Photo credit: Natalie Baszile

White male supremacy became an essential element of the US Department of Agriculture’s default ideology, part of an operating system that dominated offices, dictated decisions, and often barred African Americans, women, Native Americans, Hispanics, and even poor whites from its agenda.⁴

The USDA was established during the Civil War, but its young white fingers did not touch rural issues generated by Emancipation or the transformation of labor relations that emerged after slavery, especially the crucial questions of labor control and ownership of crops. Its agenda grew, and its reach gradually expanded as the 1887 Hatch Act gave it dominion over state experiment stations, and two years later the USDA gained cabinet status. The Smith-Lever Act of 1914 created the Cooperative Extension Service that placed USDA employees in counties throughout the country at the same time that the Woodrow Wilson Administration segregated the civil service, basically sanctioning racism throughout the federal bureaucracy. Mistreatment of Black farmers degenerated into jocular racism epitomized by Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz’s demeaning racist joke in 1976, which the Christian Science Monitor viewed as “an obscene characterization of Black Americans.” Butz’s comfort in cracking a racist joke among USDA employees suggests that such demeaning humor often bounced off headquarters walls and was echoed in distant agency outposts.⁵ Overt racist statements such as Butz’s joke riddled the white male culture of the USDA, and discrimination typified departmental policy.

It had taken seventy years since its founding for the USDA to gain control of the countryside, culminating in New Deal farm programs that made rural America eligible and magnified opportunities to tilt programs to favor white male farmers and to push others either into agribusiness or out of farming. To execute acreage reduction, loan policies, and the extension service mission, the USDA compiled records on every farm in the country, heightening the possibility of favoring white male farmers who could afford mechanization at the expense of all others, in particular sharecroppers, African Americans, women, Hispanics, and Native Americans.

This revolutionary agenda occurred in the context of a long historical continuum. The emergence of a free labor system after Emancipation produced a body of new legislation as landlords insisted on labor laws to bind sharecroppers and tenants to annual contracts and lien laws that defined crop ownership. Litigation between owners and tenants in county and state courts created a complex body of decisions and precedents that varied from state to state and changed over time. Resourceful African American farmers negotiated this legal minefield, and by the first decade of the twentieth century held title to some sixteen million acres of land. By 1920, there were 925,000 African American farmers. While many of the nearly one million Black farmers were tenants or sharecroppers, the landowning class was substantial and had acquired farms during some of the worst years of discrimination and violence.⁶ Despite their numbers, Black farmers had no voice in shaping legislation and USDA policy, which were controlled by white male politicians and bureaucrats in Washington and by county USDA employees in the hinterland. With hard work and sagacity, African Americans acquired land, but holding on to it in the face of racist government policy proved increasingly difficult after the Great Depression.

In 1933, Congress created the Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA) to carry out numerous programs aimed at helping farmers control surplus commodities and raise prices. Acreage allotments—that is, how much land a farmer could plant to a commodity—became the AAA’s centerpiece; to execute allotments, county committees across the country relied on data collected on every farm. The Washington AAA office decided on a commodity’s national allotment and apportioned each state its share, and then each county was awarded acreage to be assigned to farmers based on previous production formulas. This program changed names over time but is most familiarly known as the Agricultural Stabilization and Conservation Service (ASCS).

The three county ASCS committeemen were elected by local farmers, prompting the USDA to boast that these committees were the epitome of grassroots democracy. In practice, though, farmers usually voted, if at all, for better-educated white men who could understand opaque USDA rules.⁷ While a few tenants may have been elected to these committees, no sharecroppers or African American farmers gained a seat, although they were sometimes allowed to vote since the only candidates were white men. A farmer disgruntled with a committee’s decisions could appeal to a county review committee composed of another three white men, or to Washington, or finally to a federal court. Few farmers had the resources to carry a fight very far, and county committee decisions were usually the last word. The white committees often favored friends, relatives, and office help and punished those who were not white men.

In the early years of the New Deal, the division of federal payments for acreage reduction created major issues between landlords and sharecroppers. In 1934, the USDA Office of the General Counsel produced a remarkable study of lien laws that revealed a legal niche that would award a portion of ASCS payments to sharecroppers, many of whom were African Americans. USDA leadership evidently considered the study a violation of its emerging agenda favoring landlords and fired the “liberals” who produced and supported the study.⁸ Allowing a landlord to keep the entire ASCS payment demonstrated not only USDA class bias but also its determination to subsidize landlords who could use federal payments to mechanize their operations and dismiss sharecroppers. USDA policy thus defined sharecroppers out of federal payments even though legally they were eligible. William R. Amberson, a professor at the University of Tennessee Medical School in Memphis in 1934, gave a succinct account of how AAA policies turned eastern Arkansas into a battlefield as landlords and sharecroppers struggled for supremacy. In his opinion, federal policies made a bad situation worse.⁹

