The Real Sherrod Injustice: Right-Wing vs. Black Farmers

Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack was direct, forceful and blunt when he declared this week that the USDA does not tolerate racial discrimination. This was Vilsack’s widely circulated public explanation for firing black civil servant Shirley Sherrod. There are two problems with this.

First, the world now knows that Sherrod, who had been the rural development director for the USDA in Georgia, did not do or say anything to merit being branded a bigot and sacked. The video that got her fired—posted on a conservative blogger’s website—was highly edited and misleading, to say the least. Vilsack and President Obama subsequently apologized to Sherrod and offered her her job back.

The second problem is more troubling. Vilsack should have been talking about the shameful and disgraceful treatment of black farmers by his agency, and the equally shameful and disgraceful treatment of the farmers by Congress.

The day after Vilsack issued his lofty pronouncement about zero tolerance for racial discrimination, Gary Grant, president of the 20,000-member Black Farmer & Agriculturalists Association, flatly called Vilsack’s statement “a complete lie.” He had good reason. During the past quarter century, tens of thousands of black farmers have lost their land, homes and livestock, due to the blatant refusal by the USDA to make or guarantee loans to them. The farmers have filed individual and class-action lawsuits, staged sit-ins, and held marches and rallies challenging the nakedly discriminatory lending practices of the USDA.

Shirley Sherrod was one of them. She and her husband, a minister and civil rights leader, were part of a cooperative of black farmers who were refused loans. Their farms were foreclosed on in 1985, and they filed suit. It took more than two decades of legal wrangling, but finally Sherrod, her husband and the other farmers won their case and were awarded $13 million in damages.

In recent years, the USDA has revamped its operations. It has an active civil rights division and claims that it carefully scrutinizes its lending program to prevent bias. But this doesn’t mean that the USDA has totally righted its past racial wrongs. In a statement, the black farmers association noted that the USDA has not punished any of its agents or officials who turned a blind eye to discriminatory lending, or actively encouraged it.

A decade ago the USDA shelled out $2.3 billion to the farmers to settle the discrimination suits. But that didn’t end the injustice. Thousands of black farmers who lost their land did not get a nickel. They were excluded from the settlement through bureaucratic bungling, technicalities, and challenges from Justice Department officials during the W. Bush years.

With President Obama’s approval, Vilsack agreed to a second settlement of $1.25 billion. But again, the injustice continued. Congress had to approve release of the funds and set a deadline of March 31. The deadline came and went. Congress went on spring vacation without approving the money. It set another deadline of May 31. That date also came and went with no action.

GOP conservatives and the right-wing talking heads then went to work. They railed that the settlement was a deficit-buster and an unjustified political giveaway by the Obama administration to appease black Democrats—the presumption being that all the black farmers are Democrats and dutiful Obama voters.

Even as Vilsack loftily intoned about clamping down on racial discrimination at the USDA in reference to Sherrod, Congress again stonewalled the approval of the settlement funds. GOP senators demanded and, with Democrats’ consent, got the money stripped from the bill extending jobless benefits. This was part of the price Democrats paid to break the GOP filibuster against the extension.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has vowed that he and the Democrats will make a determined effort to get the settlement money approved in the war-supplemental appropriations bill scheduled for a vote sometime before the end of July. But a Reid spokesman said it "remains unclear" whether the bill could pass with the farm-settlement attached. This doesn’t exactly sound like the Democrats will go to the barricades to get the funds released.

Vilsack says that because of Sherrod’s horrific family history of suffering—a white farmer murdered her father and was never prosecuted—and her long fight for justice for farmers, she is in a unique position to tell the story of the black farmers’ battle for justice. Unfortunately, despite his apology and offer of reinstatement, Vilsack’s firing of Sherrod gave the right-wing smear machine the ammunition it needed to blast the settlement as a political scheme by the Obama administration to pay off black Democrats. Iowa GOP Congressman Steven King, even less charitably, called the settlement a fraud.

Given the fierce GOP opposition to any financial compensation for the beleaguered black farmers, and the long history of USDA racism, black farmers aren’t holding their breath that Congress will do the right thing and approve the settlement. Given her experience with USDA, Sherrod probably isn’t either.