Treva Lindsay and Melissa Harris-Perry on misogynoir, poverty, and violence
By Courtney Napier

On a recent girls’ trip to the National Museum of African American History and Culture, my friends and I made the visual arts exhibit our final stop. I glimpsed the work of Bisa Butler out of the corner of my eye and ran towards it, giddy with admiration. Before me was Butler’s quilted portrait of Harriet Tubman, with her black velveteen hair and full skirt adorned with purple and yellow flora—an icon of liberation, wrested by the hands of Black women.

Just over my shoulder, the presence of a vacuous black space interrupted the triumphant moment. I slowly turned until I was face-to-face with Amy Sherald’s arresting portrait of Breonna Taylor, hanging in solitude in a blackened enclave. The people who stood in line waiting to both admire its beauty and pay their respects could not hold back their cries. In front of me, a Black teenage girl buried her face in her mother’s shoulder. My friend Gloria did the same in mine while she wept.

The visceral sense of anger and hopelessness that we experienced in the presence of Breonna Taylor’s portrait captured some of the same emotions that propelled Dr. Treva B. Lindsay to write her latest book, America Goddam: Violence, Black Women, and the Struggle for Justice. 

On April 22, media host and scholar Dr. Melissa Harris-Perry joined Dr. Lindsay at Rofhiwa Book Café, a Black owned bookstore, for the Durham launch of America Goddam. There the two discussed Lindsay’s new book and the ways that harm—economic, medical, police, and intimate partner violence—shows up in the lives of Black women.

“I want Black girls and gender-expansive people to curl up with my book and feel like, ‘Wow, she sees these issues that I’ve experienced, that friends have experienced. I’m not alone.'”

Dr. Lindsay has experienced these kinds of violence first hand. Her book names the same truth that the murder of Breonna Taylor and the layers of political violence that followed, revealed to the rest of the world. It’s a truth that Black women have known our entire lives: America doesn’t give a damn about us. The fact that we only learned about Taylor’s killing in the wake of the murder of George Floyd—which occurred three months later—along with the fact that none of Taylors’ killers were sentenced for her death, proves that Black women have never been regarded as full humans, let alone full American citizens.

What makes Lindsay’s book unique from others that deal with the violence against women is its expansive definition of the word “violence” itself. Each chapter of America Goddam addresses a distinct, death-dealing system that causes harm to Black women and gender expressive people.

Lindsay wrote of her book, “I bear witness and with-ness to what’s on these pages.” America Goddam is a mandate from her ancestors to pass down not just her intellectual knowledge of how our country became such a violent place, but her hard-won wisdom on how to survive it.

Lindsay’s own journey began in Washington D.C. “I grew up in Chocolate City when it was still Chocolate City,” she said with a wry chuckle. Her parents, both North Carolina-bred Fayetteville State University graduates, instilled in her both a love for the South and a love for Black people.

Too often, Americans from the North and the West love scapegoating the South as the nation’s Superpredator. America Goddam examines the murders of Sandra Bland and Breonna Taylor, two women slain in Southern states. The last chapter of her book, however, is written as a letter addressed to Ma’Khia Bryant, the teenage girl murdered by the police in Columbus, Ohio, where Dr. Treva Lindsay lives and teaches as Associate Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at The Ohio State University.

“I always wince when I hear people over-determine that the South is uniquely violent in the context of America,” she explained. “As though once you move from there, somehow the anti-Blackness, the patriarchy and all of that just just disappears and that it’s not entrenched in these other regions across the nation. I’m very intentional in talking about violence that’s happening all over America to really make it America Goddam.”

She also acknowledges that certain cases of violence that stood out to her needed to be examined and written about specifically in their Southern context, which made her conversation with Dr. Melissa Harris-Perry at Rofhiwa all the more significant.

“Each region—and sometimes regions within regions—have their own distinct histories and have their own resistance histories that I think are super important to put [certain cases] into context.” But while the South has a uniquely oppressive history, it also carries an amazing organizing history, rich with incredible traditions of Black radical resistance and reverberated throughout the country.

Lindsay shared the story of Francis Thompson, a trans woman who, in 1866, was one of the first people to testify before Congress about being sexually violated. “It’s a Black woman from the South who is speaking in front of Congress—one hundred plus years before Anita Hill, and later Christine Blasey Ford—about sexual violence. The South to me means so much in terms of the documenting of the violence, and the documenting of the incredible resistance.”

“We see such an acute attack on Black communities, Black kinship networks, Black families, and then at the core of that Black women and girls who feel that disparate impact of this targeted divestment from the public good.”

Lindsay herself is another living example Southern femme resistance, and looms large in the field of Black feminism as a historian and prolific writer. She has also been awarded an array of awards, fellowships, and grants for her work, including the ACLS/Mellon Scholars and Society Fellowship, The Equity for Women and Girls of Color Fellowship at Harvard University, and The Woodrow Wilson Career Enhancement Fellowship—and has made a significant impact on her community outside of academia, founding the Transformative Black Feminisms Initiative and co-founding the Black Feminist Night School at Zora’s House, both in Ohio.

Appearing on my computer screen with a crown of locs down past her shoulders and a stunning dress in a springtime green, her smile accented a soft yet focused countenance. Her presence was powerful, like her words that followed. The depth of her love for Black women and gender expansive people was effervescent.

“This book is for Black girls and Black women,” Lindsay replied with pride when asked about her intended audience of readers. “I wanted them to know that there are those of us who deeply care about our stories, who deeply care about the lives we live before this moment of harm, that deeply care about highlighting and amplifying the work of those who are working to end violence against Black women and girls.”

She has made herself accountable to Black women and girls concerning the impact of America Goddam, too. “If other people find it and can take something away from it, that’s awesome,” Lindsay explained. “But I want Black girls and gender-expansive people to curl up with my book and feel like, ‘Wow, she sees these issues that I’ve experienced, that friends have experienced. I’m not alone.'”

One chapter that especially struck me is entitled “Unlivable: The Deadly Consequences of Poverty.” I had recently been introduced to the term “the feminization of poverty” in my Introduction to Sociology class, and it resonated deeply as memories of various family members, nightly news clips, and my own past experiences of trading WIC vouchers for milk and eggs swirled together in my mind. It also reminded me of one of a famous quotation by one of America’s unsung orators and activists, Coretta Scott King:

“I must remind you that starving a child is violence. Neglecting school children is violence. Punishing a mother and her family is violence. Discrimination against a working man is violence. Ghetto housing is violence. Ignoring medical need is violence. Contempt for poverty is violence.” 

Lindsay was unsatisfied with the treatment of poverty in mainstream conversations about violence against Black women as incidental instead of a system of violence in its own right. “We have millions of Black women and girls who are barely surviving, without resources, but overworked, underpaid, and hyper exploited,” she said.

It is common to hear a poor Black woman or gender-expansive person describe their lifestyle as “making a way out of no way.” Lindsay points out that this effort of navigating the impossible nature of poverty with a disappearing social safety net is just that: Impossible. “We see such an acute attack on Black communities, Black kinship networks, Black families, and then at the core of that Black women and girls who feel that disparate impact of this targeted divestment from the public good.” Here, she is referring to the “welfare queen” and “crack baby” tropes that were created to dehumanize and demonize Black women and girls and turn white voters against everything from public housing, to unemployment insurance, to pell grants.

She also reminds the women, girls, and gender-expansive people of color that we gave birth to the wealth this country works so hard to keep from us. The impact of this lack of access to wealth, plus the hyper-exploitation of our bodies for productive and reproductive labor, results in multiple layers of violence including kidnapping and trafficking, workplace injuries and abuse, mental health decline, and “weathering,” or physiological decline due to chronic racism-induced stress—which, studies have shown, are linked to the most common killers of Black women: heart disease, diabetes, and cancer.

In our conversation, Lindsay pointed to the internalization of these tropes as evidence of capitalist violence. “Why have we constructed an imagination in which we maligned welfare, so much to the point that we then do the work to dissociate from it?” she asked, rhetorically. “The impulse to dispute the stereotype of [the welfare queen] as a Black woman still leaves intact the lie that receiving welfare is a negative or something to be maligned for, instead of a part of the robust safety net of a nation that proclaims to care.”

Much in the manner that James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time and Alice Walker’s In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens inspired a generation of Black people to not settle for survival, America Goddam grasped the torch and carried it passionately into the 21st century.

In her endorsement, journalist and author Melissa Harris-Perry says America Goddam is “not a memoir, but it’s personal. This is not journalism, but it reports. It is not an easy book, but it’s necessary. And in the end, Lindsey challenges you to choose hope.”

Dr. Lindsay’s book is, indeed, a work that defies category. It is a tapestry of narratives from the past and the present, from the personal to the global, and from the familial to the political. These narratives tear off the cape of invincibility forced upon Black women in an anti-Black world and instead wrap us in quilts that gather us up in a future safety.