Laws regarding liens and tenure had usually favored landlords, but before the New Deal, disputes had been interpreted by judges and tried before juries, a step removed from local politics, and precedents were recorded in county and state reports.¹⁰ A Mississippi case illuminates not only an example of the complexity of lien laws even as the USDA instituted county ASCS committees but also African American sharecroppers’ access to the courts. In 1933, tenant W. R. Jenkins rented Mrs. M. E. Jackson’s farm and agreed to pay her $1,000 standing rent and received from her an advance to finance his operation. Then Jenkins contracted with four African Americans and made sharecropper arrangements to furnish them and, after deducting their furnish, divide the crop proceeds equally. When Jenkins sold the crop, he turned all of the money over to Mrs. Jackson who, after settling with Jenkins, took the sharecroppers’ portion and applied it to Jenkins’s outstanding $2,300 debt to her. The sharecroppers brought a case that traveled to the Mississippi Supreme Court, which ruled the croppers had a lien on the crop for their labor “paramount to all liens and encumbrances of rights, of any kind created by, or against Jenkins, except the lien of Mrs. Jackson for her rent and supplies furnished to Jenkins.” The court ordered that the sharecroppers receive their share plus 6 percent interest.¹¹

Contracts became more complex when a USDA program allowed farmers to rent part of their land to the federal government. In Mississippi County, Arkansas, a case similar to Jackson v. Jefferson arose when, in 1935, a renter kept rental money that by contract should have gone to the landlord, who then seized the croppers’ share. The dozen sharecroppers sued and won back their share of the crop proceeds.¹² State courts were bound by lien laws that applied equally to landlords, tenants, and sharecroppers. Increasingly, ASCS committees decided such cases, thus removing disputes from courts where juries and precedent offered legal protection to all citizens. Industrious Black farmers took advantage of the USDA rental program. An East Baton Rouge official in Louisiana indignantly complained that a Black farmer rented land and “is sub-renting that same land to the United States Government, collecting the rent in cash and spending it as he pleases.” The USDA replied that any tenant, regardless of race, could accept and dispose of the rental money. His contract gave him control over the rented land.¹³

In 1956, the Soil Bank program opened another cash window for those who controlled cropland, whether they farmed it or not. Historian Linda Flowers, who grew up in North Carolina, wrote of a farmer who rented “every available acre a big landowner had for twenty-five hundred dollars” and the next day put it in the Soil Bank for $6,000 without ever even cranking his tractor. “If the decimation of tenantry was not the purpose of the Soil Bank,” Flowers judged, “it was certainly its effect.”¹⁴ Landowners could bank their most unproductive acres and intensively farm the remainder using machines and chemicals.

After ASCS committees intruded into disputes over allotments, tenure disagreements, and government programs, state and local court cases involving landlords, tenants, and sharecroppers, such as in the Jackson and Dulaney cases, decreased drastically. Disputes increasingly arose not over sharecroppers’ portions (they were becoming extinct) but over government benefits and acreage allotments, new elements introduced into farming that offered broad territory for disputes. By the 1950s, ever-shrinking allotments triggered fierce disputes within counties and states complicated by agricultural policy so abstruse that even judges puzzled over its logic.¹⁵ Most disputes, however, were settled administratively at the local, state, or federal level, where no records of precedents were kept, and only a Freedom of Information Act search could uncover decisions since few county ASCS committees archived decisions. Thus, decisions remained encrypted and unavailable to the public. Moving disputes from courts to committees was revolutionary but attracted little opposition.

The allotment stakes rose higher as agribusiness marched across the land and allotments not only became crucial to farm survival but were also commodified and could be rented, bought, and sold. By the 1960s, a tobacco farm took additional value of $7,000 per acre of allotment, while cotton and rice farms ran from $500 to $1,000.¹⁶ Thus, a government program intended to control surplus commodities attained monetary value, giving landowners a windfall. Distrust of local committees is documented in the approximately six thousand review proceedings in 1954 and fourteen thousand a year later.¹⁷ To combat being allotted into oblivion, some farmers suggested that those with small allotments should not be cut in the same proportion as those with more. Tobacco farmers, for example, had plows, mules, barns, slides, and packhouse space to handle their customary acreage, and reductions threatened their farming operation. The USDA replied that a program that preserved small acreages would be impossible to implement, a dubious claim given its data on farms. It was as if acreage policy targeted small farmers for extinction. In a larger sense, complex and opaque USDA programs controlled the countryside but were largely hidden inside complex legislation and cumbersome officiousness, puzzles that confounded even the most diligent critic.

