Speaker 1: As I got into how my family gained and then
Speaker 1: lost control of a plot of land in East Texas,
Speaker 1: I learned that we were part of a broader trend
Speaker 1: for Black Americans after slavery. Owning land was freedom, it
Speaker 1: was autonomy and importantly economic security because farming was big
Speaker 1: business back then, and some black families have been farmers
Speaker 1: for generations all the way up to the present day.
Speaker 1: Take one black farmer in Virginia, John Boyd, who grows
Speaker 1: wheat and other crops. He also raised his cows. I
Speaker 1: really was trained as a farmer by my dad and grandfather.
Speaker 1: My mother's parents were sharecroppers, and I also worked on
Speaker 1: their farm as a little boy, so I got to
Speaker 1: see it on both sides. You know what it was
Speaker 1: like to to own your farm, and I also got
Speaker 1: to see what it was like having grandparents as share croppers.
Speaker 1: John comes from a long line of black farmers whose
Speaker 1: legacy stretches back to the end of the Civil War.
Speaker 1: His farm is located in a southern Virginia town called Baskerville.
Speaker 1: In eighteen sixty eight, the Fourteenth Amendment grantited citizenship to
Speaker 1: black people, and after the Civil War, despite many obstacles,
Speaker 1: black people were able to purchase some of the very
Speaker 1: land they've been forced to farm under slavery. By nine
Speaker 1: black men operated around four of all the farms in
Speaker 1: the US, but over the years that share of black
Speaker 1: farms declined, and in a big way. Today black people
Speaker 1: operate less than two percent of farms in America. White
Speaker 1: people basically run the rest. So what happened to the
Speaker 1: black farming industry over the last century. Of course, I
Speaker 1: knew we had racial tensions in the country at that time,
Speaker 1: but I didn't see it as what I was about
Speaker 1: to run into this major brick wall and I waken
Speaker 1: in reality check with the government. It was a real
Speaker 1: break up call for me. They really let me know
Speaker 1: that there was a difference in the way many in
Speaker 1: his country view black and white and race relations. In
Speaker 1: the late nineteen eighties, John Boyd had only owned his
Speaker 1: land for a few years, but he found himself on
Speaker 1: the verge of losing all of it and jeopardizing his
Speaker 1: family's legacy of ownership. There was a nine year period
Speaker 1: in which I was trying to get farm operating loans,
Speaker 1: so I was applying every year. I think I may
Speaker 1: have received one one loan and the rest were for denials,
Speaker 1: so totally last bit of the eighties and early nineties. Uh,
Speaker 1: every every everything just blew up. The thing is what
Speaker 1: happened to John Boyd was also happening to tens of
Speaker 1: thousands of other black farmers. And it was happening because
Speaker 1: they were black. But those houses of farmers were about
Speaker 1: to take on the government, and their fight represents a
Speaker 1: long overlook chapter in the push for black equality. The
Speaker 1: data shows that the median white family has ten times
Speaker 1: more wealth than the average black family. One of the
Speaker 1: drivers of that wealth gap is redlining. Economists often point
Speaker 1: to the absence of African American generational wealth forces. Be heard,
Speaker 1: and we're gonna not the United States, the problem of avriculture. No,
Speaker 1: that we're not leaving until we were seeing justice. I'll
Speaker 1: come on in. It's a trend propelled not just by
Speaker 1: economic forces, but by white racism in local white political
Speaker 1: and economic power. It's much easier to integrate a lunch
Speaker 1: counter than it is to guarantee an annual income, for instance,
Speaker 1: to get rid of positive Welcome back to the paycheck.
Speaker 1: I'm Rebecca Greenfield and I'm Jackie Simmons. This week we're
Speaker 1: talking about land, specifically farmland. Today, when we think about
Speaker 1: wealthy dynasties, we don't usually think about generations of farmers.
Speaker 1: But for most of the twentieth century, farming was a
Speaker 1: huge part of life in America. It was a huge
Speaker 1: part of black life. Running a farm was a good
Speaker 1: way to make a living, and owning the land meant
Speaker 1: farmers could pass wealth to their children. But over the
Speaker 1: last century, black people lost nearly all their farm land.