This article was originally published by Scalawag Magazine.

Nurturing a Narrative
By Courtney Napier

What would you do if you held a link to the humanity of a near-mythical figure in history? Through a serendipitous series of circumstances, Victoria Scott-Miller came to possess such a treasure, and it set the course for her future in an unexpected way.

Hailing from Memphis, Tennessee, the Scott family lived a life surrounded by art and beauty. Father Victor Scott was a freelance photographer, plugged in to the opulent lifestyle of famous friends like Lena Horne and Al Jarreau. These relationships were exciting, but also opened him up to the world of drugs. By 1986, he and his wife, Pamela, had just celebrated their daughter Victoria’s first birthday and were expecting their second daughter, Jessica. If they were going to survive as a family, they had to make a drastic change. They left behind the life they knew and moved to Philadelphia to begin the road to recovery.

During a rummage trip to the basement of their new home, Victor Scott found a Bible trimmed in gold. His wife noticed right away that it was special. She pleaded with her husband not to pawn the book to satisfy his addiction, but after realizing that this was a losing battle, she insisted on at least keeping the thick stack of papers tucked inside.

The years passed. Victor Scott overcame his addiction, but the couple divorced in the 1990s. Pamela Scott had the papers examined by Sotheby’s—they were indeed valuable, appraised at $50,000—but even though she was by then a single mother and needed the money more than ever, she declined their offer. Her intuition said that this possession was more significant than money. When Victor Scott passed in 2017, Pamela Scott finally gave the papers to her eldest daughter, Victoria Scott-Miller.

A detailed look at the letters belonging to Victoria Scott-Miller. Photos by Eamon Queeney

Scott-Miller immediately went to work to untangle their origin story. The handwritten notes, she soon discovered, were an exchange between legendary abolitionist Frederick Douglass and Nathanial Knight, a white bookstore owner and justice of the peace. As described in his biography, Douglass met Knight in his Baltimore bookstore, Greedy Reid’s, at just 14 years old. Defying the law, it was there that Douglass purchased his first book, the Columbian Orator, which had a major impact on the trajectory of Douglass’s life.

In January of 2019, the Miller family was contacted by a prestigious historian, who offered them $2 million for the papers. All they had to do was agree to a non-disclosure agreement concerning her family’s role in the discovery of the letters, allowing the origin story to begin with him and his institution.

The money was tempting. Scott-Miller and her husband, Duane Miller, had just relocated to Raleigh. Miller had been medically discharged from the military, and Scott-Miller had left a teaching position to care for their boys. They were on food stamps, just making ends meet.

Then she had a conversation with John Muller, a Baltimore historian and friend of the Douglass family. “It was as if he delivered a message from our past,” says Scott-Miller. “He said, ‘If you sell these papers, you will no longer be part of this story.’”

She declined the offer with a new thought: “How can we safeguard our legacy the way that my mom did for us?”

Scott-Miller’s son, Langston, had just started writing his own stories. So the Millers went to a bookstore and played a game: count the number of children’s books with Black protagonists on display, extra points if the author is also Black. After over an hour, they counted just five books. At that moment, the vision clarified.

“We thought about what it would look like to have a space that provided books with characters that looked like our children,” says Scott-Miller. “Then we thought about what it would look like if we provided that space.”

Scott-Miller had just received a gift of $250 from her mother to help make ends meet. She decided to use $225 to buy her first round of children’s books that featured Black authors and characters, and the remaining $25 fed her family for the week. Scott-Miller hosted her first pop-up bookshop on May 3 of last year, and Liberation Station was born.

Having a mobile store was a key part of the vision. The Miller family was familiar with moving around in the military, and they also understood that—due to forces like gentrification—neighborhoods of color are constantly changing. “We could set up a bookstore somewhere right now, and that would be great,” she says, “but what about the kids who are displaced and homeless across our city? Why can’t the bookstore be in their hotel room? We have to think about accessibility.”

In just a year, Liberation Station has seen astronomical success. They began a fruitful relationship with VAE Raleigh in August, when the pop-up bookstore earned their Awesome Grant for their Walk & Read program, which hosted storytime gatherings in Chavis Park and Pullen Park. They hosted storytime at SparkCon, and book readings and signings with local authors of color during VAE’s Writing On The Wall celebration. To kick off 2020, Liberation Station hosted a pop-up for the release of My N.C. from A to Z, a children’s book by Michelle Lainer, executive director of the North Carolina African American Heritage Commission, illustrated by Dare Coulter.

This year, Liberation Station will have programs across the state, including developing culturally sensitive programming for several public schools in Wake County and a creative collaboration with the African American Cultural Festival.

Although her family encouraged Scott-Miller to create Liberation Station, the bookstore is the product of Scott-Miller’s own extraordinary imagination. “I had to practice arriving in my power,” she says. “It’s one thing to know your purpose, but it’s another thing to fully arrive in it. For me, that means recognizing that this is an extension of my brilliance, my giftedness, and my genius, and fully owning that.”
In March, Scott-Miller connected with a second near-mythical figure in history, when Liberation Station received the Obama Foundation certification. Scott-Miller explains: “This certification gives us the opportunity to garner federal partnerships and gives us access to a global network of advocates and mentors.”

What started as a mission to safeguard her family’s legacy became a calling to provide access to literature in which children of color—and everyone connected to them—can see themselves. “The representation we provide through Liberation Station bookstore is necessary,” Scott-Miller says. “We are the living link to this community, and to narratives that must be shared.”

Each of our pandemic experiences are unique. Camilo is a 16 year old who lives in New York City with his mother and two siblings in a shelter with no Internet. May his account of personal reconciliation and resilience be an inspiration.

Camilo R. (Illustration by João Fazenda for the New Yorker)

As Told To: An Unhoused High Schooler’s New Nest
By Zach Helfand

A year ago, we talked with a fifteen-year-old named Camilo, who lived with his mother and two siblings in a shelter with no Internet. The family shared one unreliable laptop and one cell phone. When they spent a night at the home of friends, to use their Wi-Fi, the shelter kicked them out. Last week, Camilo brought us up to date.

We still don’t have Wi-Fi, but I have a school iPad that has service. Last spring, we moved to a shelter on the Lower East Side. I didn’t like it because I had to share a room, and I need my own space. But I liked the vibe. It was a good neighborhood, next to East River Park. I had a place to jog. I had a place to feed the birds.

In July, I hadn’t seen anybody in so long, so I took the Staten Island Ferry with one of my old friends from the Bronx. In Battery Park, a squirrel kept following me. I could tell it was hungry. It was, like, reaching toward me. Then I remembered: I had peanuts in my bag! Next thing you know, a ton of pigeons come, a ton of squirrels. I even fed the squirrel by hand. They were really friendly animals. I don’t know if it was because of my aura—I had a crystal on my neck. That was the happiest I’d been in a while.

After that, I would go to East River Park almost every day. There was nothing else to do, because of quarantine. I didn’t have any friends because I’d moved to a new neighborhood—nobody’s going to get near you with this virus. But the birds would see me from afar, and they’d come flying. There would be ten birds on my lap, on my shoulder, on my head, too. I was like a male Snow White! I really wish I had a friend to record it—I’m pretty sure that would’ve gone viral.

One bird was white with two bracelets on its feet, an escaped racing pigeon. I’d been feeding him for months, but I didn’t know that they’re not supposed to be in the streets, that they could get killed by a hawk, that they don’t have the instincts. The white pigeon was always alone. He wouldn’t fly with the other birds. I brought him to the shelter. Another day, I went to Union Square. I saw a bird with a broken leg. He was trying to get the food that I was throwing, but he couldn’t. He was just hopping around on one foot. I caught him, too. His name’s Rocky. The white one is Zen.

Zen never really liked me. Rocky is different, because I rescued him. I bought a first-aid kit, looked up a bunch of YouTube videos, and made a cast until the foot was healed. I got some vitamins, pills, and pain-relief cream. He loves me. When I call his name and snap my fingers, he’ll fly to my hand. He’ll make a happy noise when he sees me. When I pet him, he’ll close his eyes and purr.

We’ve been in shelters since 2019. We’ve been on the nycha waiting list for, like, ten years. Until I bought a cage, the birds lived in a crib. I taped a blanket around the bars. I had a ritual to hide them from the maintenance men. It wasn’t difficult until my mom snitched. I had to talk with the social worker, who made me leave them at my grandma’s house. It was hard to let them go.

Maybe this quarantine changed me for the better. I’m starting my first business right now, selling crystals. It’s called Faith in Stones. I became a vegan, too. My mom doesn’t really support it, so I buy my own stuff. Right now, I’ve got celery, blueberries, strawberries, bananas, kale, spinach, broccoli, and asparagus.