In the early 1960s, as the USDA operating system grew increasingly into a tool for discrimination, Morton Grodzins, a University of Chicago political science professor, served on a committee that evaluated the ASCS. He submitted a minority report that concluded that rather than epitomizing grassroots democracy, as often claimed, the ASCS structure was actually authoritarian. Among other issues, he questioned the power of committees to rule on “quasi-judicial matters” that earlier had been settled in courts of law, and he faulted the USDA for not addressing this alarming grasp of power. Grodzins recommended that the ASCS committee system be abolished, but his minority report languished as the study’s majority supported the ASCS. A Columbia Law Review article in 1967 put the issue succinctly: the ASCS election procedure used by the USDA “permits to exist, and by its neglect of its duties encourages, a system which gives white southern farmers vast power over the economic well-being of their Negro neighbors.” By this time African American challenges for seats on ASCS committees had produced a catalog of authoritarian behavior. Yet neither Grodzins’s report nor the Columbia Law Review’s analysis gained traction, and the issue faded.¹⁸

A poor farmer’s only affordable recourse to AAA discrimination, unfortunately, lay in the USDA’s Washington bureaucracy, and in the mid-1930s, some four hundred letters per week poured into the USDA mailbox. In many cases, Washington bureaucrats simply sent the complaints back to the county, in some cases to the very people complained of, and this bureaucratic custom endured at least into the 1980s, when the USDA civil rights office either ignored, destroyed, or sent complaints back to the county office.¹⁹ In the first six years of the Reagan administration, the USDA civil rights office had eight different directors and a new reorganization plan each year. The USDA lagged behind nearly all government departments in the number of African American and female employees.²⁰

Several years after the New Deal began in 1933, a prominent southern citizen of a rural county counted twenty-seven federal agencies among people who, he observed, had formerly tolerated no federal intrusion.²¹ Some of these agencies helped stabilize rural life, but others contained seeds that would transform the countryside. The number and complexity of New Deal agencies visited on rural communities offered not only opportunities but also temptations for manipulation and pelf. By the end of World War II, the USDA had shed most programs intended to aid poor farmers, such as the Farm Security Administration and the Bureau of Agricultural Economics, and instead preached efficiency and favored larger farm operations.²² The USDA grew into agrigovernment, a Goliath composed of the headquarters bureaucracy, experiment stations, research facilities, regulation units, acreage policy divisions, land-grant universities, state agricultural offices, and county agricultural employees and committees. Its companion, agribusiness, included farming operations and the manufacture and distribution of farm commodities. These powerful conglomerates cooperated to reshape the country’s rural life by controlling policies, research, regulation, farm structure, and the products of science and technology. The personnel both of agrigovernment and agribusiness were overwhelmingly white men, certainly the leadership positions, and they cooperated to replace labor-intensive with capital-intensive farming operations. This revolution came about at the confluence of the Great Depression, World War II, the civil rights movement, and the USDA’s increasing support of science and technology, the firms that could provide it, and the farmers who could afford it. That it discriminated against Black, female, Native American, Hispanic, and poor white farmers was imbedded in the operating system.

Throughout this radical transformation, no African Americans were consulted about policy, there were no Black ASCS county committeemen, and the Negro Extension Service was segregated and demeaned. Capital-intensive agriculture crushed small farmers across the nation, but in the South the confluence of mechanization and the beginning of the civil rights movement proved especially brutal. In January 1956, Medgar Evers and Mildred Bond, two NAACP field workers, toured eight hundred miles of the Mississippi Delta and reported that mechanization was the engine accelerating desperation among sharecroppers and tenants. Landowners made sharecroppers into day laborers to avoid sharing any of the crop or federal money. “Various tales were related to the field workers how these families are being driven from plantation to plantation as each owner resorts to cutting down on the cost of labor by getting cotton picking machines, planters, etc.”²³ The USDA often blamed Black farmers for being inefficient, for having acreages too small to utilize large machines, and for being inept, and after blaming the victim set Black farmers adrift to sink or swim.

After World War II, the USDA moved belligerently toward support of capital-intensive agriculture and contemptuously abandoned concern for small farmers whose affection for annual routines often did not promise wealth but did provide satisfaction. Tilling the soil meant observing seasons and understanding when to plant and cultivate and then harvest and sell the crop. Many African American farmers worked a modest acreage and did not expect great wealth, but they did hope to plant each year. For these small farmers, the USDA emphasis on efficiency, machines, and chemicals challenged their resources. Even a farmer with a small acreage needed seeds, fertilizer, and pesticides and even hoped for a tractor. Land-grant schools failed to study how to bring small farmers along in this transformation. While ASCS committees reduced acreage in efforts to control surplus commodities, experiment stations and land-grant universities conducted research to increase production that was often sponsored by corporations that specified topics and wished-for research results.

