An African American Represents Alabama During Reconstruction: Fill & Download for Free

Edit: If you got here via a link, then you should know the part of this answer with the statistics is in part four, entitled:"4. Ignorance of real systemic present-day racism."------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Some people think that White racism against Blacks only happens in black and white photographs.But of course, nothing could be further from the truth.You asked a legitimate question, and you deserve a legitimate answer. I will do my best to help.(Note: I know you ask about "minorities" in general, and the situation is different for different minorities. I answer your question only for Black Americans because it seems to be the most egregious, to have the longest history, and to have the most research.)"Individualism." We Americans believe that people are libel for our own actions. We have individual rights and individual responsibilities, thus we have individual blame. So the argument goes like this:I did not commit those acts of racism, you are not a direct victim of those acts of racism, thus the history doesn't really matter.You and I know that this is ridiculous and heinous. But I think this is the most dominant argument out there in people's minds.Ignorance of the history of slavery. Aka "actually slavery wasn't so bad."Now you and I know that slavery in the Western Hemisphere was probably the worst systematic atrocity of history by one group against another group given the American value of freedom and quotes like Patrick Henry's "Give me liberty or give me death." That is to say, if we believe freedom is the most important, essential right one can have, even higher than life itself (according to Patrick Henry at least), then the 200+ years (that's more than 10 generations) of White-enforced Black slavery good argument for being the worst thing a people ever did to another people in all history.So, who says "actually slavery wasn't so bad"?This professor who gets to keep his job.As well as many conservatives.The argument basically goes like this:Free association is a very important aspect of liberty. It is crucial. Indeed, its lack was the major problem with slavery. The slaves could not quit. They were forced to 'associate' with their masters when they would have vastly preferred not to do so. Otherwise, slavery wasn't so bad. You could pick cotton, sing songs, be fed nice gruel, etc. The only real problem was that this relationship was compulsory.That's the extreme form of the argument. More people with an ignorance of the history of slavery would say, that basically slaves got room and board, which is better than many people who live on the street today. This totally ignores basically all history on the subject. You just need to watch 12 Years A Slave to see the ridiculous extent of ignorance such reasoning requires.Ignorance of the history of post-slavery racism.For those of you who don't know if you wanted to vote as a non-white person in the Jim Crow South, literacy tests were no fun. That is to say they were impossible. And of course, there were many, many other barrier to voting as a non-white person.But that wasn't even near to the biggest problem as an African American in post-civil-war-pre-civil-rights America. Obviously the biggest problem was lynching and other racially motivated killing like Emmett Till. Heck, I'm not even sure we would even have Emmett Till in the history books if it had happened 10 or 20 years earlier.Much of what we as a culture generally remember about the suffering Whites inflicted upon Blacks in history comes post-WWII. But consider this cartoon:That was in the Tuscaloosa, Alabama newspaper in 1968. It's a threat against "carpetbaggers" who came during reconstruction. If the newspaper had this much gall to threaten KKK lynchings against white migrants from the North during Reconstruction, do you really think they would think twice about killing a Black person? A Black family? Terrorizing a Black community?People don't understand this, and thus we have a problem.Ignorance of real systemic present-day racism.Racism still exists. In fact, if you are white and American, then you are probably racist. Or at least I think the argument is pretty compelling that you are.Now I realized that I've probably pissed a lot of people off who are reading this. If you've gotten this far then you are definitely going to need some definitions.Racism: Any predisposition that causes treatment of a historically oppressed racial minority person worse than you would another person simply because of that person's race and/or characteristics of that person's "racial culture." This can be intentional or unintentional; this can be with the knowledge or without the knowledge of the racism of this treatment.Or, to put this another way:I realize that you will not find this specific word-for-word definition in Webster, so if you must then please leave a comment, and we can hash out what the best, most proper definition of racism is for the purposes of this argument. I am not opposed to retroactively changing answers if it seems that they are unhelpful or incorrect.Furthermore, I realize that with a definition this broad it makes me a holder of racist predispositions. That is to say, with this definition, I am a racist. It's a fact. I'm not happy about it, but it is a fact. So, please understand this