By Eliott C. McLaughlinAssociated Press Writer ATLANTA (AP) – Claiming they were denied reparations doled out in a discrimination settlement, black farmers said that they are taking their case to Congress, which will hold a fourth hearing on the matter in June. The farmers say that U.S. Department of Agriculture discrimination not only forced black farmers to sell their farmland, it ultimately prevented them from eventually becoming major players in the food-production industry. About 13,500 black farmers each received the $50,000 promised by the Agriculture Department when it settled Pigford v. Glickman, a 1999 class-action civil rights lawsuit. Another 66,000 farmers sent in their claims late and were precluded from the settlement because the department intentionally failed to notify the plaintiffs, said Tom Burrell, president of the Black Farmers and Agriculturalists Association. “Black farmers got the barnyard version of jurisprudence,” Burrell, a farmer from Covington, Tenn., said at a news conference last Wednesday while flanked by church ministers. “The lawsuit itself has turned out to be as discriminating as the past acts of discrimination the lawsuit was intended to remedy,” he said. The federal agency contends it has fully complied with the settlement terms and even has voluntarily taken measures to guarantee equal opportunities for all farmers, said spokesman Ed Loyd. Through personal letters and various media, the department informed 87 percent of the potential plaintiffs of the settlement, he said. J.L. Chestnut, a Selma, Ala., attorney who represented the black farmers in the lawsuit, said the problem wasn’t informing the plaintiffs; the problem was that black farmers didn’t trust the government to pay up. Though he said more black farmers should receive the $50,000 payments, Chestnut said, “I don’t know of another class-action where notification was more complete than in this one.” The chairman of the House Subcommittee on the Constitution, Rep. Steve Chabot, R-Ohio, plans to introduce legislation after the June hearing that would open the window for the 66,000 late filers, said Chabot’s spokesman, Todd Lindgren. “There just seems to be a lot of problems with this settlement,” Lindgren said. “If the government makes a settlement with black farmers, the legitimate cases need to be considered.” A spokesman for Rep. Spencer Bachus, R-Ala., who has worked with the black farmers on this matter, said the congressman would support Chabot’s efforts. Trying to avoid congressional action, Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, is working with the Agriculture Department to get the problem resolved internally, said Beth Levine, the senator’s spokeswoman. U.S. District Judge Paul Friedman ruled in January that the courts would not reopen the window, but left a loophole for Congress to take action. But the Agriculture Department has doubts about the number of plaintiffs eligible if the window is reopened, Loyd said. The 13,546 farmers who received the money were among more than 22,000 who applied for it, according to department documents. Add the 66,000 late filers, and there are about 88,000 farmers ostensibly eligible for the money, which is twice the number of black farmers the U.S. Census indicated were in the country in the early 1980s, around the start of the alleged period of discrimination, Loyd said. In the lawsuit, black farmers said the department discriminated against them in its loan programs between January 1981 and July 1997. Organizations like Burrell’s say the discrimination goes back to the early 1900s when 925,000 black farms occupied 16 million acres of land. There are only about 30,000 black farms today, Burrell said. Even in declaring the settlement reasonable, Friedman referenced the same numbers and wrote of the broken promise that black farmers would receive land and plow implements confiscated from the Confederacy after the Civil War. “Forty acres and a mule, the government broke that promise to African-American farmers,” Friedman wrote in his 1999 opinion. However, Loyd said the demise of the black farmer coincides with the demise of the farmer in general. The country has lost about 15 million farmers since the early 1900s, many of whom — black and white — migrated to urban areas to find employment over the last century. “Major demographic shifts are beyond USDA farm policy,” Loyd said.
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