I got jumped last year, so they transferred me to a new school. They put me in twelfth grade—I skipped eleventh. I thought it was an accident, but the counsellors said I’ve got enough credits. I’m gonna be sixteen in college! As soon as I could, I went in person to school. I stopped after a few days. It was whack. I wanted to go meet new people, but there were only three others in the room. All we’d do is sit down and do Zoom. What’s the point?

In December, they told us that they’d found an apartment for us. They gave us the address and everything. I missed school so we could pack. Then they told us it’s not ready.

We finally moved two weeks ago. The place is small, there’s no furniture—I’m used to sleeping on the floor anyway—and bringing back the pigeons was a lot of work. But I felt free. I had my own room. And I had my own key! Now if I ever get some friends I can bring them here. I talk to this spiritual girl, she’s into crystals and all that. I still have the pigeons only because I want to show her. After that, I’m gonna find a new home for Zen, and I’m gonna set Rocky free. ♦

This interview was originally published for the New Yorker magazine.

Sometimes a simple reframe helps us consider how we want to exist in the world. For instance, will we consider ourselves “wealth owners” or “wealth holders”?

As wealth changes hands, we have a choice to make both individually and collectively; to further entrench racial and economic inequalities, or alternatively, to build a regenerative economy where wealth is more fairly distributed. The latter option opens the door to reconcile our wrongs through a strategy that addresses damage we’ve caused within our communities and the natural world.

Helping the Rich Let Go
By Chuck Collins

A new generation of wealth advisers helps wealthy people give away their money instead of hoard it.

Over the next 20 years, a minimum of $35 trillion, and up to $70 trillion, in wealth will transfer from the post-World War II generation to the next younger generation. Most of that wealth will flow in the upper canopy of the wealth forest, between family members in the world’s wealthiest 0.1%.

This intergenerational transfer will only further entrench racial and economic inequalities, aided by a veritable army of financial professionals devoted to minimizing taxes and maximizing family inheritances within narrow bloodlines.

But some beneficiaries of this system are working to disrupt it, with the help of financial advisers who have a very different outlook from the rest of their profession. They are redirecting this wealth to solve big problems, like climate disruption and racial inequity.  And this has created a new ethos among some of the elite and their financial advisers: “wealth minimization.”

Jody Wiser, an investor with inherited wealth from Portland, Oregon, saw a change in culture when her investment advisory firm went through a change in ownership. “I was soured to them when their quarterly podcast began with a CPA who advises clients to move to states with no income taxes,” she says. She told the firm that their anti-tax bias was why she was transferring her assets away from them.

“Some people inherit a ‘trusted family wealth adviser’ along with money,” says Nora Leccese, the high-net-wealth and family philanthropy coordinator at Resource Generation, a multiracial community of young people with wealth committed to the equitable distribution of wealth, land, and power. “These advisers show up with a bias for accumulation and against redistribution.”

This puts some wealthy family members on a collision course with the “wealth defense industry,” professionals whose training is entirely focused on excessive accumulation and fostering inherited-wealth dynasties. As I wrote in my book, The Wealth Hoarders, this sector includes the tax attorneys, accountants, wealth managers, and family office staffers who are paid millions to hide trillions. They have a toolbox of tricks and dodges—anonymous shell corporations, offshore bank accounts, dynasty trusts, complex transactions—to sequester and place wealth beyond the reach of taxation and accountability. They are the accomplices to tax avoidance, wealth hoarding, and entrenched inequality.

That’s what makes it all the more amazing to meet Stephanie Brobbey, the founder of Good Ancestor Movement Ltd., a new U.K.-based wealth advisory firm devoted to wealth minimization. Brobbey spent a decade working as an attorney in London’s bustling private wealth sector; her new firm is now disrupting industry norms.

“There are two prevailing narratives that the wealth advisory profession has internalized,” explains Brobbey, who was born in London to parents from Ghana. “The first is that excessive wealth accumulation is completely acceptable if not desirable. The second is that taxation is synonymous with waste. That’s the water that our profession swims in.”

Brobbey believes when it comes to taxation, we’ve lost our way completely. “Many economic elites in society have cultivated this distrust in government so that we don’t associate tax with the public investments we depend on every day,” she says. “Our job is to be good ancestors, to redefine the notion of legacy beyond the Global North concept of bloodlines and toward a broader understanding of community.”

Brobbey uses the language of “wealth holders” rather than “wealth owners.” “We are pioneering a radically different path for wealth stewardship—to move from a system of wealth extraction to a regenerative economy where wealth is more fairly distributed.”

There are examples of wealthy families redirecting their wealth to heal the harms created by the initial extraction of that wealth.

Good Ancestor has developed a program where clients move through three stages as they create an alternative wealth minimization plan. The first stage is to work with clients to understand their wealth story and “reimagine wealth.” This includes exploring their upbringing, the sources of wealth, and the values communicated along with the money. “There are many forms of resistance to be navigated that are rooted in our socialization and how an individual’s wealth history has been shaped,” Brobbey says.

“There are several critical questions that people with wealth should be asking ourselves but are afraid to consider,” says Leonie Taylor, who is a lead organizer at Resource Justice, the U.K. cousin of Resource Generation. The work “is so exciting precisely because it provides the intellectual grounding and space for these important conversations to take place, which can, through proactive shifts in our behavior, contribute to transformative and systemic change.”

The second stage is removing barriers to change, which may include technical financial planning along with coaching or cognitive support. “We have to build new neural pathways to rethink wealth and how much is too much,” Brobbey says.

The third stage is identifying how to redistribute excess wealth so it is both reparative and regenerative. Brobbey says, “We ask our clients, ‘What harm may have been caused in the process of the extraction or ongoing accumulation of this wealth? Were there groups of people [who] were harmed? Was there ecological harm? And what, based on this, is imperative for you to do?’”

In this process of redistribution, Brobbey aims to “decenter” traditional philanthropy. “It is a problem that excessive wealth accumulation is a prerequisite for embarking into the world of philanthropy,” she says. “Too much philanthropic activity reinforces the power and replicates the structural inequalities that led to the wealth inequalities.”

Redistribution outside philanthropy can take the form of paying taxes—at the local, state and federal level. It can mean transferring assets into community-controlled ventures, forming partnerships with social movements and communities that have been excluded from wealth for generations. There are examples of wealthy families redirecting their wealth to heal the harms created by the initial extraction of that wealth.

The Rockefeller Brothers Fund was established by the sons of John D. Rockefeller Jr. in 1940 from wealth that came originally from the Standard Oil Company. The fund publicly divested from the fossil fuel sector in 2014 and redirected its $1.2 billion in assets to campaigns for clean energy. Recognizing the harms caused by oil extraction, Rockefeller family members took a powerful action to boost the divestment movement.

Resource Generation is rethinking how it relates to financial advisers, helping their members navigate a field that is biased against redistribution. To be included on their referral list, the organization is now inviting financial advisers like Good Ancestors to fill out a survey that includes how they would respond to various scenarios, including a client that wants to give away 10% of their wealth every year for 10 years to racial justice groups. “Believe it or not, there is a growing market for anti-capitalist wealth advisers,” says Leccese of Resource Generation.

More than 100 Resource Generation members have gone through 10-month-long “praxis” groups—part study, part personal support—to move toward radical redistribution. Part of this is a session that Leccese frames as, “How much is enough for me? How much is enough for the world? How much is too much to keep?”

“What really inspires me is the potential of the great wealth transfer,” says Brobbey, referring to the trillions about to be handed off to younger generations. “We want to be ready and optimistic that there will be people who want to radically redistribute this wealth for repair and regeneration.”

The firm is helping to give “early adopters” the support and oxygen they need to disrupt the system, says Brobbey.

“Our clients will be partners in pursuing a radically different vision of the world,” she adds. “This is a lifelong journey of healing for all of us as we try to recover a lost story—or write a new economic story of justice and collective liberation.”

This article was originally published by Yes! Magazine

Housing Projects And Empty Lots. How Chanell Stone Is Reframing Nature Photography
By Will Matsuda

Chanell Stone photographs places like overgrown lots and green spaces at public housing projects, often including herself in the frame. Above, “In search of a certain Eden,” 2019, Brooklyn.
Chanell Stone

When most people think about traditional nature photography, black and white images of towering mountains and rushing rivers in the American West are often what comes to mind. It’s a genre that was made popular by men like Ansel Adams and Edward Weston, whose work in the early 1900s often positioned the natural world as something that is remote, wild and untouched.

But missing from this tradition is another kind of landscape — the natural beauty found within cities.

“For many Black people, rural nature, places like national parks, aren’t very accessible,” says Chanell Stone. Above, “Imperial Courts,” 2018, Los Angeles.
Chanell Stone

It’s in these settings that the California-based photographer Chanell Stone, 29, challenges this genre of photography. Working within predominantly Black neighborhoods in Brooklyn, Los Angeles and her home city of Oakland, Stone photographs locations like overgrown lots and green spaces at public housing projects, often including herself in the frame.