Speaker 1: We're talking about a huge amount of black wealth that
Speaker 1: assembly vanished. By one estimate, the land alone was worth
Speaker 1: three fifty billion dollars. So what made that wealth disappear.
Speaker 1: A lot of it goes back to farming loans, and
Speaker 1: it's the U. S Department of Agriculture that's responsible for
Speaker 1: dispensing those loans. That's where John Boyd comes and Elizabeth
Speaker 1: Rembert has a story. John Boyd thought his first piece
Speaker 1: of farmland when he was eighteen. He wanted to follow
Speaker 1: in his parents and his grandparents footsteps, and as soon
Speaker 1: as he was old enough, he set out to carve
Speaker 1: out his own piece of property. I bought my first
Speaker 1: farm in from another black farmer by the name of
Speaker 1: Russell sally Ah. He was having difficulties with then it
Speaker 1: was called the Farmer's Home Administration, and so he agreed
Speaker 1: to sell me as farm But what John didn't know
Speaker 1: was that the difficulties that Russell was having with the
Speaker 1: Farmer's Home Administration, those would foreshadow problems John himself was
Speaker 1: going to have down the line. The Farmer's Home Administration
Speaker 1: was a unit within the U s d A. The
Speaker 1: U s d A is the biggest provider of money
Speaker 1: to farmers in the US. It has a one hundred
Speaker 1: and fifty one billion dollar federal budget, and part of
Speaker 1: its mission is to operate like a big bank for farmers.
Speaker 1: It lends money to pay for seeds, equipment, and labor.
Speaker 1: The us DA's roots date all the way back to
Speaker 1: Abraham Lincoln, who formally established the agency in eighteen sixty two.
Speaker 1: He called it the People's Department because back then half
Speaker 1: of all Americans lived on a farm. But for a
Speaker 1: long time there was a problem at the U s
Speaker 1: d A. The agency, the so called People's Department, wasn't
Speaker 1: lending money equally to black and white farmers. In the
Speaker 1: nineteen nineties, the agency took an average of two hundred
Speaker 1: and twenty days to process a loan application for a
Speaker 1: black farmer versus the sixty days it took for a
Speaker 1: white farmers application. And between two thousand and six and
Speaker 1: two thousand and sixteen, black farmers represented less than three
Speaker 1: percent of the recipients of the U. S d A's
Speaker 1: direct loans, but they made up more than thirteen percent
Speaker 1: of the farmers who lost their land to foreclosure. Those
Speaker 1: discrepancies had major consequences, and John was about to find
Speaker 1: out that, as with many things in the US, landownership
Speaker 1: was completely skewed to white people. Skewed as in, black
Speaker 1: people own less than one percent of American farmland. White
Speaker 1: people basically own the rest. Economists call this the land gap.
Speaker 1: A better name for it might be the land Chasm,
Speaker 1: the Grand Canyon of inequity. Black landownership began to fall
Speaker 1: off after its peak in nineteen ten. Many black farmers
Speaker 1: didn't have wills or estate plans, so banks, real estate companies,
Speaker 1: and other predatory actors were able to force property sales.
Speaker 1: When black landowners died, some stopped farming due to intimidation
Speaker 1: violent race riots. One farmer told me she remembers racist
Speaker 1: neighbors burning crosses on the land her family owned, and
Speaker 1: then there was the U. S d A, which was
Speaker 1: locking black farmers out and causing them to lose their land.
Speaker 1: The impact of losing that land lasted generations. I talked
Speaker 1: to Thomas Mitchell, a law professor at Texas A and
Speaker 1: M about the cost of what black farmers were shut
Speaker 1: out of, not just the land itself, but the economic
Speaker 1: power it could have had to secure college educations and
Speaker 1: build wealth over generations. He added all of that potential
Speaker 1: value that would have been built on the land to
Speaker 1: the three hundred and fifty billion dollars he estimates the
Speaker 1: farmland itself is worth, and he came up with a
Speaker 1: dollar figure that represents everything black farmers have lost over
Speaker 1: the years. We're thinking that that additional impact could be,
Speaker 1: you know, somewhere between four hundred and five billion dollars,
Speaker 1: so that the overall negative net impact of this loss
Speaker 1: of land could be on the order of a trillion dollars.