During the crucial years of the Eisenhower administration, the USDA increased pressure on African Americans. After the Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954, Black farmers who belonged to the NAACP, registered to vote, or sent their children to white schools were denied federal support and harassed by local whites. The more African Americans insisted on equal rights, the more ruthless the white response. USDA leadership did nothing to protect activist Black farmers from the racist decisions of county ASCS committees. Tellingly, former Secretary of Agriculture Ezra Taft Benson did not even mention African Americans in his 1962 autobiography, Cross Fire.

The US Commission on Civil Rights report in 1965, Equal Opportunity in Farm Programs: An Appraisal of Services Rendered by Agencies of the United States Department of Agriculture, found discrimination throughout the USDA, and a follow-up report in 1982 did not remark on notable progress. The 1965 study observed that, except for some custodial positions in ASCS offices, “there were no Negroes employed in professional, clerical, or technical positions in the South, either in State or county positions.”²⁴

Secretary of Agriculture Orville Freeman, responding to the commission’s report, in 1965 issued a memorandum demanding equal treatment for African American farmers. He hired William M. Seabron, an African American who had held a leadership position in the Urban League before joining the USDA, as his assistant for civil rights. Freeman also appointed several African American farmers to state ASCS committees and established the Citizens Advisory Committee on Civil Rights. Seabron was buried in the white bureaucracy with hardly any staff, reported to an unsympathetic assistant secretary, and liaised with twenty civil rights offices throughout the country that may or may not have supported equal rights. His decisions were sometimes reversed, ignored, or contested. Seabron’s office files in the National Archives catalog how racist bureaucrats not only undermined civil rights but also concurred with discriminatory decisions detrimental to Black farmers. Seabron battled almost alone against discrimination. When Republicans came to power under Richard Nixon, USDA bureaucrats cynically blamed Seabron for not achieving more for civil rights. Even as landmark civil rights legislation made its way through Congress and the movement gained headlines, discrimination persisted throughout the USDA bureaucracy, and the press mostly ignored the alarming demise of Black farmers. Secretary Freeman personified good intentions that blanched when confronted with deeply imbedded racism.

Despite commission reports, studies by concerned organizations, and occasional newspaper articles chronicling discrimination, few people learned about or cared about what happened to Black farmers and, in a larger sense, to rural America. Farmers did not fare well in the age of civil rights activism. Southern white farm ownership in that decade fell from 515,283 to 410,646, and white tenants from 144,773 to 55,650, while Black owners declined from 74,132 to 45,428, with an alarming decline of Black tenants from 132,011 to 16,113.²⁵ Whatever else the Great Society achieved, its programs did not favor African American farmers. Rural life no longer held the charm it once did—except in nostalgic visions of white yeomen farmers or idyllic images of well-kept farmhouses and vast fields. The USDA had almost stealthily grown into a huge and needlessly complex bureaucracy that served and rewarded conflicting interests and courted a vast constituency covering congressional districts that demanded funding for experiment stations and land-grant school projects. Its operating system had grown so complex that only specialists could decipher it, all the better to cloak racism, and bureaucrats utilized a vocabulary that pledged equal rights while carrying out discrimination.

By the end of the Eisenhower administration, the rural table had been set to serve the white male elite and to remove farmers deemed small and inefficient, including an initiative to remove as many remaining Black farmers as possible. That this purge occurred during the civil rights movement with scant public interest or awareness is an example both of how invisible USDA policy had become, especially what went on in localities run by a white male elite, and the public’s disinterest in the issues of Black farmers. Discrimination had become regularized to the extent that it no longer registered as remarkable. USDA headquarters ignored racist behavior in states and counties and seldom issued a discouraging word of protest. Lacking oversight, county committees assumed enormous power to shape the development of capital-intensive agriculture. These three thousand committees allotted acreage, administered price support programs and conservation grants, and disbursed an enormous sum of federal dollars.²⁶

The 1965 commission report was based on extensive interviews throughout the South, and the transcripts that survive in the National Archives provide a damning view of USDA perfidy. Interviewers talked with Black extension workers, county ASCS committeemen, FHA employees, farmers, and others involved with agriculture. The interviews barely mentioned the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) or organizations involved in voter registration and other civil rights initiatives, but as the sun set on Freedom Summer in 1964, civil rights activists focused on federal programs that at least theoretically guaranteed a just distribution of federal funds. The challenges in Mississippi in 1964, and in Georgia, Louisiana, Arkansas, and Alabama in the following years, alarmed white ASCS leaders and prompted them cynically to encourage violence, intimidation, fraud, and purposeful ineptness to divert Black voters.²⁷ The ASCS establishment stooped to any tactic to protect the federal largesse from African Americans.