“For many Black people, rural nature, places like national parks, aren’t very accessible,” says Stone. “Sometimes it’s the cost, but more often the issue is societal. As Black people, it feels like these rural spaces aren’t for us. I want to turn that idea on its head.”

“In the Overgrowth,” 2019, Los Angeles.
Chanell Stone

The data seems to back this up. Black Americans account for less than 2% of national park visitors, according to a 2018 report published by the George Wright Society.

Rather than leave the city in search of natural beauty, Stone heads into it. “It’s important to see the beauty in the most overlooked and mundane urban environments,” she says. “Growing up in a low-income neighborhood, I saw how the area was cast aside compared to other areas of Los Angeles. It made me think about why it was disregarded. But now these same places where I grew up are being gentrified. So apparently there was value there all along.”

“Fig,” 2019, Oakland.
Chanell Stone

Stone’s work offers a new take on basic questions about nature photography — questions like where is nature located? Who is the genre for? Who gets to practice nature photography and what even counts as nature anyway?

Stone says the answers to these questions have almost always been seen through a very specific lens — one that is white, male and rooted in a narrative of westward expansion that largely erases Native communities from the landscape. When Stone photographs herself in the middle of a patch of plants at a public housing complex in Brooklyn, she makes these implicit biases clear for the viewer.

“Early landscape photography perpetuates a cultural amnesia. There is another kind of forgetting and erasure happening now with gentrification in these Black communities where I am making pictures. That is why I put myself in these places and photos,” she says. “It is important to see a Black body in this space before gentrification erases the history and aesthetics of these neighborhoods. I want to reaffirm my presence, especially as a Black woman.”

“It’s important to see the beauty in the most overlooked and mundane urban environments,” says Stone. Above, “Balcony Year,” 2019, Oakland.
Chanell Stone

The images are all part of Stone’s series, “Natura Negra,” which she describes as an act of reclamation.

“Growing up, I only understood Black people’s relationship to nature through slavery. My textbook had two pages of Black history: slavery, the Emancipation Proclamation, and MLK. That’s it.”

Stone says she wants to correct this reductionist history, and show that Black people have a relationship with the land beyond one of terror and oppression. In her own family’s photography archive, for example, she found pictures of her grandparents on camping trips.

“Lorimer Court,” 2019, Brooklyn.
Chanell Stone

In one photograph from the Natura Negra series, Stone poses in her grandmother’s backyard, a space filled with aloe and other succulents suited for the Los Angeles sun. She is shirtless, staring directly at the camera. She explained that it is a place where she feels safe.

“I want Black people to be able to move within these spaces without worrying about their life being taken,” she says.

In “Potted Earth,” a 2019 portrait in Los Angeles, Stone poses in her grandmother’s backyard.
Chanell Stone

That feeling of safety, she says, starts with reinforcing a sense of closeness to the land.

“I want Black people to understand our connections to nature, both urban and rural,” says Stone. “I want to destroy the notion that it isn’t for us.”

This article was originally published by NPR.

How the Beaches of the South Got There
By Livia Gershon

For many people, summer means days spent at idyllic beaches that stretch along the coastline of the American South. But as historian Andrew W. Kahrl writes, Americans haven’t always seen southern coasts as attractive places.

At the start of the twentieth century, Kahrl writes, shorelines were the South’s “most forsaken and forgotten lands.” They were unsuited to most agricultural purposes, prone to violent storms, and covered in forests where dangerous animals lived. But developers were beginning to see the promise in creating seaside getaways.

Local jumps in real estate values were accompanied by increased racial terrorism.

One barrier standing in their way was Black farmers, many of whom had been relegated to the less-fertile land near the ocean. By the 1920s, nightriders were burning Black-owned homes across the coastal South and warning African Americans to sell their land. Local jumps in real estate values were accompanied by increased racial terrorism.

Some Black locals responded with their own development plans. In 1923, a group of Black doctors, lawyers, and ministers bought Shell Island, North Carolina, and turned it into a resort.

“After three successful seasons, it suffered a series of fires ‘of undetermined origin’ that eventually forced investors to cut their losses and abandon the property, thus restoring the ‘color line’ in North Carolina’s coastal real estate market,” Kahrl writes.

To make their plans work, developers didn’t just need land. They needed help from the federal government, which soon obliged. It built roads and bridges to remote areas. And, in the 1930s and ’40s, lobbyists from the American Shore and Beach Preservation Association persuaded federal officials to fund projects fortifying beaches against storms and floods. Some Army Corps of Engineers officials protested, in vain, that it wasn’t their job to protect private property from the forces of nature.

Beyond protecting the beaches, Kahrl writes, the federal government soon found itself responsible for replenishing them with sand and even building new beaches. For example, in 1945, Virginia Beach, Virginia, was a small resort town, many of whose year-round residents were Black farmers. By 1965, it was the state’s largest city. The change was largely thanks to the city, state, and federal governments, which spent tens of millions of dollars turning its wild, unstable coastline into a long white-sands beach. (As natural ocean activity washes the sand away, it must still be replenished frequently.)

Over time, government agencies embraced their pro-development mission. In a 1964 report, “Land Against the Sea,” the Army Corps of Engineers declared that “our campaign against the encroachment of the sea must be waged with the same care that we would take against any other enemy threatening our boundaries.”

And in 1968, the National Flood Insurance Program began subsidizing the insurance of private coastal property against predictable, periodic floods, encouraging new development. The Sun Belt boom of the next few decades was a testament to that program, and the continuing collaboration between developers and the government.

“Few places benefited more from the power of an activist state to fuel the growth and development of private industry,” Kahrl writes.

This article was originally published by JSTOR Daily.

The Severe Health Consequences of Housing Instability
By Frances Gill

The relationship between housing and health is intuitive and multifaceted. Causal pathways linking housing and individual health include everything from environmental health concerns (lead poisoning in old homes, for an example) to neighborhood characteristics (walkability, safety, access to affordable supermarkets) to the psychosocial stress of financial instability.

The latter is of particular interest to public health researchers because the health effects of financially-related housing instability are so far reaching. Rent burdened households — i.e. households that spend more than 30 percent of their monthly income on rent — suffer profound health consequences as a direct result of their housing status. As more and more American households become rent-burdened, the downstream health consequences experienced by these households need to be articulated and addressed, preferably by upstream solutions.

A rent burdened household is less likely to be able to afford sufficient food, to have a usual source of medical care, or to seek needed medical treatment. In fact, a rent burdened household is more likely to ultimately use the emergency room for medical treatment, potentially at a later, more severe, less treatable point in the disease course.

Housing stability in the U.S. is threatened by rising rents, inadequate housing stock, and poor access to legal resources to fight evictions. (The NYC Right to Counsel Coalition estimates that half of evictions wouldn’t have occurred if residents had had an attorney). Housing instability itself — which can be broadly defined as falling behind on rent, moving frequently, or experiencing a period of homelessness — is associated with enormous health consequences: poorer self-reported health and more frequent hospitalizations for both parents and children.

The actual experience of losing one’s home also has a litany of associated negative health outcomes. In a systematic review of scientific literature on home foreclosures and health, researchers noted significant associations between foreclosures and higher body mass index, higher systolic blood pressure, a greater frequency of psychological distress queries, poorer reported health, a higher number of positive depression screens and self-reported anxiety attacks, an increased number of service calls about domestic violence, higher rates of suicide, increased number of emergency visits and hospitalizations, higher rates of alcohol dependence, lower rates of health insurance, higher rates of cost-related unmet health needs, and higher rates of cost-related prescription non-adherence.

In one study, the authors found that an outbreak of West Nile Virus in California was likely related to a rise in the number of abandoned swimming pools because there were so many foreclosed homes in the area.

The distribution of housing instability also falls more heavily on people of color: 54.7% of Black households were categorized as rent burdened in 2015, while only 42.7% of White households were. Racial health disparities (chronic disease burdens, cancer rates and mortality, geographic access to health care, to name just a few) have been studied for more than half a century but still remain stable, and some researchers have speculated that persistent residential segregation is one of the common threads that links many of these disparities together.

The health problems associated with housing are very well documented, and they are also often very expensive. Health care delivery systems, eager to save money by decreasing hospitalizations and decreasing emergency room utilization, are keenly aware of potential solutions. In Oregon, Massachusetts, New York, and Vermont, state Medicaid programs have sought waivers allowing them to spend Medicaid funds on more broadly defined social services, including providing permanent shelter for patients experiencing homelessness. Hospitals in Illinois have partnered with the Department of Housing and Urban Development to fund permanent supportive housing for homeless patients. Doing so is ultimately much cheaper than paying for the emergency care that homeless and unstably housed patients often seek.