Speaker 1: A trillion dollars. That's a really huge number to wrap
Speaker 1: your head around. But what Thomas is saying is that
Speaker 1: the gulf between black and white land ownership is a
Speaker 1: root cause of the gap between black and white wealth. Now.
Speaker 1: John Boyd the farmer that we heard from earlier, he
Speaker 1: wasn't thinking about the wealth gap or the land gap
Speaker 1: or structural inequality back in the nineties. He just wanted
Speaker 1: to farm. And usually when a person wants to farm,
Speaker 1: the U. S d A can be a partner in that.
Speaker 1: It's purpose is to help farmers with the resources they need.
Speaker 1: One of those resources credit. Access to credit is a
Speaker 1: make or break issue for most farmers, especially for young farmers.
Speaker 1: Farmers often need loans to get the seed in the
Speaker 1: ground and the equipment running. After they harvest and sell
Speaker 1: their crops, they can use that money to pay back
Speaker 1: the loan, and it's a cycle for every season. But
Speaker 1: if they never get that loan, or if they don't
Speaker 1: get it on time or get enough money, it sets
Speaker 1: their harvest back and then their ability to pay loans back.
Speaker 1: To start the process of getting credit and resources, farmers
Speaker 1: head into their local U. S d A office and
Speaker 1: sit down with the loan officer. But in John's first
Speaker 1: meeting with his county's U. S d A loan officer
Speaker 1: back in the mid nineteen eighties, he could tell that
Speaker 1: borrowing wouldn't be easy for one The U s d
Speaker 1: A officer would own, you see, black farmers once a week,
Speaker 1: so we all had the same letters. Your apartment is
Speaker 1: at nine o'clock nine am Wednesday morning, and we would
Speaker 1: all come to the office with the with the same letter.
Speaker 1: And what he experienced next was disturbing. It was, you know,
Speaker 1: a time period where he tore my application up and
Speaker 1: tossing in the trash can. This man spat on me.
Speaker 1: He left the door open, he talked boastfully loudly about
Speaker 1: what he wasn't gonna do, and uh, you know, if
Speaker 1: he was going to do something, this is all he
Speaker 1: was gonna do. And it was a real quick, all
Speaker 1: right opening experience for the way blacks were treated versus whites,
Speaker 1: especially in the South. John says that white farmers were
Speaker 1: treated very differently. He says that once he was meeting
Speaker 1: with a loan officer when a white farmer walked in.
Speaker 1: John says the loan officer handed over a government check
Speaker 1: for one hundred and fifty seven thousand dollars. According to John,
Speaker 1: after exchanging pleasantries with the white farmer and making plans
Speaker 1: for dinner, the loan officer casually reminded him to come
Speaker 1: back and fill out the paperwork for the loan because
Speaker 1: he'd estimated based on the previous year's numbers. John had
Speaker 1: been practically begging for a loan for a tiny fraction
Speaker 1: of that amount. So here this farmer have received a
Speaker 1: farm operating on for hundred fifty seven thousand dollars. He
Speaker 1: hadn't even done the paperwork, the correct paperwork on the loan,
Speaker 1: and I was pretty much big and pleading for five
Speaker 1: thousand dollar operating loan. And he had this conversation as
Speaker 1: though I was invisible. John says the U. S d
Speaker 1: A operated like a whites only country club, where you
Speaker 1: had to be a part of the club to get
Speaker 1: the money that you need for your farm. And this
Speaker 1: discrimination against black farmers was so widespread that people called
Speaker 1: the U. S d A the Last Plantation in news articles, studies,
Speaker 1: and even in court documents. The U. S d A
Speaker 1: is a federal agency, but many loan decisions are made
Speaker 1: locally by committee members. They're elected by their local communities,
Speaker 1: and the overwhelming majority of these committee members were white,
Speaker 1: So they were just your local guys, but they had
Speaker 1: a huge amount of influence and power. On a whim.
Speaker 1: They could reject, delay, or reduce loans to farmers. Here's
Speaker 1: John talking about the loan officer. He told me one
Speaker 1: time he was the next thing to God in his county.