context before I go forward.EDIT: After waiting for quite a long time and linking to this answer countless times someone here finally challenged me on this definition with a fair complaint. Thus, I want to qualify this definition.Consider this a definition of racism that really, really matters. When racism is the natural ideological progression and inheritance of a long history of unjust disadvantage, it is a different animal than simple racial prejudice.Thus, I entertain the existence of racism against white people in America, but not the idea that it is somehow comparable with racism against Black Americans or other historically oppressed racial minorities.Now here are some examples of clear present-day systemic racism that cannot simply be explained away:In the job market:Study: Black man and white felon – same chances for hirewhites with a felony conviction fared just as well, if not better, than a black applicant with a clean background.That's right. The data from this study showed that it is slightly better to be a white applicant with a felony conviction on your resume than it is to be a Black applicant with a clean record.In a separate study, Are Emily and Greg More Employable than Lakisha and Jamal? A Field Experiment on Labor Market Discrimination, researchers find similar conclusion.The results show significant discrimination against African-American names: White names receive 50 percent more callbacks for interviews.Thus, it is no wonder thatJust last year, the Census revealed that whites had about 22 times the wealth of African-Americans ... and those numbers only got worse over the last five years during the Great Recession.(from What Do We Do About America's Racial Wealth Gap?)That's systemic racism.In the justice system:Marijuana Arrests Four Times as Likely for BlacksBlack Americans were nearly four times as likely as whites to be arrested on charges of marijuana possession in 2010, even though the two groups used the drug at similar rates, according to new federal data.That's right. If you are Black and smoke marijuana, you are four times as likely to be arrested than if you are white and smoke marijuana.There are a lot of other examples you can find all over the web. I will quote a few from these two articles:Fourteen Examples of Systemic Racism in the US Criminal Justice System11 Facts About Racial DiscriminationThe police stop blacks and Latinos at rates that are much higher than whites. ... In a California study, the ACLU found blacks are three times more likely to be stopped than whites.The U.S. Sentencing Commission reported in March 2010 that in the federal system black offenders receive sentences that are 10% longer than white offenders for the same crimes.The US Bureau of Justice Statistics concludes that the chance of a black male born in 2001 of going to jail is 32% or 1 in three. Latino males have a 17% chance and white males have a 6% chance. Thus black boys are five times and Latino boys nearly three times as likely as white boys to go to jail.That's systemic racism.In the media:Racism in the United Statesin a study done by the Entman-Rojecki Index of Race and Media, 89% of Black women in movies are shown swearing and acting in offensive behavior while only 17% of White women are portrayed in this manner.If you don't see how this is a problem then consider this from Representations of Black People in Film:Stereotypes are problematic not simply because they are false, but because they often stand in for real knowledge and actual life experience. When stereotypes are highly visible and persistently exposed in the media, they tend to be adopted by individuals who do not come into contact with African Americans frequently.Here is another example from this article:Black directors only make up four percent of the Directors Guild of America and of the 839 writers employed on prime-time television dramas and comedies, only 6.6% were black, with 44 out of the 55 employed at UPN or WB.Obviously, this example is a little old, but 1999 obviously wasn't that long ago.Now consider this from Wikipedia's Representation of African Americans in media:A report in 2007 showed that blacks, Latinos, Asians, and Native Americans made up only 13.65% of American newsrooms.And from The Lack of African Americans in Newspaper and Television:African Americans were four times more likely than Whites to have their mug shot shown on the news. Blacks were twice as likely as Whites to be shown being physically restrained by the police in a local television report.From Mass Media and Racism:[Consider] the media portrayal of the Los Angeles riot in 1992. What we witnessed in Los Angeles was the consequence of a lethal linkage of economic decline, cultural decay, and political lethargy in American life.Race was the visible catalyst, not the underlying cause, as media portrayed it to be. The portrayal of this individual event encouraged the perception that the black community was solely responsible for the riots and disturbances. According to reports, of those arrested, only 36% were black and of those arrested, more than a third had full-time jobs and most had no political affiliation. Some 60% of the rioters and looters were made up of Hispanics and whites. Yet the media did not report this underlying fact. The media portrayal of this event along with other race riots has again inflicted negative charges and scorn on black awareness. Race