Another approach involves intervening earlier by providing financial support to families so that they can move out of high-poverty neighborhoods. A randomized controlled trial conducted in five cities in the mid-1990’s demonstrated that when residents of low-income neighborhoods were provided with vouchers to move to high-income neighborhoods and provided assistance facilitating that move, they had significantly lower rates of diabetes, obesity, and psychological distress. Participants in this trial who were children at the time of the move were more likely to attend college, had higher average earnings, and lower rates of single parenthood. Another study showed that children who experienced a period of homeless in utero were more likely to have fair or poor health and to be at risk for developmental delays.

Among the many social determinants of health, housing is of particular interest to both public health researchers and community activists alike. The need for stable and affordable housing is felt urgently by communities, and this emergency is manmade: municipal politics that serve the interests of the wealthy have led to decisions that have drained our cities of affordable housing and drastically exacerbated rates of homelessness in many American cities. There’s no shortage of research that demonstrates the health consequences this will have, but it remains to be seen whether there will be a shortage of political will to meaningfully address these issues.

This article was originally published by The People’s Policy Project

What Is Trauma-Informed Design?
By Carl Winfield

For many of us, the global lockdowns stemming from the COVID-19 pandemic have made our homes places of respite, healing, and renewal. But for many others, including the unhoused, “home” is not always healing and can in fact be just the opposite.

Shari Stratton knows that all too well. For her, “home” meant a constant threat of domestic violence. When she eventually left, she had nowhere to turn until she found Arroyo Village, a supportive housing complex designed for those with traumatic histories. In a written profile she said she had stayed with friends and had applied for a shelter but instead was provided an apartment in Arroyo Village. She had worried that apartment living would be loud, a trigger for her PTSD, but that hasn’t been a problem for her.

“The apartments are really soundproof and it’s a secure, safe place to live,” she wrote. They were soundproofed by design in fact. The growing awareness of the impact of the built environment on our health is one reason for the growth of trauma-informed design — design that includes adaptations to support a strengths-based framework based in an understanding of, and responsiveness to, the impact of trauma.

Sandra Serna, vice-president health and housing at Stewards of Affordable Housing for the Future (SAHF), said that the COVID-19 pandemic put a spotlight on the importance of home as a safe and health-protecting haven.

“Substandard housing — places that are overcrowded, dark, confining, poorly ventilated, or without access to social support — really highlight the negative impact poor-quality indoor environments can have on health,” she added.
Chad Holtzinger, president of the Denver-based architecture firm Shopworks Architecture, sees this connection of housing to physical and mental health in his daily work. “Places don’t feel great and you know why: they’re dark; they’re not connected to the environment; and they don’t have a lot of options for living. It looks great from the outside, but when you walk in, the space looks gross and you can’t put your finger on what’s wrong. We’re trying to put our finger on it by saying: ‘Here are those spaces that promote feelings of well-being and connection to the environment, that speak to the quality of life.’”

Denver’s Arroyo Village, a 60-bed homeless shelter that also includes 35 units of low-income permanent supportive housing and 95 units of affordable housing for individuals and families, is one of those spaces.

Stephanie Miller, CEO of the Delores Project, which manages Arroyo Village in partnership with Rocky Mountain Communities, said that in Denver, the pandemic has brought seven to eight other shelters together to help open auxiliary shelters. Moreover, the city’s push to incorporate trauma-informed design principles has begun to change how spaces are considered.

“We used to be one of the few shelters in Denver that was trauma-informed, but the pandemic has helped shift the culture, the mindset, and the innovation frameworks to intentional, housing-first, strength-based interventions that give as much choice and autonomy to individuals,” Miller said. She added that the city is investing in 13 affordable housing projects in its development pipeline, which will produce 1,021 units of affordable housing, including a 75-bed medical respite community.

Whose Trauma Gets Addressed?

Trauma-informed practices have been, and remain, firmly rooted in design, although Black, Brown, and Indigenous people have not historically benefited from the practice.

The murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, and the health disparities highlighted by the COVID-19 pandemic, have shown the degree to which race-based violence and discrimination underpin U.S. policy. This discrimination has been mirrored in housing policies, including redlining, that continue to have traumatic effects on people of color. 

“In so many ways trauma-informed approaches have been for the benefit of a particular class or focus, situated in power,” said Abdul-Qadir Islam, a scholar at Columbia University’s Teachers College. “In the broader scheme, as we think about people learning, and how people engage with the spaces in the world around them, much of it is centered around the white upper class that have access to resources to address their trauma.”

Researchers Lillian Comas-Diaz, Gordon Nagayama Hall, and Helen Neville have determined that the symptoms of racial trauma, such as fatigue, lack of focus, hypervigilance, avoidance, suspiciousness, headaches, and heart palpitations, are among those clinically outlined for diagnosing Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). But unlike PTSD, which is linked to a particular experience or series of experiences, racial trauma is marked by continuous direct and indirect exposure to race-based stress, which has a traumatic effect on society as a whole.

Holtzinger, whose firm Shopworks Architecture designed Arroyo Village, said that the organization’s work has been informed by training that shows a link between adverse childhood experiences (ACE) and brain development. He added that as a result, Shopworks began thinking about ways the built environment can be welcoming, feel safe, and help with the repair and healing of the brain and the prefrontal cortex.

Designing for Trauma

That consideration, according to Miller, was key in creating trauma-informed spaces at Arroyo Village.

One trauma-informed consideration is the stairways. Having substantial lighting, cut-out windows, and corridors that are larger than normal highlight interrelationships that enable people to feel comfortable and safe in a building at any time, Miller said.

“Trauma-informed design for any community would have to look at the space and environment, as well as the structural design and space in terms of landscaping, such as the addition of exterior fences and light fixtures. You can translate that to the community making sure there’s enough open space and choices in space for residents.”

Serna also noted that the Sanderson Apartments in Denver, which opened in 2017, have provided developers and property managers with a model for implementing trauma-informed practices in affordable housing. For the design, Davis Partnership Architects, in collaboration with the Mental Health Center of Denver, sought to include design principles beneficial to health and well-being, including elements such as green space and natural light, Serna said.

“A lot of work went into making sure there were design elements that facilitated safety and belonging,” she said. “Some residents have said: ‘This is the first space I’ve been in that’s felt safe and welcoming.’”

Serna said that including residents’ needs and ideas in the design sends the message that “This is for you: This is your home.” She added that, while such examples are anecdotal, the benefits a thoughtful, well-designed space can have can’t be underestimated.”

Quality of life has become all the more important in the wake of COVID-19. As Black, Brown, and Indigenous people in the U.S. increasingly question and criticize systems that support inequality — including the criminal justice and financial systems — there are some who maintain that the institutionalization of trauma-informed principles is necessary to address rapidly shifting demographics.

“Many corporations, industries, and other stakeholders are now interested in trauma-informed principles and redress for larger swaths of the population, because the majority of that population is now turning racially and culturally diverse in ways that power holders now have to address in order to continue to hold power,” Islam said. “People are saying enough is enough.”

The Way Forward: Residents’ Voices

The key to implementing trauma-informed design practices in community development, and expanding them to heal communities, is talking to residents.

CommonBond Communities, a member of Stewards of Affordable Housing for the Future, hired a behavioral consultant to work with staff and residents to determine where they feel comfortable talking about their experiences and how they continue to be shaped by them. CommonBond did this with the understanding that mental wellness is a priority for residents and staff. Moreover, Holtzinger says, the experiences of people who have not been housed must be paramount in creating spaces that are conducive to healing.

At the same time, Islam noted that such conversations need to be expanded dramatically in order to redress white supremacy.
“In the U.S. system, there exist noticeable traumas toward marginalized bodies over generations. If that trauma is to be informed, we have to listen to each other,” Islam said. “The systems that are operating in this country now are not listening to trauma-informed practices because they don’t accept that trauma is significant enough to affect their lives, or those of marginalized people.”

Serna noted that including residents in the design of the space sends a message that it is a home in which every resident has a stake. She added that, beyond just a roof, the building is also a hub to connect residents to other things that help them to thrive. The effort to connect residents and help form a larger, interrelated community beyond a particular development has led to the exploration of ways in which people can begin to address their trauma collectively and heal.

While the human resources cost represents the single biggest vulnerability to a building, according to Holtzinger, that barrier is not insurmountable so long as people can communicate with each other.

“With some simple refinements and an acknowledgment of a reframing of priorities, those costs can fall because the relationship between staff and residents has been stabilized,” he said. “The environment is inherently safe, and harmful behaviors are discouraged.”

Islam has maintained that it is imperative that Black, Brown, and Indigenous people realize that they have power, and that agency is connected to power in the community. A welcoming space designed to acknowledge and address ongoing racial trauma, can empower communities and provide a context for newcomers, so they can begin to understand the communities they enter.

Having endured the COVID-19 lockdowns, and now, mutating strains of the virus, the principles inherent in trauma-informed design — safety, acceptance, and empathy — have an added resonance. The fear and uncertainty caused by the pandemic is universal, and our collective need to address that, and other traumas, is undeniable. But, if there’s any lesson that can be taken from the events of the last 18 months, it is that spaces that welcome us and affirm our shared experiences are as vital for healing as any medicine.