Speaker 1: He controlled all the bank boards, and he said, nobody
Speaker 1: lends more money in this county than I do. And
Speaker 1: if you don't learn how to speak to me, you're
Speaker 1: not going to get any any money, and you won't
Speaker 1: be and you won't be farming very long. That's what
Speaker 1: he said. And got into it, and I told him
Speaker 1: I didn't I didn't know what Jesus Christ, no God
Speaker 1: look like I said. But he can't look like you.
Speaker 1: He can't act like you. John applied every year for
Speaker 1: an operating loan, which was essential in getting seeds in
Speaker 1: the ground to be able to make money in the harvest,
Speaker 1: but nearly every single application was denied, and without those loans,
Speaker 1: John couldn't get the profit from his farm that he
Speaker 1: needed to pay down the debt he inherited from the
Speaker 1: previous owner. One day, John says, the USDA tried to
Speaker 1: take some of the land away from him. John says
Speaker 1: his loan officer wanted him to sign over his land
Speaker 1: to a white landowner in the area, and then John
Speaker 1: could rent land from the white farmer, So basically, you
Speaker 1: wanted me to be a share crop. John says he
Speaker 1: refused to sign the paperwork because he refused to give
Speaker 1: up on his land. He was determined to fight to
Speaker 1: keep it. He borrowed money from his family and friends,
Speaker 1: and that helped him scrape together enough to make the
Speaker 1: minimum payment each month for a while, until one day
Speaker 1: he couldn't. And then one night, at midnight, federal agents
Speaker 1: sent by the U. S d A showed up banging
Speaker 1: on his front door. They woke up his five year
Speaker 1: old son, who looked on as strangers loaded his father's
Speaker 1: belongings into trucks. You know, they kept choosing to sell
Speaker 1: me out rather than to work with me to see
Speaker 1: what they could do to help me stay on the farm.
Speaker 1: John knew this wasn't just happening to him. He started
Speaker 1: calling up other black farmers in the area to talk
Speaker 1: about their experiences dealing with the U. S d A.
Speaker 1: And he found the discrimination by local loan officers was
Speaker 1: sort of an open secret. We would shake our heads,
Speaker 1: but we didn't have a real conversation. Must Old Black
Speaker 1: pride is the definition of that Black farmers like John
Speaker 1: were losing their land, their operations and their ability to
Speaker 1: improve their lives and their children's lives because they couldn't
Speaker 1: get loans. So John decided to fight back. He started
Speaker 1: a group called the National Black Farmers Association to represent
Speaker 1: black farmers interests and to get people to take him seriously,
Speaker 1: and he started suing the government. First, John tried to
Speaker 1: contest his own loan rejection with the U. S d A.
Speaker 1: Then he started finding lawsuits on behalf of other farmers
Speaker 1: for their discrimination at the hands of the U. S
Speaker 1: d A. And then in he led a group of
Speaker 1: sixty farmers to Washington, d C. That was campaigning and
Speaker 1: and protesting and cities around the country. And I took
Speaker 1: my mule there. I took my tractor there. John's message
Speaker 1: as he and a crowd of protesters led literal mules
Speaker 1: around the seat of government. We have our mule. Now
Speaker 1: we're looking for our forty acres. I went over to
Speaker 1: the department for the first day and there were a
Speaker 1: group of black farmers picketing the Department of Agriculture. That's
Speaker 1: s Dan Glickman. Today he's a senior policy fellow at
Speaker 1: a think tank, but back in he had recently been
Speaker 1: appointed to be Secretary of Agriculture by President Bill Clinton.
Speaker 1: He had served nine terms in Congress as a representative
Speaker 1: from Kansas, and he thought he was pretty well steeped
Speaker 1: on the issues farmers face until he got to the U.
Speaker 1: S d A. I was a congressman for eighteen years
Speaker 1: from Kansas, has served on the Agriculture Committee that entire time,
Speaker 1: and do not recall ever one hearing on this subject
Speaker 1: of discrimination against a minority or black farmers. He says
Speaker 1: his first impulse was to figure out what was going on.
Speaker 1: So I talked to my staff and I said, let's
Speaker 1: get into this thing. Let's figure out what's happening. I
Speaker 1: talked to the farmers who are picketing for a short time,
Speaker 1: and I said, well, I'll get to work on it.
