Georgia is the state that gave the Democrats a majority in the Senate, and one of the two senators who made it, Raphael Warnock, should make bows with President Biden when the “Help is Here” tour of the White House visits Friday peach state. Warnock is responsible for obtaining debt relief for black farmers in the US rescue plan, a problem that has prevented significant action for decades and one that he is deeply aware of growing up in rural Georgia.
It is extremely unusual for a first senator in their first months in office to achieve such a remarkable achievement, but his election as the 50th Democrat made it possible to move to the $ 1.9 trillion package. Thus, a grateful democratic leadership wants to ensure that voters recognize how important it is in the change Biden has promised.
Warnock will vote next year, and the Republican-controlled legislature in Georgia is crossing all sorts of barriers to voting to discourage high turnout for Democrats – and to make sure they get a different result in November 2022, when Warnock will be released for his first full Senate term.
Incorporated into the massive $ 1.9 trillion aid bill COVID-19 is a provision, for which Warnock is directly responsible, creating a $ 5 billion fund to benefit black farmers who have been marginalized in the past and who have need help to cover outstanding debts and to avoid foreclosure, by the way, which white farmers usually receive. In total, $ 4 billion of the total would go to debt relief, and $ 1 billion would provide technical assistance and subsidies, a long overdue aid to correct a serious historical error.
“Almost since its inception, US agricultural policy has been racist,” said Zoe Willingham, co-author of a 2019 report on black farmers for the Center for American Progress. The government’s documented history of denying federal loans to black farmers led to the loss of about 90 percent of their land between 1910 and 1997, while white farmers lost only about 2 percent. “The first significant action for black farmers is to forgive federal financial loans from the American Rescue Plan,” says Willingham, who lends to groups of grassroots farmers and powerful progressive leaders like Warnock for generating support in Congress. “It was thrilling to see the leadership he took over.”
Almost immediately after arriving in the Senate, Warnock proposed an independent bill, the Emergency Aid Act for Black Farmers. Its central component is the forgiveness of loans and, working with fellow Democrats Cory Booker and Ben Ray Luhan, it has obtained the first significant action on this long and deep issue of financial aid for black farmers. “I hope Biden will pick this up as a huge victory,” Willingham told The Daily Beast. “He highlighted a forgotten segment of rural America, namely the rural communities of color.”
Warnock grew up in public housing in rural Georgia, where his mother, as a teenager, chose cotton as a parapet. “40 acres and a mule” was the federal government’s promise to distribute land released to blacks released after the civil war. This was a failed promise, and in 1999, 16 years after the US Civil Rights Commission described discrimination against black farmers in detail, the USDA (Department of Agriculture) closed a lawsuit with black farmers to pay compensation.
It is known as the Pigford case, named after one of the farmers, and was a moral victory that failed to reach its financial end. “It marked the recognition of the struggle for farmers, but in no way did it compensate for the century of discrimination they suffered,” says Willingham.
As a senator, Barack Obama sponsored the Law on Remedial Claims for another round of payments. Among the sponsors was fellow Senator Joe Biden. In 2010, with both men in the White House, Obama signed the $ 1.15 billion bill, saying he would put an end to what he called “a painful chapter in American history.” Conservatives attacked it as repairs in the back and, although a billion dollars is nothing, they did very little to remedy the loss of land and the degradation of black rural communities.
When the US Recovery Plan passed with the reduction of debts for black farmers, Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack called on him to congratulate John Boyd, founder and president of the National Association of Black Farmers. A fourth-generation farmer in Baskerville, Virginia, Boyd suffered directly from USDA County racist agents, and after decades of activism, protesting across the country and lobbying lawmakers, he knows all the players in Washington.
Vilsack called him twice to “calm the waters” as he went through Senate confirmation for a second round of service at the USDA. “I told (Vilsack) that things can’t be the same as Obama’s. He needs to be more aggressive in dealing with discrimination in reducing and reducing debt. It’s behavior and culture, that’s why we call it (USDA) “The Last Plantation.” ”
Boyd, 55, grows corn, wheat and soybeans and has a hundred head of cattle on 114 acres of land. He has been cultivating for 38 years, long enough to have experienced the most egregious forms of discrimination. He described to the Daily Beast how the county’s local agent was “the next thing for God,” leading him over the black farmers, seeing them only one day a week, and calling him “loudly and boastfully.” ”And lobbying racial insults. “I called it Black Wednesday,” says Boyd.
Of the 157 agricultural loans granted to Boyd’s house in Mecklenburg County, only two were for black farmers. Loan applications for local white farmers took 30 days to process; the same application for black farmers lasted 387 days.
““We’ve been through so much history from slavery to sharing with Jim Crow,” says Boyd, “and now we have a chance to get help and [Graham’s] shooting at him. “”
During the Trump administration, Boyd met with Trump’s secretary of agriculture, Sonny Perdue, who told him that black farmers must “grow up or go out.” Boyd says he replied, “How are we going to grow up when you don’t lend us money?” Under CARES, almost all of the billions of dollars for farmers went to white farmers, according to USDA data.
GOP Senator Lindsey Graham characterized the $ 5 billion fund set aside in the US Debt Reduction Plan for the “repairs” of marginalized farmers, a busy deadline. Boyd lobbied for Graham’s support over the years and said the South Carolina Republican was “very cordial, but never did anything about it.” “We’ve been through so much history from slavery to sharing with Jim Crow,” says Boyd, “and now we have a chance to get help, and he’s taking care of it.”
Debt relief is for blacks, Hispanics, Native Americans, “and for any group that fits the designation of being marginalized,” says Boyd. At the end of our interview, he said that this is something he wanted in this article and that is his message: “Don’t give up especially the young people who do this work, you have to keep pushing.” In 2003, he rode a two-masted wagon to Washington, DC to protest. It took him 17 days. It had a sign that read “40 acres and battles,” the names of its mules. “People laughed at me and here we are all these years later, finally getting justice.”