riots in Miami in 1980 were similar to the later Los Angeles riots. Here the media also refused to search for the underlying cause behind the protest choosing instead only to depict African-American males engaged in violence and destruction.That's systemic racism.In the housing market:For People Of Color, A Housing Market Partially Hidden From ViewBlack renters learned about 11 percent fewer rental units, and black homebuyers were shown about a fifth fewer homes.That's clearly discrimination against Blacks.That's systemic racism.In people's minds:AP poll: U.S. majority have prejudice against blacksRacial attitudes have not improved in the four years since the United States elected its first black president, an Associated Press poll finds, as a slight majority of Americans now express prejudice toward blacks whether they recognize those feelings or not.Yup. Prejudice against Black Americans has increased. Recently.(This statistic added 5-25-14) Another fascinating and disturbing example of racism in America is Study examines racial bias at crosswalks:The study – the first examining the effects of race on pedestrian crossing experiences – found that black pedestrians were passed by twice as many cars and waited nearly a third longer to cross than white pedestrians.The reason they did this study is becauseMinorities are disproportionately represented among pedestrian fatalities in the United States. The Center for Disease Control reported in 2013 that in the first decade of this century, the fatality rates for black and Hispanic men were twice as high as they were for white men.Researchers ... hypothesized that if minority pedestrians experience more delay at crosswalks, they might take greater risks when crossing – risks that could contribute to the disparate fatality rates.This is yet another example of how a system of racism makes the lives of Black Americans needlessly harder--and even sometimes shorter--than the lives of white people.Now for this part of my argument is more delicate. I will show you some statistics and then argue that these are only possible if racism is very prevalent in society.From The Lack of African Americans in Newspaper and Television:The Discovery Channel conducted an experiment with children consisting of two identical pictures. In one photograph, two Whites were standing on stairs, one above the other. On the other photograph was the same scenario, however in this instance, a Black child was standing higher on the stairs than his White counterpart was.The children surveyed said the White child looked like he was helping the other child up the stairs, but the Black child was pushing the White child down the stairs. In this experiment, parents of the children surveyed were unaware of how their child learned such a stereotype.Children are not born with racism, the inherit it. It doesn't matter where they inherit it from in order for it to be strong evidence of systemic racism.Some people may consider this the weakest part of my argument, but hear me out: The Uncomfortable Racial Preferences Revealed by Online Dating data showsUsers in search of someone for a date or for sex flip through profiles of other users and, for each one, click either "yes" (I like what I see) or "skip" (show me the next profile). When the answer is "yes," the other user is notified and has the opportunity to respond....both black men and black women got the lowest response rates for their respective genders.This means that in our culture people of all races it seems that people prefer not to date someone who is Black.Sexual attraction to one race over another for an individual may be considered just simply "the way it is," but when looked at in aggregate like this, that answer is just not good enough. Clearly, the reason Blacks receive less attraction is because our culture has decided that they are less desirable than other races. That seems like pretty strong evidence for systematic racism.And now, I bring you my least favorite data I perhaps have ever come across. A deeply saddening statistic that I hope I accidentally forget someday from Whites Believe They Are Victims of Racism More Often Than Blackswhites believe that anti-white racism has increased and is now a bigger problem than anti-black racism.When there is clearly so much racism in society against Black Americans today, it is deeply disturbing that whites think that racism against whites is a bigger problem that racism against Black Americans.Such an idea cannot be a coincidence and must be a result of the culture and the media. It must be a result of the system.That's systemic racism.So to answer your question white people gloss over segregation because they want to support their preconceived idea that before minority Americans and white Americans were sort of unequal, but today minority Americans and white Americans are equal, except for situations of racism against whites.Or to put it another way, white people ignore and stay ignorant of historical and current problems in US race relations.i.e., white people are ignorant and foolish about a lot of past and current discrimination against Blacks, so it it natural for us to gloss over segregation, both present and past.That is to say, white people gloss over it because of racism.