Speaker 1: I don't know anything about it. Then he went to
Speaker 1: the White House and talked to Bill Clinton personally. Essentially,
Speaker 1: he says, the President told him make this right. And
Speaker 1: it was complicated because the picketing didn't stop, and we
Speaker 1: had the open sessions that were pretty emotional, not only
Speaker 1: in Washington and around the country. I took a team
Speaker 1: and we listened to farmers in various states, particularly in
Speaker 1: the South. We did open town meetings, and you could
Speaker 1: sense the high level of emotion and the belief that
Speaker 1: this system wasn't working for a large number of people.
Speaker 1: When Dan listened to the farmers stories, he said he
Speaker 1: knew these experiences weren't isolated loan denials or just random offenses.
Speaker 1: The stories traced back to a much bigger history of
Speaker 1: racism and its hold on agriculture, property and opportunity. One
Speaker 1: farmer that Dan heard a lot from was John Boyd.
Speaker 1: By this time, John had filed a lot of lawsuits
Speaker 1: against the U. S d a's Civil Rights Office alleging
Speaker 1: that the U. S d A was discriminating against him
Speaker 1: and other black farmers, and Dan, as Agriculture secretary, was
Speaker 1: the defendant in many of those lawsuits. The movement was growing.
Speaker 1: The protests John led and the lawsuits he filed were
Speaker 1: getting national media attention, and that media attention led more
Speaker 1: and more black farmers to go public with their own
Speaker 1: experiences of discrimination at the hands of the U. S
Speaker 1: d A. John got an update from Washington the U.
Speaker 1: S d A's Civil Rights Office was going to settle
Speaker 1: the complaint that he had filed against the agency over discrimination.
Speaker 1: John saw it as a victory after so many years
Speaker 1: of fighting for him. It confirmed what he had always
Speaker 1: known he had been treated unfairly. It included a twelve
Speaker 1: page document that stated outright that the U. S d
Speaker 1: A had discriminated against John. He wouldn't tell me exactly
Speaker 1: how much he got, but it was enough to buy
Speaker 1: some land back. But the loan officer in Virginia, who
Speaker 1: John says, spat on him and tore up his loan application.
Speaker 1: John says, he retired, so there there was no no
Speaker 1: act of pity for anyone who discriminated against any of us.
Speaker 1: John's case turned out to be bigger than him. His
Speaker 1: settlement and all of his activism set the stage for
Speaker 1: something that would go way beyond him and put more
Speaker 1: than two billion dollars in the hands of thousands of
Speaker 1: black farmers. Soon after John's own case was settled with
Speaker 1: the U. S d A, he worked with a farmer
Speaker 1: from North Carolina named Timothy Pickford to file what would
Speaker 1: become the largest class action lawsuit in US history. The
Speaker 1: lawsuit became known as Pigford Versus Glickman. Timothy Pigford's lawyers
Speaker 1: claimed the U. S d A had discriminated against black
Speaker 1: farmers when doling out loans and assistants. It was a
Speaker 1: familiar complaint by now, but the Pigford case took things further.
Speaker 1: It also said the U. S d A had not
Speaker 1: properly handled complaints of prejudice. In fact, the agency wasn't
Speaker 1: handling the complaints at all. The U. S d A
Speaker 1: Civil Rights Office, which was supposed to investigate reports from farmers,
Speaker 1: hadn't functioned properly for more than a decade. That meant
Speaker 1: submissions were ignored and complaints of racism were just collecting
Speaker 1: dust for years while farmers lost their livelihoods. Pigford recruited
Speaker 1: more than four hundred other black farmers to join the
Speaker 1: class action lawsuit, and the case landed in the hands
Speaker 1: of a federal judge named Paul Friedman, who approved the
Speaker 1: landmark settlement, and in the order he released in court,
Speaker 1: he traced the legacy of racism and agriculture all the
Speaker 1: way back to the U. S. Government's original reparations promise,
Speaker 1: when Union generals pledged those forty acres and a mule
Speaker 1: to freed slaves at the end of the Civil War.