Bitterly disappointed by the Democratic National Convention’s refusal to seat the entire Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) delegation, the civil rights groups that had worked under the umbrella of the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO) evaluated their work in the autumn after Freedom Summer. COFO workers, many of them in their late teens and veterans of SNCC projects, examined the ASCS structure and hastily organized to challenge ASCS committee seats in twenty-one Mississippi counties, including Holmes County. There, eight hundred Black farmers owned their land, many of them taking advantage of a Farm Security Administration project that divided some nine thousand acres into 106 farms available to Black farmers. SNCC canvassers were well received by these independent farmers, who shared their homes and stories of resistance to white chicanery, and there were promising signs of support in other counties. Worried ASCS bureaucrats began a campaign of disinformation or no information that included failing to send notification letters to Black farmers or directing them to the wrong polling place. More violent opponents to Black voting shot into houses.

The 1964 Mississippi ASCS elections were held primarily in rural stores or buildings owned by whites, an uncomfortable setting for Black farmers who understood the economic power not only of the store owners but also of planters who menacingly stood around as votes were cast and counted. Penny Patch, an eighteen-year-old white SNCC veteran, and a young Black woman observed voting in a small country store in Panola County. “It was terrifying to be so totally isolated in that little store surrounded by people who hated us,” she recalled. Some white teenagers threw a live snake at their feet that slithered under the wood stove. “We were young, we were living in wartime conditions,” she recalled. Poll watchers at other sites were ordered to leave, and some were arrested.²⁸ ASCS offices unconvincingly distanced themselves from intimidation and arrests by sheriffs.

COFO workers were adept at reporting abuses. William H. Forsyth Jr. wrote biting letters of complaint to, among others, USDA Secretary Orville Freeman, the USDA inspector general, the US Commission on Civil Rights, and local ASCS officials, chastising the ASCS for not holding reelections in all Madison County communities, instead of just two. Washington ASCS leaders spent some time drafting an evasive reply. “Forsyth, I understand, is a 17-year-old boy and is getting mail to & from almost everybody,” an outraged official wrote in the margin to a draft, which did nothing to answer Forsyth’s erudite criticisms.²⁹ Frustrated ASCS leaders at the state and county levels denied improprieties and absurdly accused COFO workers of breaking rules. ASCS officials in Washington, DC, Mississippi, and contested counties washed their hands of any blame. Despite ASCS efforts, fourteen African Americans won seats on six community committees, but none were elected to the powerful county committees.

As the reaction to Forsyth’s letter indicated, white USDA leaders not only lacked sympathy with the passion for equal rights that flowed from the 1960 Greensboro sit-ins but also denigrated young African American civil rights activists whom one USDA leader labeled “the younger, more radical elements of the Civil Rights movement.” It was easier to placate the NAACP or the US Commission on Civil Rights, so USDA leaders sought to discredit young COFO workers to prevent their “ridiculous statements,” which no doubt included challenging ASCS elections.³⁰

As ASCS elections approached in 1965, SNCC, the Congress of Racial Equality, and the National Sharecroppers Fund explored ASCS voting regulations, eager again to challenge all-white county committees in Mississippi, Louisiana, Georgia, Arkansas, Tennessee, and Alabama. Even as civil rights workers invented imaginative diagrams that unlettered Black farmers could understand, ASCS officials marshaled illegal ways to prevent Black farmers from voting. What comes across most strongly in challenges both in 1965 and 1966 is the competence of articulate civil rights workers and the bumbling and lying incompetence of ASCS officials who devised barriers to Black voters in a desperate effort to maintain control of the substantial federal funds that went through the county committees. Fighting white power ultimately exhausted the ardor of many civil rights workers, and after 1966, challenges to ASCS dwindled.

In December 1966, a community development worker shared his concerns with a Mississippi National Sharecroppers Fund worker. “Tenants, sharecroppers, and renters are getting tossed off the land right and left,” he warned. Mechanization had a major impact on farming, he wrote, “but the immediate reason for throwing the people off the land is their increasing activity and interest in sharing in federal programs they’re entitled to.” In a Hinds County ASCS election, Blacks won all five contested seats, making “the local whites pretty mad.” Invigorated Black farmers were challenging furnishing merchants and demanding receipts and refusing to sign away their share of USDA payments, and they were met with increasing white hostility. He concluded that “things are going to hell in a handbasket.”³¹ A litany emerged of African Americans contesting federal programs, local whites resisting, and state and national USDA leaders fecklessly taking no action. African Americans were seldom invited to sit in on meetings that discussed reform and were often demeaned or ignored when they did attend. In three chapters of my book Dispossession, I discussed this battle over federal programs, which vividly documented USDA racism.³²