Lynching, as a form of punishment for presumed criminal offenses, performed by self-appointed commissions, mobs, or vigilantes without due process of law took place in the United States before the American Civil War and afterwards, from southern states to western frontier settlements. The term "Lynch's Law" (and subsequently "lynch law" and "lynching") apparently originated during the American Revolution when Charles Lynch, a Virginia justice of the peace, ordered extralegal punishment for Tory acts.In the South, members of the abolitionist movement or other people opposing slavery were usually targets of lynch mob violence before the Civil War. Employees of Morris L. Hallowell, the outspoken Philadelphia abolitionist, were threatened with lynching but escaped with their lives, i.e. Thomas W. Sweney visiting in Atlanta and T. Russel Dawson where he lived in Norfolk, Virginia.[19] During the war, Southern Home Guard units sometimes lynched white Southerners whom they suspected of being Unionists or deserters; one example of this was the hanging of Methodist minister Bill Sketoe in the south Alabama town of Newton in December 1864. The largest example during the war and perhaps U.S. history, was the lynching of 41 men at the Great Hanging at Gainesville, Texas in October 1862. Most of these were hanged after an extra-judicial "trial" but at least fourteen did not even receive that formality.[20] The men had been accused of insurrection or treason. Five more men were hanged in Decatur, Texas as part of the same sweep.[21]After the war, southern whites struggled to maintain social dominance. Secret vigilante and insurgent groups such as the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) instigated extrajudicial assaults and killings to keep power and to discourage freedmen from voting, working and getting educated. They also sometimes attacked Northerners, teachers, and agents of theFreedmen's Bureau. A study of the period of 1868 to 1871 estimates that the KKK was involved in more than 400 lynchings. The aftermath of the war was a period of upheaval and social turmoil, in which most of the white men had been war veterans. Mobs usually had alleged crimes for which they lynched blacks. In the late 19th century, however, journalist Ida B. Wells showed that many presumed crimes were exaggerated or did not occur.[22]From the 1890s onwards, the majority of those lynched were black,[23] including at least 159 women.[24] Between 1882 and 1968, the Tuskegee Institute recorded 1,297 lynchings of whites and 3,446 lynchings of blacks.[8][25] However, lynchings of other minority members, such as Mexicans and Chinese, have been shown to have been undercounted in the Tuskegee Institute's records.[26] One of the largest mass lynchings in American history involved eleven Italian immigrants in New Orleans, Louisiana, in 1891.[27]Mob violence arose as a means of enforcing white supremacy and verged on systematic political terrorism. "The Ku Klux Klan, paramilitary groups, and other whites united by frustration and anger ruthlessly defended the interests of white supremacy. The magnitude of extralegal violence during election campaigns reached epidemic proportions, leading the historian William Gillette to label it guerrilla warfare."[28][29][30][31][32]During Reconstruction, the Ku Klux Klan and others used lynching as a means to control African Americans, forcing them to work for planters and preventing them from exercising their right to vote.[28][29][30][31][32]Federal troops and courts enforcing the Civil Rights Act of 1871 largely broke up the Reconstruction-era Klan.By the end of Reconstruction in 1877, with fraud, intimidation and violence at the polls, white Democrats regained nearly total control of the state legislatures across the South. They passed laws to make voter registration more complicated, reducing black voters on the rolls. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, from 1890 to 1908, ten of eleven Southern legislatures ratified new constitutions and amendments to effectively disfranchise most African Americans and many poor whites through devices such as poll taxes, property and residency requirements, and literacy tests. Although required of all voters, some provisions were selectively applied against African Americans. In addition, many states passed grandfather clauses to exempt white illiterates from literacy tests for a limited period. The result was that black voters were stripped from registration rolls and without political recourse. Since they could not vote, they could not serve on juries. They were without official political voice.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:1891_New_Orleans_Italian_lynching.jpgOne of the largest mass lynchings in American history involved the lynching of elevenItalian immigrants in New Orleansin 1891.The ideology behind lynching, directly connected with denial of political and social equality, was stated forthrightly by Benjamin Tillman, governor of South Carolina and later aUnited States Senator:We of the South have never recognized the right of the negro to govern white men, and we never will. We have never believed him to be the equal of the white man, and we will not submit to his gratifying his lust on our wives and daughters without lynching him.