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FORTY ACRES AND A MULE." JUDGE PAUL L. FRIEDMAN BEGAN HIS 1999 decision in Pigford v. Glickman, the successful class-action suit brought by African American farmers, with that familiar broken promise from the Civil War/Reconstruction era. The case concerned the sorry civil rights record of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and its denial of federal benefits to black farmers in the years after World War II and in particular the thirty-five years since the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The decline of black farmers after World War II contrasted dismally with their gains in the half century after emancipation when, demonstrating tremendous energy and sagacity, they negotiated a maze of racist law and custom and-during the harshest years of segregation, peonage, and violence-gained land and standing in southern communities. By 1910 African Americans held title to some sixteen million acres of farmland; by 1920 there were 925,000 black farms in the country. In the teens and twenties, however, the graph of rising ownership faltered and then plunged downward. Depression, mechanization, and discriminatory federal programs devoured black farmers, but their fate was eclipsed by press coverage of school segregation, voting rights, and public accommodations. They almost disappeared without a trace.1
Racism circulated through federal, state, and county USDA offices, and employees at every level bent civil rights laws and subverted government programs in order to punish black farmers. Judge Friedman admitted that the Pigford case would "not undo all that has been done" but insisted it was "a good first step." By 2000, of course, it was too late for hundreds of thousands of black fanners. When Judge Friedman handed down his decision only months before the end of the millennium, there were but eighteen thousand black farms left, and many of those were endangered. Underlying Friedman's decision was a disturbing contradiction: black farmers suffered their most debilitating discrimination during the civil rights era when laws supposedly protected them from racist policies. While white farmers also lost land, black farmers endured not only similar economic forces but also USDA racism. The increase in USDA programs had an inverse relationship to the number of farmers: the larger the department, the more programs it generated, and the more money it spent, the fewer farmers who survived.2
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