This story was published by Next City with the permission of Build Healthy Places Network; it appears in Crosswalk, a gathering place for stories that illustrate the deep connection between health and place. 

Growing Food and Latino Culture in Tucson’s Barrio Centro
by Lourdes Medrano

In a long-abandoned school playground, a small-scale farm is planting seeds for a more equitable and sustaining food system in a neighborhood where fresh, affordable food is hard to come by.

The Midtown Farm in Tucson, Arizona, is an offshoot of the Flowers & Bullets Collective in the Barrio Centro neighborhood. Tito Romero and Jacob Robles, friends since childhood now in their early 30s, launched the organization in 2012 to provide healthy food alternatives, to improve their neighborhood, and to share their Latino and Indigenous cultures. “The idea of growing food, being sustainable, has been a trend for some time in predominantly White, middle-class communities,” Robles says. “For communities in the barrio, communities of color, those trends don’t reach us as easily.”

The friends spent about five years planting gardens and installing rainwater harvesting systems in people’s backyards before they and other members of the collective began leasing a 4-acre portion of their closed former elementary school to grow crops and build a sense of community. Where the friends, as youngsters, used to kick around a soccer ball and dangle from monkey bars, they now harvest fruits and vegetables, raise goats and chickens, and put on gardening workshops for their neighbors.

Although urban agriculture has a long history, Barrio Centro is part of a more recent movement to increase food security in underserved, largely ethnic communities while retaining or reclaiming cultural traditions and values that people can share and express through those spaces. In West Sacramento, California, the We Grow Urban Farm sits across from an elementary school in the low-income neighborhood of Broderick, where it serves local residents and seeks “to empower the next generation of farmers of color.” And in Chicago, the Urban Growers Collective, a Black- and women-led nonprofit, cultivates eight urban farms mostly on the South Side, where more than 76% of residents are Black.

Barrio Centro sprawls next to a highway and sits directly beneath the flight path of Davis-Monthan Air Force Base. Aircraft noise led to the closure of Julia Keen Elementary in 2004, depriving residents of not just a school, but a vibrant neighborhood hub. “This school was extremely important for this community,” says Romero. “It was two meals a day for kids, it was after-school programming, it was youth sports, it was employment. It was a safe space.”
The farm is a way of restoring some of the lost community space, Romero says, adding that the goal is to someday buy more or all of the 9.5-acre campus to accommodate growth. He spends many mornings at the farm doing various chores. Like most of the collective’s dozen core members, he is a volunteer; Robles is one of three full-time employees. On a recent summer day, Romero was in the greenhouse spraying a natural pest repellent on dozens of plant seedlings that would later be transplanted into the ground. “We have some kale, some chard, some mustards, lettuce, broccoli,” he says, his voice trailing as the thunderous roar of a jet invades the greenhouse.

Long before the first seeds were planted, Romero says, he and his friends would often wonder at the possibility of developing their enterprise on the campus. “For years, we would drive by the school and say, ‘Damn, everything that we’re doing in the community, imagine that we could do it there.’”

What they were doing was selling T-shirts with culturally relevant artistic imagery, a venture that later would finance the first seeds of what would become the agriculture component of Flowers & Bullets. “We started with $500 and some T-shirts, meetings at the park, potlucks at each other’s homes,” Romero says. In time, one backyard garden led to another and another.

Favorable neighborhood reception to their projects motivated the group to organize around the need for a green space that residents could call their own, Robles says. They’d begun looking at their neighborhood through a different lens since taking an ethnic studies program in high school that encouraged activism and critical thinking from a Mexican-American perspective on such topics as socio-economic inequality. While the program stoked controversy and legal battles, it taught Romero and Robles that they could effect change within their own community.

“There’s a lot of families here, generational families, and people take a lot of pride in this community,” Robles says. “And there’s a lot of beauty in those things, but if I’m being completely real, there’s also a lot of struggle.” That duality is embodied in the name of the collective. “We like to say that flowers are the art, the beauty, the culture—and the bullets are kind of the struggle, the things we had to face in our community growing up, and the resistance to those things, like gang influence and drug abuse.”

Most of Barrio Centro’s residents are Latinos, many low-income. Their neighborhood isn’t blessed with the abundance of farmers markets or green spaces found in more affluent neighborhoods, but the collective set out to change that. In 2017, after submitting a project proposal for the farm concept to the Tucson Unified School District, the Flowers & Bullets Collective got the keys to the vacant school property.

By then, Dora Martinez, a member of the collective, had joined the nonprofit. Her previous work as a farm manager was crucial in developing the group’s sustainable agriculture program. In April 2018, the group received a $600,000 three-year grant from the University of Arizona’s Agnese Nelms Haury Program in Environment and Social Justice. It was a big boost for a project that sought not just to feed residents, but also to become a neighborhood resource that could offer educational workshops, jobs, and a sense of empowerment.

Existing programs at the farm and others being developed in concert with the community aim to get even more people involved and connected in the neighborhood. Although activities slowed when the coronavirus pandemic broke out, the farm became a drive-through destination where residents could obtain masks, hand sanitizer, and free seeds.

Now, the collective is gradually reactivating programs. After a recent harvest of native corn, Robles and the group’s project manager, Silvia Valdillez, led a small workshop for residents on how to grind it into masa, or dough, for tortillas, using ancient methods dating to Mesoamerican culture.

“For us, these foodways are a part of our identity,” Robles says. “They are a connection to the land, the seasonal cycles and how to maintain our health and our ceremonies. It’s also important not to lose these practices that our ancestors maintained and died for.”

Another program, the subscription-based “barrio supported agriculture,” offers people a bagful of freshly-picked produce for $10-$20 each. People can stop by the farm to pick it up, or they can donate it to someone else.

On a recent Tuesday, local resident and farm supporter Susana Valdez left with a bag loaded with about 20 pounds of produce, including green beans, eggplant, onions, garlic, tomatoes, and Armenian cucumbers. “You get different things, whatever’s in season,” she says. “The bell peppers and the carrots may not be as pretty as the ones you see in the store, but they taste amazing.”

In fact, Valdez says, knowing those who put the time and effort into growing crops for the community—without pesticides—makes her appreciate their produce even more. “I often hang out there with my child and I get to support them,” she says. “They let you feed the goats, they let you feed the chickens, and children can pick vegetables. It’s beautiful, it’s bringing people together.”

The farm is a critical piece of the neighborhood transformation that Flowers & Bullets seeks, but its work extends beyond the two acres of rows of peppers, squash, basil and other crops that tint green the arid landscape. The collective has planted some 300 desert willows, mesquites, and other native trees throughout the neighborhood and successfully petitioned the city to install additional street lightning and speed bumps. And it covered the initial expense of rainwater harvesting systems so residents could take advantage of a government rebate program. This summer, Flowers & Bullets is tapping residents for ideas to revitalize a vacant lot in the neighborhood.

The farm also serves as an outlet for people required to do community service after a brush with the law, or as they adapt to life after incarceration. Tim Deisering, 25, completed his community service at the farm in 2019, after being cited for trespassing on private property. He picked vegetables, dug holes with a backhoe tractor, and fed brewer’s grain to the goats, among other chores.

“I never had a green thumb before I went there, or even really an interest in it to be honest,” he says. “Working over there at Flowers & Bullets definitely changed my outlook on that. I learned how to grow my own food, I learned how to harvest my own food.”

Although he no longer has to do it, Deisering still stops by the farm to help out. He’s one of a wider group of volunteers who lend a hand when time and responsibilities allow. “The other day we were covering plants from the sun so they don’t get too beat up,” he says. “There’s always something to do at the farm.”

Six-year-old Aden Alexander likes to catch pesky animals before they munch on crops. One day, the boy and his father, farm employee Brandon Alexander, placed a rabbit trap near a shady hackberry tree on an edge of the farm. “He really likes to hang out here,” says the father, who grew up in the neighborhood. “My nana and my tata came here a long time ago and I still live here.”

Alexander, who along with Robles tends the farm all day, says he enjoys working at a place that offers nutritious food to his family and his neighbors. And, while the farm addresses a real need to ensure equitable access to healthy food, Romero points out, it’s also an effective conduit for residents to share successes and challenges. “It’s healing, to be able to not just create a community but also have a space to gather in.”

This article was originally published in YES Magazine.

How Thousands of Black Farmers Were Forced Off Their Land
By Kali Holloway

In 1883, less than 20 years after emancipation, Curtis Gentry bought nearly 1,500 acres of undeveloped land in Shiloh, a rural community in the Alabama county where he had once been enslaved. Alongside his brother Turner, with whom he was able to reunite after emancipation—unlike the members of so many other Black families—Gentry cleared that property, uprooting trees, brush, and undergrowth. Once the land was arable, he planted and harvested an array of crops, including ribbon cane, corn, and peas.