[33]Lynchings declined briefly after the takeover in the 1870s. By the end of the 19th century, with struggles over labor and disfranchisement, and continuing agricultural depression, lynchings rose again. The number of lynchings peaked at the end of the 19th century, but these kinds of murders continued into the 20th century. Tuskegee Institute records of lynchings between the years 1880 and 1951 show 3,437 African-American victims, as well as 1,293 white victims. Lynchings were concentrated in the Cotton Belt: (Mississippi,Georgia, Alabama, Texas and Louisiana).[34]African Americans resisted through protests, marches, lobbying Congress, writing of articles, rebuttals of so-called justifications of lynching, organizing women's groups against lynching, and organizing integrated groups against lynching. African-American playwrights produced 14 anti-lynching plays between 1916 and 1935, ten of them by women.After the release of the movie The Birth of a Nation (1915), which glorified lynching and the Reconstruction-era Klan, the Klan re-formed. Unlike in its earlier form, it was heavily represented among urban populations, especially in the Midwest. In response to massive immigration of people from southern and eastern Europe, the Klan had an anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic and anti-Jewish stance, in addition to exercising oppression of blacks.Members of mobs that participated in lynchings often took photographs of what they had done to spread awareness and fear of their power. Some of those photographs were published and sold as postcards. In 2000, James Allen published a collection of 145 lynching photos in book form and online,[35] with written words and video to accompany the images.

I wish I could do a better job on this subject than the D.C. Circuit Court, but I can’t. The factual background to Pigford v. Glickman answers this question with perfect clarity and detail. I have reproduced some of the Opinion, for educational purposes only, below;OPINIONPAUL L. FRIEDMAN, District Judge.Forty acres and a mule. As the Civil War drew to a close, the United States government created the Freedmen's Bureau to provide assistance to former slaves. The government promised to sell or lease to farmers parcels of unoccupied land and land that had been confiscated by the Union during the war, and it promised the loan of a federal government mule to plow that land. Some African Americans took advantage of these programs and either bought or leased parcels of land. During Reconstruction, however, President Andrew Johnson vetoed a bill to enlarge the powers and activities of the Freedmen's Bureau, and he reversed many of the policies of the Bureau. Much of the promised land that had been leased to African American farmers was taken away and returned to Confederate loyalists. For most African Americans, the promise of forty acres and a mule was never kept. Despite the government's failure to live up to its promise, African American farmers persevered. By 1910, they had acquired approximately 16 million acres of farmland. By 1920, there were 925,000 African American farms in the United States.On May 15, 1862, as Congress was debating the issue of providing land for freed former slaves, the United States Department of Agriculture was created. The statute creating the Department charged it with acquiring and preserving “all information concerning agriculture” and collecting “new and valuable seeds and plants; to test, by cultivation, the value of such of them as may require such tests; to propagate such as may be worthy of propagation, and to distribute them among agriculturists.” An Act to establish a Department of Agriculture, ch. 71, 12 Stat. 387 (1862). In 1889, the Department of Agriculture achieved full cabinet department status. Today, it has an annual budget of $67.5 billion and administers farm loans and guarantees worth $2.8 billion.As the Department of Agriculture has grown, the number of African American farmers has declined dramatically. Today, there are fewer than 18,000 African American farms in the United States, and African American farmers now own less then 3 million acres of land. The United States Department of Agriculture and the county commissioners to whom it has delegated so much power bear much of the responsibility for this dramatic decline. The Department itself has recognized that there has always been a disconnect between what President Lincoln envisioned as “the people's department,” serving all of the people, and the widespread belief that the Department is “the last plantation,” a department “perceived as playing a key role in what some see as a conspiracy to force minority and disadvantaged farmers off their land through discriminatory loan practices.” See Pls' Motion for Class Certification. Exh. B, Civil Rights at the United States Department of Agriculture: A Report by the Civil Rights Action Team (Feb.1997) (“CRAT Report”) at 2.For decades, despite its promise that “no person in the United States shall, on the ground of race, color, or national origin, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be otherwise subjected to discrimination under any program or activity of an applicant or recipient receiving Federal financial assistance from the Department of Agriculture,” 7 C.F.R. § 15.1, the Department of Agriculture and the county commissioners discriminated against African American farmers when they denied, delayed or otherwise frustrated the applications of those farmers for farm loans and other credit and benefit programs. Further compounding the problem, in 1983 the Department of Agriculture disbanded its Office