosures where the owner had filed a discrimination complaint were halted.
Step Four: John Boyd Jr. and the NBFA expanded their lawsuit to a class action covering ALL Black farmers in America. Over 16,000 Black farmers signed up.
This shyt wasn’t born from a rally here and there, it took a LOT of ground work. John was now spending half of his time running his farm with the help of his dad and a couple cousins, and the other half of his time lobbying those a$$holes in D.C. He also ran an outreach program for minority youth at local agricultural colleges and a technical support program for farmers, helping them complete loan applications and other documentation.
In January 1999 the USDA settled the NBFA’s suit for $1,000,000,000 in cash, agreeing to pay $50,000 to every Black farmer named in the class action.
One billion dollars for Black farmers.
That suit brought a leg up for over 16,000 Black farmers. But there were tens of thousands more who hadn’t heard about the lawsuit until it was too late.
John went back to work fighting for the farmers who hadn’t gotten into the first suit, sometimes going the 200 miles to D.C. two or three times a week. When he made a statement by riding a mule and wagon it took 17 days to get to Washington. He slept in the wagon right outside the White House lawn.
After nearly a decade of leg work, in 2008 senator and presidential candidate Barack Obama agreed to be the lead sponsor of the measure to reopen the excluded farmers’ case.
In 2009, John led a march down Independence Avenue with his mule “40 Acres”, demanding the farmers get their cases heard. They pressed the White House and Congress for $2.7 billion total to settle all 80,000 remaining Black farmers in the country.
In 2010, John led a 7-state campaign through the south, riding his tractor right up to the USDA headquarters in D.C. to plead for settlement funds.
In December 2010, Congress approved the $1.25 billion to cover 25,000 additional claimants. President Obama signed the bill into law, with John in attendance. The pen Nancy Pelosi used to sign the bill now belongs to John, and a picture of John shaking hands with Obama hangs over his fireplace.
A movement initiated by one man, fighting against a broken and racist system that nearly caused him to lose his land, ended up with the reorganization of the USDA, the settlement of hundreds of discrimination cases, easier access to USDA programs going forward, the passing of laws that made it easier for poor farmers to hold onto their land, and two and a quarter billion dollars in reparations for Black farmers. You can never say that any form of racism/discrimination has "ended", but John's work made the relationship between Black farmers and the USDA fundamentally different than when it started. He achieved true change.
And it only took 20 years of fighting for what was theirs.
That's an American hero right there.