One of the USDA’s historic duties was keeping farmers up-to-date with the latest research on better farming methods generated by experiment stations and land-grant universities. In 1892, long before any federal program, Booker T. Washington initiated the Tuskegee Negro Conference and later added farmers’ institutes, courses in agriculture, a farm newspaper, and leaflets. Around the turn of the twentieth century, demonstrations to teach farmers to combat the boll weevil infestation gained popularity, and as the idea spread, Black farmers participated. Tuskegee’s Thomas M. Campbell became not only the first African American extension agent but also a legend for his work among Black farmers.³³ White land-grant schools established during the Civil War not only taught horticulture but also, after the Smith-Lever Act of 1914, administered the federal Cooperative Extension Service that spread across the country. Since land-grant schools were segregated, Congress in 1890 established Black land-grant schools, the so-called 1890 schools, that housed Black agents who were closely supervised by whites. The Negro Extension Service was underfunded, like the 1890 land-grant schools, but despite discrimination Black male and female agents did heroic work among Black farmers.³⁴ Experiment stations and land-grant schools through the extension service provided information to farmers to improve husbandry, but the Negro Extension Service was the last link in this chain and shared neither adequate funding, personnel, nor information.

As I have observed in earlier work, the Cooperative Extension Service resembled an octopus that from Washington wound its tentacles around land-grant schools and county extension personnel. Because its budget contained a mix of federal, state, and county funds, it used its vague status both to invade all levels of government and, when challenged, to shield itself from responsibility. White male county agents and female home demonstration agents distributed information from experiment stations and land-grant schools intended to improve husbandry and homemaking. Male and female agents of the Negro Extension Service worked under the supervision of white county agents, were paid substantially less, were often housed in shabby offices with sparse furniture and second-hand office machines, and were demeaned by the white county staff. In 1948, for example, John B. Jordan, the Black agent in Evergreen, Alabama, reported to the state Negro Extension Service leader that he paid office rent and for electricity, fuel, water, and telephone out of his own pocket. The annual expenses came to $360 a year. “I sweep and clean the office myself,” he wrote.³⁵ USDA headquarters in Washington and white land-grant schools ignored such discriminatory treatment. Numerous articles and books document not only discriminatory treatment but also the hard work and accomplishments of Black men and women in the Negro Extension Service.

In a 1951 article complaining that Black youngsters were excluded from national 4-H events, such as the National 4-H Congress and the International Youth Exchange, and had never won a national 4-H scholarship, Revella Clay cited the difference in Black and white extension agents’ annual salaries. Nationally, whites averaged $4,904 and Blacks $3,138, and the difference was even more stark in Alabama (where whites were paid $5,331 and Blacks $2,872 per year) and in Arkansas (whites, $4,478, and Blacks, $2,855). The 46,000 African American 4-H members were segregated from the 330,000 white members.³⁶ As the civil rights movement arrived, pressure increased to integrate camps and events, and whites fought every effort to grant equal access.

As the civil rights movement gained support in the 1960s, pressure increased to integrate the extension service. It turned out to be a one-way street, for in every case African American extension staffs were transferred from Black to white land-grant schools where they were usually ignored and given no responsibilities, as if their former work were negligible. The intent, of course, was to eliminate African American executives and agents and preserve white control.

When the order came down to integrate the Alabama extension service, Negro Extension Service executives—including office head Bailey Hill, editor Willie Strain, and head of girls’ 4-H Bertha M. Jones—moved from Tuskegee University to Auburn University. Willie Strain had risen from a county agent to edit The Negro Farmer, a newspaper that reported on farming, 4-H activities, general news, and advice, and he also worked with agents on improving farming methods and publicity. Both Bailey Hill and Bertha Jones were assigned little work at Auburn, and Strain’s supervisor saw no need to continue The Negro Farmer, as if Black farmers no longer needed news and advice. Given nothing to do, Strain arrived at his office each morning and was shunned as whites turned their backs. He would quickly leave his office for the library.

Restless, he went back to graduate school at the University of Wisconsin, but when he returned he was passed over for promotion to a job for which he was highly qualified. He sued. Auburn investigated every aspect of Strain’s career, attempting in vain to undermine his credibility. The case, Strain v. Philpot, expanded to include Auburn’s efforts to evade integration throughout the state’s extension service. After Judge Frank M. Johnson had digested the depositions, hearings, records, and five briefs, he saw no need for a jury trial and wrote a decision castigating Auburn’s evasions and calling for reform across the state.³⁷ Alabama’s efforts at manipulation were replicated throughout the South as civil rights programs were twisted to allow white control, so similar cases were brought throughout the region as white land-grant schools tried desperately to defeat equal rights. Having Black female agents conduct sessions that included white women became extremely contentious, as did having Black agents in charge of white women in county offices.³⁸ The Strain case demonstrates the unintended consequences of integration; school integration followed a similar path when Black teachers were often dismissed and Black schools closed. As Greta de Jong has eloquently observed, whites ruthlessly contested government programs intended to benefit African Americans.³⁹

In 1946, the Farmers Home Administration (FHA, later FmHA) was founded almost as if to atone for the Farm Security Administration programs that sometimes aided poor farmers but had fallen from the grace of agribusiness and politicians who no longer supported its programs. Although still tasked with providing last resort loans to poorer farmers, the FHA in the South entrapped Black farmers with unnecessarily large loans, cleaned them out (sold their possessions) when they could not pay off the loans, misinformed them of loan programs, refused to explain complex application forms, and treated them rudely at county offices.