of Civil Rights and stopped responding to claims of discrimination. These events were the culmination of a string of broken promises that had been made to African American farmers for well over a century.It is difficult to resist the impulse to try to undo all the broken promises and years of discrimination that have led to the precipitous decline in the number of African American farmers in the United States. The Court has before it a proposed settlement of a class action lawsuit that will not undo all that has been done. Despite that fact, however, the Court finds that the settlement is a fair resolution of the claims brought in this case and a good first step towards assuring that the kind of discrimination that has been visited on African American farmers since Reconstruction will not continue into the next century. The Court therefore will approve the settlement.I. BACKGROUND OF THE CASEThe plaintiffs in this case allege (1) that the United States Department of Agriculture (“USDA”) willfully discriminated against them and other similarly situated African American farmers on the basis of their race when it denied their applications for credit and/or benefit programs or delayed processing their applications, and (2) that when plaintiffs filed complaints of discrimination with the USDA, the USDA failed properly to investigate and resolve those complaints. See Seventh Amended Complaint at 4–5. Plaintiffs allege that defendant's actions violated a number of statutes and the Constitution, but both sides agree that this case essentially is brought under the Equal Credit Opportunity Act, 15 U.S.C. § 1691 (“ECOA”). See Transcript of Hearing of March 2, 1999, at 19.1The Court certified this case as a class action on October 9, 1998, and preliminarily approved a Consent Decree on January 5, 1999. After a hearing held on March 2, 1999, the parties made some revisions to the proposed Consent Decree and filed a revised proposed Consent Decree with the Court on March 19, 1999. The Court now concludes that the revised proposed Consent Decree is fair, adequate and reasonable.A. Factual BackgroundFarming is a hard way to make a living. Small farmers operate at the whim of conditions completely beyond their control; weather conditions from year to year and marketable prices of crops to a large extent determine whether an individual farmer will make a profit, barely break even or lose money. As a result, many farmers depend heavily on the credit and benefit programs of the United States Department of Agriculture to take them from one year to the next.2For instance, if an early freeze kills three-quarters of a farmer's crop one year, he may not have sufficient resources to buy seeds to plant in the following season. Or if a farmer needs to modernize his operations and buy a new grain harvester in order to make his operations profitable, he often cannot afford to buy the harvester without an extension of credit. Because of the seasonal nature of farming, it also is of utmost importance that credit and benefit applications be processed quickly or the farmer may lose all or most of his anticipated income for an entire year. It does a farmer no good to receive a loan to buy seeds after the planting season has passed.The USDA's credit and benefit programs are federally funded programs, but the decisions to approve or deny applications for credit or benefits are made locally at the county level. In virtually every farming community, local farmers and ranchers elect three to five member county committees. The county committee is responsible for approving or denying farm credit and benefit applications, as well as for appointing a county executive who is supposed to provide farmers with help in completing their credit and benefit applications. The county executive also makes recommendations to the county committee regarding which applications should be approved. The salaries of the county committee members and the county executives are paid from federal funds, but they are not considered federal government employees. Similarly, while federal money is used to fund the credit and benefit programs, the elected county officials, not federal officials, make the decision as to who gets the federal money and who does not.The county committees do not represent the racial diversity of the communities they serve. In 1996, in the Southeast Region, the region in the United States with the most African American farmers, just barely over 1% of the county commissioners were African American (28 out of a total of 2469). See CRAT Report at 19. In the Southwest region, only 0.3% of the county commissioners were African American. In two of the remaining three regions, there was not a single African American county commissioner. Nationwide, only 37 county commissioners were African American out of a total of 8147 commissioners—approximately 0.45%. Id.Throughout the country, African American farmers complain that county commissioners have discriminated against them for decades, denying their applications, delaying the processing of their applications or approving them for insufficient amounts or with restrictive conditions. In several southeastern states, for instance, it took three times as long on average to process the application of an African American farmer as it did to process the application of a white farmer. CRAT Report at 21. Mr. Alvin E. Steppes is an African