Speaker 1: He called the dysfunction of the agency's civil rights office
Speaker 1: the quote culmination of a string of broken promises that
Speaker 1: had been made to African American farmers for well over
Speaker 1: a century. Paul Friedman's decision provided a starting point for
Speaker 1: any black farmer who felt they'd experienced discrimination between nine
Speaker 1: and nine. They could now come forward to try and
Speaker 1: prove their case for damages. Some people wanted the money
Speaker 1: because of just compensation for past wrongs. Some of the
Speaker 1: people wanted money to use for operating their existing farms,
Speaker 1: operating loans, and some of the people wanted it to
Speaker 1: buy additional farm land. Black farmers were struggling with economic
Speaker 1: problems and agriculture that it was that were affecting almost
Speaker 1: all farmers. That's Dan Glickman again. He says the way
Speaker 1: the settlement was structured was probably the closest thing the
Speaker 1: US has come to issuing real reparations to Black Americans.
Speaker 1: When black farmers around the country heard about the lawsuit,
Speaker 1: they started coming out in droves, each with their own
Speaker 1: personal story of racism at the hands of the U.
Speaker 1: S d A. Now came the question of who was
Speaker 1: entitled to payments and how much? How do you prove
Speaker 1: that as a black farmer you lost your land because
Speaker 1: of systemic discrimination and how much money can really make
Speaker 1: that right. The court appointed a monitor named Randy Roth
Speaker 1: to review every claim of discrimination and determine who was
Speaker 1: eligible for compensation. Randy and her team traveled the country
Speaker 1: and processed tens of thousands of those farmers claims to
Speaker 1: determine if the U. S d a Had discriminated against them.
Speaker 1: So for a farmer to win in the case, the
Speaker 1: farmer had to specifically identify similarly situated white farmer who
Speaker 1: was treated more favorably. The way they did that was
Speaker 1: by digging through old public documents. One of the ways
Speaker 1: that they found the information was to go to their
Speaker 1: county courthouse and see what loans white farmers had recorded.
Speaker 1: You record a security interest in a loan, and that
Speaker 1: was for many people a very fruitful way to get
Speaker 1: information about white farmers loans. By the end of the
Speaker 1: settlement and a subsequent class action suit known as Pigford,
Speaker 1: two over two billion dollars was paid out by the
Speaker 1: US government to black farmers across the country. The thing
Speaker 1: about Pigford was, by the time of the settlement, a
Speaker 1: lot of the damage had already been done from nineteen ten,
Speaker 1: which is largely considered the peak of black land ownership.
Speaker 1: Black people had lost nine of their land, and even
Speaker 1: the two billion dollars that the Pigford suits doled out,
Speaker 1: mostly in fifty dollar increments to individual farmers, didn't come
Speaker 1: close to the amount of money that black farmers really
Speaker 1: lost at the hands of the U. S. D As
Speaker 1: discriminatory practices. But John Boyd says that the money did
Speaker 1: help a lot of people. Fifty dollars to struggling in
Speaker 1: farmer who has no money is a real shot in
Speaker 1: the arm up. So it did help. Did it give
Speaker 1: the land back? No? Was the enough settlement to to
Speaker 1: make all of the discrimination go away from U? S
Speaker 1: toda to answer is no, But did it help the
Speaker 1: people who got the money? Absolutely? So you know, here
Speaker 1: again I see it. I see it on both sides
Speaker 1: of the coin for farmers who were were treated brutally
Speaker 1: and awful by the government. No, it was not enough
Speaker 1: money for settlement, but it was a building block. And
Speaker 1: you know, if you're building the building, you build it
Speaker 1: in blocks. John sees the Pigford settlements and all of
Speaker 1: the organizing it took to get there, as a crucial
Speaker 1: chapter in the long fight for equality. For Black Americans.
Speaker 1: There's a huge gap in the history when people, when
Speaker 1: these experts talk, they go from the sixties two the
Speaker 1: Black Lives Matter, and and the Black farmer movement, like
Speaker 1: I said, was is absent from that conversation. John's payout
Speaker 1: came after decades of fighting, decades of hard times, and
Speaker 1: the money came at a personal cost. He'd been traveling
Speaker 1: around the country talking to farmers and lobbying politicians. He'd
Speaker 1: gotten divorced, he spent time away from his son, and
Speaker 1: then he got a victory that he knows wasn't enough,
Speaker 1: but it's still got him land. These days, John spends
Speaker 1: most to his time on the three acre Virginia farm
Speaker 1: that he was able to hold onto in part with
Speaker 1: the settlement money. He spends his days like any farmer.