The National Sharecropper Fund Papers in Detroit and William Seabron’s files at the National Archives bulge with documentation of FHA racism, and US Commission on Civil Rights investigators in 1964 uncovered discriminatory FHA behavior throughout the South. County FHA supervisors were appointed, not elected, and they reported to area supervisors who served under a state FHA director. Eighty African Americans worked for the FHA in the South, serving Black farmers from segregated offices; they were barred from FHA committee meetings, and only two served on state advisory committees. No matter how egregious the behavior of FHA county supervisors, they were protected by their white superiors.

The seasonal routine for farmers began with spring planting, and they customarily borrowed enough money to buy seeds, fertilizer, and pesticides for the crop year and paid off the loan when they marketed their crop. When poor farmers could borrow from credit merchants or banks, they dealt with local people who knew them and could judge their competence without intrusive oversight. Farmers who had no other credit options applied to the FHA and endured an intrusive eligibility test to determine if they were creditworthy. If approved, they signed documents indicating interest rate, the FHA’s right to accelerate the loan, a description of the property backing the loan, and a financial plan. Unlettered farmers faced with sheaves of forms depended on FHA office staff to explain loan programs and help with filling out forms, but offices were often run by petty and racist men and abetted by a staff of women who were often impolite and unhelpful to Blacks. The FHA increasingly failed to fulfill its intended role, for state and county offices twisted the loan programs to favor larger farms and ultimately to fund segregated community projects. When it came to African American farmers, FHA officials became as arbitrary, capricious, and insulting as the meanest planters and supply merchants. They relished refusing credit to deserving farmers, as the 1952 case of Alabama farmer Joe Henry Thomas demonstrated. Thomas owned an eighty-five-acre farm, rented other land, and tended nine acres of cotton. He owned a pickup and livestock, and his wife did public work. They hoped to build a modern house and consolidate their debts with an FHA loan. The county supervisor turned down the loan request without even visiting the Thomas farm.⁴⁰

The voting rights initiative in Tennessee’s Haywood and Fayette Counties in 1960 vividly illustrated the intersection of civil rights, mechanization, and FHA duplicity. When sharecroppers and tenants attempted to register to vote, many were evicted and replaced with machines and chemicals. The NAACP and other groups supported the evicted farmers, and the US Justice Department prevented some evictions, but the arrival of machines and of the civil rights movement created a grave crisis. A Memphis attorney, James Franklin Estes, complained of another issue: credit. His office had received complaints from more than five hundred Black landowners, tenants, and sharecroppers complaining that those who attempted to register “will not receive any form of credit for crop planting, cotton producing or other purposes as a form of reprisal.” Estes’s letter was addressed to President Dwight D. Eisenhower, and it was bounced to the FHA, which fretted over a reply before declaring there was no discrimination. There were no keys on FSA typewriters that could spell out “discrimination,” no matter what the evidence.⁴¹ The NAACP, the National Sharecroppers Fund, and other organizations supported the evicted farmers but could not finance their farming or block oncoming machines and chemicals.

A widespread FHA tactic granted Black farmers large loans that would prove difficult to pay off. In the spring of 1961, for example, Georgia county FHA supervisor Carl Grant persuaded Fred Amica to take out a larger loan than usual. Amica had a good crop year and was paying off the loan when Grant arrived at his farm with a judgment against the unpaid balance and removed Amica’s farm equipment, including a tractor that he had nearly paid off. When the sale of Amica’s property did not satisfy the full amount of the loan, Grant garnished the future cotton crop and spread the word that Amica had not paid off his FHA loan, ruining his credit.⁴²

Persuading a Black farmer to take on more debt and seizing property for the unpaid balance became a common practice among FHA supervisors. It resembled the landlord/credit merchant practice of “cleaning out” farmers each season that Booker T. Washington had complained of at the turn of the twentieth century. FHA supervisors also lied to Black farmers, promising them a loan and then waiting until the farmer became indebted for seeds and fertilizer to announce that the loan did not come through, leaving the farmer in debt and unable to finish his crop. Other supervisors told farmers that the loan they hoped to apply for did not exist. Office staffers often treated Black applicants with contempt, telling them to come back later or sending them home with unexplained forms. Such sleazy and, indeed, unethical behavior brought no reprimands from Washington.