American farmer from Lee County, Arkansas. In 1986. Mr. Steppes applied to the Farmers Home Administration (“FmHA”) for an operating loan. Mr. Steppes fully complied with the application requirements, but his application was denied. As a result, Mr. Steppes had insufficient resources to plant crops, he could not buy fertilizer and crop treatment for the crops he did plant, and he ended up losing his farm. See Seventh Amended Complaint at ¶ 14.Mr. Calvin Brown from Brunswick County, Virginia applied in January 1984 for an operating loan for that planting season. When he inquired later that month about the status of his loan application, a FmHA county supervisor told him that the application was being processed. The next month, the same FmHA county supervisor told him that there was no record of his application ever having been filed and that Mr. Brown had to reapply. By the time Mr. Brown finally received his loan in May or June 1984, the planting season was over, and the loan was virtually useless to him. In addition, the funds were placed in a “supervised” bank account, which required him to obtain the signature of a county supervisor before withdrawing any funds, a requirement frequently required of African American farmers but not routinely imposed on white farmers. See Seventh Amended Complaint at ¶ 11.In 1994, the entire county of Greene County, Alabama where Mr. George Hall farmed was declared eligible for disaster payments on 1994 crop losses. Every single application for disaster payments was approved by the Greene County Committee except Mr. Hall's application for four of his crops. See Seventh Amended Complaint at ¶ 5. Mr. James Beverly of Nottaway County, Virginia was a successful small farmer before going to FmHA. To build on his success, in 1981 he began working with his FmHA office to develop a farm plan to expand and modernize his swine herd operations. The plan called for loans to purchase breeding stock and equipment as well as farrowing houses that were necessary for the breeding operations. FmHA approved his loans to buy breeding stock and equipment, and he was told that the loan for farrowing houses would be approved. After he already had bought the livestock and the equipment, his application for a loan to build the farrowing houses was denied. The livestock and equipment were useless to him without the farrowing houses. Mr. Beverly ended up having to sell his property to settle his debt to the FmHA. See id. at ¶ 12.The denial of credit and benefits has had a devastating impact on African American farmers. According to the Census of Agriculture, the number of African American farmers has declined from 925,000 in 1920 to approximately 18,000 in 1992. CRAT Report at 14. The farms of many African American farmers were foreclosed upon, and they were forced out of farming. Those who managed to stay in farming often were subject to humiliation and degradation at the hands of the county commissioners and were forced to stand by powerless, as white farmers received preferential treatment. As one of plaintiffs' lawyers, Mr. J.L. Chestnut, aptly put it, African American farmers “learned the hard way that though the rules and the law may be colorblind, people are not.” Transcript of Hearing of March 2, 1999, at 173.Any farmer who believed that his application to those programs was denied on the basis of his race or for other discriminatory reasons theoretically had open to him a process for filing a civil rights complaint either with the Secretary of Agriculture or with the Office of Civil Rights Enforcement and Adjudication (“OCREA”) at USDA. USDA regulations set forth a detailed process by which these complaints were supposed to be investigated and conciliated, and ultimately a farmer who was unhappy with the outcome was entitled to sue in federal court under ECOA. See Pigford v. Glickman, 182 F.R.D. 341, 342–44 (D.D.C.1998). All the evidence developed by the USDA and presented to the Court indicates, however, that this system was functionally nonexistent for well over a decade. In 1983, OCREA essentially was dismantled and complaints that were filed were never processed, investigated or forwarded to the appropriate agencies for conciliation. As a result, farmers who filed complaints of discrimination never received a response, or if they did receive a response it was a cursory denial of relief. In some cases, OCREA staff simply threw discrimination complaints in the trash without ever responding to or investigating them. In other cases, even if there was a finding of discrimination, the farmer never received any relief.In December of 1996, Secretary of Agriculture Dan Glickman appointed a Civil Rights Action Team (“CRAT”) to “take a hard look at the issues and make strong recommendations for change.” See CRAT Report at 3. In February of 1997, CRAT concluded that “[m]inority farmers have lost significant amounts of land and potential farm income as a result of discrimination by FSA [Farm Services Agency] programs and the programs of its predecessor agencies, ASCS [Agricultural Stabilization and Conservation Service] and FmHA [Farmers Home Administration].... The process for resolving complaints has failed. Minority and limited-resource customers believe USDA has not acted in good faith on the complaints. Appeals are too often delayed and for too long. Favorable decisions are too often reversed.” Id. at 30–31.Also in