Black farmers once made up 14 percent of America’s farmers. Today, black farmers account for less than 2 percent. One of them, fourth-generation sugar cane farmer Wenceslaus ‘June’ Provost Jr., is fighting to maintain his family’s farming legacy. June and his family were once part of the 1999 Pigford lawsuit, a massive class-action suit brought against the USDA alleging discriminatory practices. The case resulted in the largest settlement in U.S. government history and an admission of wrongdoing by the USDA. But June and his wife Angie say discrimination based on race still permeates the industry today, and allege continued discriminatory practices by their lender has pushed them out of farming and have cost them their home.
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There is quite a bit of history behind the disappearance of black farmers in the US. Most blacks worked in agriculture until fairly recently. This was true during slavery. And after slavery, blacks spread out all across the country and mostly lived in rural areas. In fact, the majority of blacks were still rural until around the 1960s-1970s.
Several things happened to turn blacks into an urban population concentrated in the inner cities. One factor was the general racism. Black farmers couldn’t get bank loans and couldn’t get government funds, as did white farmers. They were economically driven out of the business. Worse still, there was the violence. In Kentucky, what were known as the Nigh Riders drove out black farmers and stole their land and property. This happened all across the country over a few decades when entire black populations were forced out of rural areas and small towns. This was done through mobs and occasionally, to set an example, through lynching.
Blacks went to the cities seeking safety in numbers where they formed separate neighborhoods. The inner cities at the time were booming industrial centers and so it was the only place most blacks could find work. The black population had been doing well for some decades with rising income and a growing middle class. The inner city wasn’t a bad place to end up and allowed greater political organizing. But redlining and other racist practices kept them trapped there, even after most of the factories closed down and moved out to the suburbs.