“He was a hard worker,” Bernice Atchison, Gentry’s granddaughter-in-law, told me. “Not only did he clear his own land, but he took jobs helping white people clear their land.” He taught his family how to take care of the farm while he worked on other people’s farms, bringing in extra money to the household.

Gentry’s children continued to farm after their father’s death, and each subsequent generation was trained in the ways of tending to their inherited land trust. When Atchison married Gentry’s grandson Allen in 1953, the young couple were given charge of nearly 280 acres of farmland, which included amenities built by those who came before.

“We had a ribbon cane mill that made syrup. We had a saw mill. There was an old still that they had used to make whiskey back in those days,” Atchison said. “I loved farming, because you have to come to understand the land.”

In 1959, the Atchisons bought another 39 acres, and two years later, they built a house in which they would raise eight children. The couple sold vegetables and produce to loyal customers, most of whom worked in nearby factories and plants. In 1981, just after the Atchisons were certified as United States Department of Agriculture pig breeders, they received a letter from the USDA notifying them that they qualified for federal loans to buy “farrowing pens for the sows to have their little babies in,” Atchison said. She and Allen had spent years helping neighbors build their own farrowing pens, which had been paid for with USDA farm subsidies. “Helping Mr. Waldruf and Mr. Jones and Mr. Scott, we saw that the loan program had worked for them. So we went down to the USDA to get the money to build ours,” she said.

But there was a crucial difference. “They were white, and we were Black,” Atchison explained. When she and Allen went to the local Farm Service; Agency office in 1981, the FSA representative, a white man named Mr. Byrd, told them there were no loan applications available, Atchison said. On a return visit, Byrd told the couple he saw no reason they needed to expand their farm.

The Atchisons made multiple follow-up trips to the FSA office, but each time, Byrd informed them they would have to wait until local white farmers received their USDA loans before the couple could even apply. From the early 1980s to the 1990s, the Atchisons were denied USDA subsidies not only for farrowing pens and pig feed but also for equipment, fertilizer, and land purchases. “We had several years of trying to go back and get loans that was supposedly available. And, of course, he would just tell us that there was no money or that it was all gone,” Atchison said. “It happened several years, year in and year out. He would tell you, ‘Oh, come back in the spring. Maybe there will be some [money] then.’” Once, when they finally succeeded in filling out an application, “Mr. Byrd tore up our application and threw it in the wastebasket. I gave him a little piece of my mind, and he told me, ‘Nigger, ain’t no money here for you.’”

The couple got no response to multiple complaints they sent to the USDA’s civil rights office in Washington, D.C. Ronald Reagan had gutted the office in 1983, after which, staffers later admitted, they “simply threw discrimination complaints in the trash without ever responding to or investigating them.” Back in Alabama, Byrd kept his position as the agency’s local loan gatekeeper.

Since 1965, multiple federal agencies—most notably the USDA itself—have issued reports citing, as the US Commission on Civil Rights put it that year, “unmistakable evidence that racial discrimination” within the Agriculture Department “has served to accelerate the displacement and impoverishment of the Negro farmer.” Through discriminatory loan denials and deliberate delays in financial aid, the USDA systematically blocked Black farmers from accessing critical federal funds. “If you are Black and you’re born south of the Mason-Dixon Line and you tried to farm, you’ve been discriminated against,” Lloyd Wright, the director of the USDA Office of Civil Rights under Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, and a Black Virginia farmer, told me. The debts Black farmers consequently accrued cost them millions of acres, which were then snapped up by white buyers. In 1920, the number of Black farmers peaked at nearly 1 million, constituting 14 percent of all farmers. But between 1910 and 1997, they lost 90 percent of their property. (White farmers lost only 2 percent in the same period.) As of 2017, there were just 35,470 Black-owned farms, representing 1.7 percent of all farms. The land Black farmers lost, some 16 million acres, is conservatively estimated to be worth $250 billion to $350 billion today.

In 1997, facing mounting debt, Bernice Atchison signed on as a plaintiff in Pigford v. Glickman, a class-action lawsuit against the USDA brought by Black farmers alleging that the agency had discriminated against them and failed to respond adequately to discrimination complaints. In the consent decree issued two years later, and in a second settlement in 2010, the USDA agreed to provide claimants with foreclosure relief, priority consideration for future federal farm loans, access to the agency’s land inventory, and billions of dollars to cancel the wrongful debt and interest charges that resulted from the agency’s discrimination. But the promised resolution never came. Instead, the USDA continued to seize Black farmers’ land through foreclosure, and the Justice Department under George W. Bush and Obama poured millions of dollars into fighting claims and denying payouts. Many surviving Pigford farmers are deeper in debt today than they were before the lawsuit.

Atchison was among those who never received debt cancellation. She has become one of the most visible and vocal Pigford plaintiffs and has testified about the failures of the settlement before Congress. Atchison and her family have lost more than 250 acres since the 1980s. She still farms the 60 acres that remain, raising “enough to fill up my three deep freezers” and to share with her kids. Allen died in 1992, amid the couple’s battles with the USDA.
In March 2021, President Joe Biden signed the coronavirus relief package, which includes $4 billion in debt relief for “socially disadvantaged farmers,” a designation that includes Black, Native American, Hispanic, Asian, and Pacific Islander farmers. Despite the diversity of that coalition, the bill was ;attacked by conservatives like South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham as slavery “reparations,” though economists at Duke University and Harvard Law School reported that the measure offers a “pittance” compared with the land’s true value.

Also lost in the discussion of the bill was the fact that it offers debt cancellation only to farmers who have outstanding USDA loans. But because of the agency’s racist lending policies, few Black farmers ever received USDA money in the first place. Wright estimates that only 8 percent of Black farmers would benefit from any USDA loan cancellation program. Nonetheless, at least 13 lawsuits have been filed by white farmers arguing that the law unconstitutionally permits “reverse racism.” Injunctions issued in those cases by judges in Tennessee, Florida, and Wisconsin have effectively stalled debt relief.

“Black farmers have been denied services by the Department of Agriculture for 150 years. Now that a little bit of money is supposed to go to people who have been harmed for the last century and a half, white farmers have suddenly decided it’s inappropriate for one group to get money that another group does not,” Wright told me. “I tell folks that we didn’t get 40 acres and a mule. Neither did Black farmers get debt relief under Pigford. So this [the halt in payouts] is consistent with all of the other promises that have been broken.”

The USDA has vowed to fight those lawsuits, but many doubt they will ever see fairness from “the last plantation,” as the USDA is known among Black farmers. Atchison told me that she is not hopeful her acres will be returned.
“The land has been resold a couple of times since it was originally sold. I don’t know whether it can ever be retrievable,” she said. “If I had gotten those loans, just think about where we would be today. Think about the assets that I would have today. That was generational wealth. Our wealth was taken away.”

The use of debt to gain control of ever more land in the United States is almost as old as the country itself. In 1803, Thomas Jefferson endorsed usurious lending to Indigenous peoples as a colonial land-grabbing scheme. “To promote this disposition to exchange lands, which they have to spare and we want,” Jefferson wrote in a letter to future president William Henry Harrison, “we shall push our trading houses, and be glad to see the good and influential individuals among them run in debt because we observe that when these debts get beyond what the individuals can pay, they become willing to lop them off by a cession of lands.” During the Civil War, Black enslavement would be abolished in name, only to be supplanted within a decade by debt slavery in the form of sharecropping. Instead of sharing in the crop yields of the farmland they worked, landless Black laborers—many of whom were tenant farmers on the same lands where they had once been enslaved—were ensnared in a cycle of perpetual debt and poverty. Under the Black Codes, a series of oppressive laws passed throughout the South during Reconstruction, African Americans could be arrested for breaking or attempting to renegotiate labor contracts and saddled with fines they were forced to work off. Attempts to escape debt servitude were met with white terror violence. Black sharecroppers involved in unionizing efforts and other acts of dissent were massacred in 1919 in Elaine, Ark.; in 1931 in Camp Hill, Ala.; and in 1935 in Lowndes County, Ala.

The government’s reversal on its promise to give millions of newly emancipated Black folks 40 acres and a mule stood in contrast to its land-giveaway policies for white citizens. The Homestead Act of 1862 took some 270 million acres of territory that had been taken from Native Americans—10 percent of all US public lands—and reallocated it in 160-acre parcels to 1.6 million Americans, almost all native or foreign-born whites, the ancestors of roughly 45 million living American adults who continue to reap generational wealth from that land grab. The Southern Homestead Act of 1866 also put free and low-cost public lands into the hands of an overwhelmingly white cohort of owners. Despite being denied these sorts of government handouts, emancipated Black farmers had acquired 3 million acres by 1875, a figure that would rise to 12 million by 1900. Land ownership by Black farmers reached its peak in 1910, when they owned between 15 million and 19 million acres.