In 1962, South Carolina attorney Ira Kaye observed that a number of Black farmers were facing failure with debts so large that even a good harvest would not pay them off. These Sumter County farmers applied for FHA loans in a “very dinky, dingy office,” Kaye reported, that “was no less than a national disgrace.” That was bad enough, but as long as the FHA supervisor and committee were all white men and the ASCS committee continued to cut tobacco and cotton allotments, these farmers were doomed. Investigations throughout South Carolina found poor farmers on the verge of extinction, unable to purchase expensive machines and chemicals or to access funds to farm even on a modest scale.⁴³

The US Commission on Civil Rights carefully scrutinized FHA employment of African Americans throughout the South and found only two on state advisory committees, a few serving as alternate county committeemen, and twenty assistant county supervisors who worked with Black farmers. Commission investigators talked both with white FHA supervisors and African American assistant supervisors. T. T. Williams interviewed assistant county supervisor John S. Currie, a 1938 graduate of Tuskegee Institute, who handled cases for Black farmers in Hinds and Rankin Counties, Mississippi, from his dingy office across the hall from the white FHA office. Currie’s office had no telephone, but he could obtain supplies from across the hall, although he had to walk two blocks to a federal building to use a restroom. Many of the Black farmers, he explained, sought only small operating loans, knowing that their acreages could not utilize large machinery and that raising beef cattle on their small farms was impossible.⁴⁴

The FHA operated with malevolent efficiency to track Black farmers, carefully monitoring and punishing any contact with civil rights activists. An Alabama farmer who owned eighty acres and rented an additional sixty-nine secured $2,600 to plant twenty-eight acres of peanuts. When the white man he contracted with to dig his peanuts discovered he was active in civil rights, he removed his machinery, and the FHA office refused the farmer a loan to hire help to dig the crop. The USDA’s William Seabron intervened and requested an inspector general investigation of the Barbour County FHA office, but that did nothing for the farmer, who had lost twelve tons of peanuts.⁴⁵ When an Alabama farmer asked the FHA supervisor about a $2,500 loan to improve his house, he was told he must get recommendations from three white people, an impossible request since the farmer was active in civil rights.⁴⁶

John D. Pattillo, the FHA supervisor in Greene County, Alabama, along with his staff, personified coarse, insulting, dismissive, and unhelpful bureaucrats. Using coarse language, he misinformed Black farmers that there was no such thing as an economic opportunity loan, suggesting it was “something they heard about in the jungle.” He was duplicitous when ordered to appoint a Black alternate committeeman, misleading him about his responsibilities. FHA office help treated Black applicants rudely, often sending them away without forms or threatening that even if they qualified, they would not get loans. A Black pastor argued that Pattillo’s actions were racist and that he should be fired. In 1966, Pattillo was transferred out of Greene County but not disciplined.⁴⁷

Even as the FHA denied loans or used other tactics to ruin Black farmers, it supported loans that would transform rural land into golf courses, shooting ranges, and tourist attractions solely for the use of whites.⁴⁸ Even as Congress passed the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act and the federal government, at least in theory, advocated equal rights, USDA leadership mouthed support for equal rights while turning on African Americans with vengeance.

When one looks through the papers of the US Commission on Civil Rights, the National Sharecroppers Fund, the Records of the Secretary of Agriculture, the papers of the NAACP, SNCC papers, and other collections, USDA racism emerges as a major theme. During the age of the Civil Rights Movement, roughly from 1954 to 1980, the USDA announced that it carried out programs that ensured equal rights, but instead its racism sharpened until, by the turn of the twenty-first century, there were but eighteen thousand Black farmers left of the nearly one million three-quarters of a century earlier. This was not an accident but rather the result of a USDA operating system that threatened not only Black farmers but small white farmers and women, Native Americans, and Hispanics.⁴⁹

Over the years since the 1950s, nearly every secretary of agriculture has offered platitudes about improving the department’s civil rights record, but none discovered a tool that could excavate racism either in Washington or throughout the country. Racism hid behind a vocabulary of euphemisms and compliance, but during the Reagan administration, policies became so overtly racist that they created documentation that ultimately informed the Pigford v. Glickman decision in 1999 and successful suits by women, Indians, and Hispanics. Despite these expensive settlements, nonwhite and female farmers still complain of USDA discrimination.

As I concluded in Dispossession, “The tracks of discrimination led from local committees and agriculture offices to state offices, to underfunded Black land-grant schools, to flush white land-grant schools, to experiment stations, and on to Washington to disappear into the trackless bureaucratic wilderness where untamed prejudice flourished and staff alienated from the land punished the clientele they were hired to help.”⁵⁰

10.

The Last Plantation: The USDA’s Racist Operating System