February of 1997, the Office of the Inspector General of the USDA issued a report to Secretary Glickman stating that the USDA had a backlog of complaints of discrimination that had never been processed, investigated or resolved. See Pls' Motion for Class Certification, Exh. A (Evaluation Report for the Secretary on Civil Rights Issues). The Report found that immediate action was needed to clear the backlog of complaints, that the “program discrimination complaint process at [the Farm Services Agency] lacks integrity, direction, and accountability,” id. at 6, and that “[s]taffing problems, obsolete procedures, and little direction from management have resulted in a climate of disorder within the civil rights staff at FSA.” Id. at 1.The acknowledgment by the USDA that the discrimination complaints had never been processed, however, came too late for many African American farmers. ECOA has a two year statute of limitations. See 15 U.S.C. § 1691e(f). If the underlying discrimination alleged by the farmer had taken place more than two years prior to the filing of an action in federal court, the government would raise a statute of limitations defense to bar the farmer's claims. For instance, some class members in this case had filed their complaints of discrimination with the USDA in 1983 for acts of discrimination that allegedly occurred in 1982 or 1983. If the farmer waited for the USDA to respond to his discrimination complaint and did not file an action in court until he discovered in 1997 that the USDA had stopped responding to discrimination complaints, the government would argue that any claim under ECOA was barred by the statute of limitations.In 1998, Congress provided relief to plaintiffs with respect to the statute of limitations problem by passing legislation that tolls the statute of limitations for all those who filed discrimination complaints with the Department of Agriculture before July 1, 1997, and who allege discrimination at any time during the period beginning on January 1, 1981 and ending on or before December 31, 1996.Pigford v. Glickman, 185 F.R.D. 82, 85–89 (D.D.C. 1999), aff'd, 206 F.3d 1212 (D.C. Cir. 2000), and enforcement denied sub nom. Pigford v. Schafer, 536 F. Supp. 2d 1 (D.D.C. 2008)If you are familiar with this case, you know that after this, there was a huge mess. The remedy of the Court provided 2 tracks for Plaintiffs. One track was for those who had evidence that they attempted to farm but were discriminated against;Track B arbitration is the option for those who have more extensive documentation of discrimination in a credit transaction. Under Track B, an arbitrator will hold a one day mini-trial and then decide whether the claimant has established discrimination by a preponderance of the evidence. Consent Decree at ¶ 10. Class counsel will represent any claimant who chooses Track B, or a claimant may be represented by counsel of his choice if he so desires. Track B is designed to balance the need for prompt resolution of the claim with the need to provide adequate discovery and a fair hearing.Pigford, at 97. There were only around 200 plaintiffs that went this route, because the evidence required was higher than Track A. Track A required a much lower bar of evidence. In fact, many commentators point out that Track A - under Pigford II - required no substantial evidence;“Under Track A, a claimant must submit “substantial evidence” demonstrating that he or she was the victim of race discrimination. See Consent Decree at ¶¶ 9(a)(i), 9(b)(i). Substantial evidence means something more than a “mere scintilla” of evidence but less than a preponderance. See Burns v. Office of Workers' Compensation Programs, 41 F.3d 1555, 1562 n. 10 (D.C.Cir.1994). Put another way, substantial evidence is such “relevant evidence as a reasonable mind might accept to support [the] conclusion,” even when “a plausible alternative interpretation of the evidence would support a contrary view.” Secretary of Labor v. Federal Mine Safety and Health Review Comm'n, 111 F.3d 913, 918 (D.C.Cir.1997)”Pigford, at 96. The Plaintiffs in Track A who had more than a “mere scintilla” of evidence received compensation roughly in line with the size of their farm. The Plaintiffs in Track A who had basically no evidence, under Pigford II, - allowed by the Court because in many cases the applications and relevant evidence was destroyed by the USDA, or never made it into a file, somehow got lost, etc. - received awards up to $50,000. This created an incredible controversy, with accusations of fraud being lobbed from both the right and the left. As the New York Times put it;“The compensation effort sprang from a desire to redress what the government and a federal judge agreed was a painful legacy of bias against African-Americans by the Agricultural Department. But an examination by the New York Times shows that it became a runaway train, driven by racial politics, pressure from influential members of Congress and law firms that stand to gain more than $130 million in fees. In the past five years, it has grown to encompass a second group of African-Americans as well as Hispanic, female and Native American farmers. In all, more than 90,000 people have field claims. The total cost could top $4.4 billion.”Farm Loan Bias Claims, Often Unsupported, Cost U.S. MillionsWhen the dust settled, Pigford has become the largest Civil Rights case in U.S. history.