Speaker 1: He wakes up early in the morning to feed the cows,
Speaker 1: plant seed or plow fields, fix equipment, and check on
Speaker 1: his crops and livestock. He's trying to impart his love
Speaker 1: of the land on the young farmers he works with
Speaker 1: as the president of the National Black Farmers Association. In
Speaker 1: all my interviews, the Pigford case has come across as
Speaker 1: something that's set a huge precedent while failing to make
Speaker 1: black farmers whole. It's a big deal that a federal
Speaker 1: agency literally paid retribution for its discrimination and that the
Speaker 1: nation's largest class action lawsuit attempts to atone for racism.
Speaker 1: But is that really enough? Two billion dollars is a
Speaker 1: lot of money compared to the hundreds of billions black
Speaker 1: landowners lost or were denied over a century. Well, as
Speaker 1: John says, it's a drop in the bucket, and it
Speaker 1: didn't bring about the systemic changes to bridge the land gap.
Speaker 1: So John is still fighting because he says that land
Speaker 1: in America tells a bigger story about race and power,
Speaker 1: and that as long as there's an unequal landownership, wealth
Speaker 1: and power will be out of balance as well. I
Speaker 1: hate to keep going back to my dad and grandfather,
Speaker 1: but they taught me the land is the most powerful
Speaker 1: tool that you can possess. Uh. Landless culture as a
Speaker 1: powerless culture. If you don't own any land as a
Speaker 1: group of people, you don't have any boggaining power. You
Speaker 1: don't have any power as a as a group of people.
Speaker 1: My grandfather said, Uh, you can't leave your pH d
Speaker 1: to your children, but I can leave my whole raggedy farm.
Speaker 1: You know, the give them some financial stability, land is it?
Speaker 1: Listening to John Boyd got me thinking about the obstacles
Speaker 1: black people face back when my family farmed their land
Speaker 1: in East Texas in the early twentieth century. But his
Speaker 1: story also jolted me into realizing that black people even
Speaker 1: today struggle to hold onto their farms. The upshot is
Speaker 1: Black involvement in what used to be a cornerstone of
Speaker 1: the US economy has been stripped to almost nothing. Owning
Speaker 1: a farm is only one way to make money from land. Today,
Speaker 1: there's a far more common wealth building tool that, at
Speaker 1: least in theory, is accessible to far more Americans. Hopes
Speaker 1: next week on the paycheck we dig into the way
Speaker 1: as black people are still being left out of the
Speaker 1: housing market. It's embarrassing right there. I feel like there
Speaker 1: is no safe place for me to have this conversation
Speaker 1: because I'm going to get judge one way or another. Oh,
Speaker 1: you know, it's it's a lot. I feel betrayed to Yeah,
Speaker 1: I feel left behind. I feel left behind. Before we go,
Speaker 1: we have a request for you. Experts estimate that closing
Speaker 1: the racial wealth gap would take around thirteen trillion dollars
Speaker 1: give or take a trillion or two. That works out
Speaker 1: to about three hundred thousand dollars for every black American.
Speaker 1: We'd like to know what would you do with that
Speaker 1: three hundred thousand dollars? How might it change your life?
Speaker 1: How might your life stay the same? Record a voice
Speaker 1: memo with your answers to these questions and email it
Speaker 1: to me at our Greenfield at Bloomberg dot net, or
Speaker 1: leave a voicemail for us at six or six three
Speaker 1: two or three four nine. Oh. We may use your
Speaker 1: voice on the show. Thanks for listening to the Paycheck.
Speaker 1: If you like the show, please rate, review, and subscribe
Speaker 1: wherever you get your podcasts. This episode was hosted by Me,
Speaker 1: Rebecca Greenfield and me Jackie Simmons. Today's episode was edited
Speaker 1: by Francesco Levi and reported by Elizabeth Rimbert and Shelley Banjo.
Speaker 1: This episode was produced by Lindsay Cradowell. We also had
Speaker 1: production help from Magnus Hendrickson and Ethan Brooks, an editing
Speaker 1: help from Janet Paskin Rocksheeta Solujia, Jackie Simmons and me.
Speaker 1: Our original music is by Leo Sidron. Francesca Levi is
Speaker 1: Bloomberg's head of podcasts. We'll see you next time.