In the 20th century, mechanization and industrialization transformed farms from “labor-intensive to capital-intensive operations,” as the historian Pete Daniel writes. Debt became endemic, with farmers borrowing money during planting season and recouping the funds when crops were harvested and sold. “If you don’t get your money on time, then you’re not going to be able to be successful,” Lucious Abrams, one of the six original Pigford litigants, told me. “In order for you to have a successful crop, you need to start the first of the year putting out your lye and fertilizer, preparing your land, and seeing what type of nutrients you need to put out there. If you get your money in May or June, it’s almost time to start gathering your crop again.” For Abrams, the USDA’s loan disbursements often didn’t come in time: “They just stretch it out, and you don’t get your money till late. You don’t get enough money to operate—just enough to hang yourself.”

Abrams’s experience was not unique. As the House Committee on Government Operations concluded in a 1990 report, the USDA “categorically and systematically denied minority farmers access and full participation in the multitude of Federal Government programs designed to assist them” and therefore is “directly responsible for the loss of land and resources these farmers have experienced.”

A 1996 USDA-commissioned study found that “97 percent of disaster payments went to white farmers, while less than 1 percent went to black farmers,” and that white men were given thousands more in loan packages than Black men. The agency’s Civil Rights Action Team (CRAT) in 1997 determined that the USDA “took three times as long” to process Black farmers’ loans as those of white farmers, and even when a loan was approved, it often “never arrives…making it impossible for the farmer to earn any money from the farm.”

The CRAT study also found that Black farmers who appealed “well in advance of planting season” to their local FSA office for loans were often falsely informed that no applications were available or were denied critical information required for the application to be processed. In 1998, the USDA’s National Commission on Small Farms reported that Black farmers were subjected to “indifference and blatant discrimination…in their interactions with USDA programs and staff.”

Local control over USDA loan disbursement is at the heart of the problem, Wright and others said. Three- to 11-person elected panels called county committees essentially control every aspect of FSA financial aid distribution at the local level, including hiring the staffers in agency offices. “The county committee system is set up to take care of their family, their friends, and themselves. And Blacks are not one of the above,” Wright told me. “They need to eliminate the county committees and…[hire staffers] federally like the rest of the government. Local control is great in most environments, but it has never worked for Black folks.”

The USDA’s horrific treatment of Black farmers also results from a civil rights department that has consistently failed in its responsibilities to the farmers it serves and to its own employees. Allegations of racism against employees have dogged the agency since the 1970s.

“We’ve had racial epithets. We’ve had people called ‘nigger.’ We’ve had women assaulted. We’ve had women be retaliated against for making complaints,” said Lawrence Lucas, a high-level USDA staffer for nearly two decades and a former president of the USDA Coalition of Minority Employees. “The culture at USDA is the reason why Black farmers are having the problems they’re having now.”

The problems with Pigford began even before the consent decree was approved. More than 40 civil rights organizations and plaintiffs, including Timothy Pigford, filed letters with the US District Court objecting to the proposed settlement agreement, and in March 1999, hundreds of debt-saddled farmers trekked to Washington, D.C., to register their opposition in person. USDA lawyers and the lead attorney for the class, Alexander Pires, testified that every farmer would get full debt cancellation under the consent decree they had negotiated, which set up a two-track system. Track A offered, in Pires’s words, a “virtually automatic” $50,000 payment to farmers, even if they lacked documentary evidence. This was ideal because most farmers did not keep records, Pires testified, noting he had waived the discovery process during negotiations for the same reason.

Track B offered unlimited money if farmers had documents to back up their debt claims, but the more stringent “standard of proof was not burdensome,” USDA lawyers testified. And if neither track appealed to a farmer, attorneys claimed, they could opt out of the decree and file their own lawsuit.

Plaintiffs responded with a litany of objections. The consent decree did not compel the USDA to return wrongfully seized farmland, nor did it direct the USDA to punish employees who discriminated. (The USDA explicitly refused Judge Paul Friedman’s request to add a sentence stating it would make future “best efforts” to ensure employees followed anti-discrimination laws.) Farmers argued that $50,000 “won’t even buy a medium-sized tractor,” as Pigford complainant Vernon Breckinridge put it. (Class counsel admitted to guesstimating that the $50,000 figure would suffice for Black farmers based on the $37,500 payment that Tuskegee experiment victims received, though the agricultural economist Donald McDowell had calculated fair compensation at $250,000.) Plaintiffs also questioned class counsel’s decision to negotiate away discovery, which meant that the USDA was under no obligation to provide Black farmers with information, including from the farmers’ own files. If an arbitrator ruled against a Black farmer, the farmer got no money at all and had no right to appeal.

“If I were a mass murderer [who] was found guilty of the most heinous crime in the world, I have a right to appeal,” James Morrison, of the National Black Farmers Association, said at the hearing. “Are you telling me the farmer who has spent his entire life farming, who has been denigrated, who has been castigated, who has seen nothing short of pure hell, cannot have any opportunity to control what his fate is going to be based on?”
Over those protests, Judge Friedman approved the consent decree in April 1999, writing in his opinion that it was “a good first step.” Class counsel had estimated the number of complainants would hit 2,000. Instead, more than 22,000 Black farmers applied and were deemed eligible to join the class.

Five years later, it was clear the consent decree had failed. A 2004 investigation by the Environmental Working Group (EWG) found that 9 out of 10 Black farmers had been “denied any recovery.” An estimated 64,000 farmers were rejected because they missed the court’s original filing deadline, even though they submitted claims before the court’s “late claims” period. Another 9,000 had their claims refuted and got nothing. Just 10 percent of 173 eligible Track B filers were granted compensation. Of Pigford’s 22,700 claimants, just 371 got any kind of debt relief.

Under the Bush administration, the USDA “aggressively fought claims by African American farmers, contracting with United States Department of Justice lawyers who spent at least 56,000 staff hours and $12 million contesting individual farmer claims for compensation,” the EWG study found. In many cases, local FSA employees of the USDA simply contested Black farmers’ claims of racial discrimination.

Justice undone: J.L. Chestnut, a civil rights lawyer and Pigford class-action attorney, raised concerns about the settlement after seeing the number of rejected claims.

“The government is holding up progress with technicalities; and the same USDA agents that discriminated against the farmers in the first place are now being called upon to respond to and reject applications from Black farmer class members. The adjudicators are not making fair and consistent rulings which has caused many of the rejections,” J.L. Chestnut, a Black civil rights lawyer and a Pigford class-action attorney, said in 2000 after seeing the number of rejections. His law partner added that Black farmers should go “into the streets to fight for justice in this case. Do not trust the judge, the lawyers, the adjudicators, the monitor or anyone else to resolve this case.”

A major barrier to compensation was the consent decree’s “specifically identified, similarly situated white farmer” standard, which required Black farmers to locate a white farmer “in their county who applied for the same benefit program at the same time, with the same acreage, the same type of crop, the same credit history, and received a higher payment or better treatment than the African American farmer.” The USDA had some of this information in its files, but agency lawyers denied Freedom of Information Act requests from Black farmers and their attorneys. Without those details, Pigford farmers were forced to rely on public records and guesswork. One Black farmers’ advocate described applications getting rejected for misspellings of white farmers’ names and other minor issues.

“When they gave away discovery we was already sold out, because then you put the burden of proof back on the farmers—but you already had evidence that discrimination transpired all over the country over the years,” Abrams told me. “Al Pires and them, the last thing they told me was I had to go and find a similarly situated white farmer. How can I do that other than break into their fancy USDA offices, go through all the files, and then have the police be out there to take my behind to jail?”

In October 2000, just two weeks before a major filing deadline, Pires and his team admitted to the court that they were way behind. To ensure that “counsel’s failings should not be visited on their clients,” Judge Friedman added stipulations to ensure that claims would not be excluded from review. Less than six months later, he noted that the lawyers had “failed to meet the minimum requirement” on timely filings “even once,” which he labeled a “disturbing trend.” Less than two weeks later, after class counsel made what Judge Friedman called “the remarkable admission that they never had a realistic expectation of meeting” target dates, the court began to charge them daily fines for tardiness. Instead of improving submission rates, “counsel drastically increased the rate at which they withdrew petitions,” a move that, Judge Friedman wrote, “bring[s] into question Class Counsel’s fidelity to their client” and was “bordering on legal malpractice.” The US Court of Appeals would in 2002 also issue an opinion stating that Black farmers, as a result of class counsel’s incompetency, had experienced a “double betrayal: first by the [USDA], and then by their own lawyers.” Fearing for the fate of Black farmers, in 2001 Judge Friedman asked the American Bar Association Committee on Pro Bono and Public Services to “assemble a team of pro bono lawyers to assist Class Counsel on an emergency basis.” The effort made little difference.

“I went through two or three of those type of lawyers after Pires and them left me,” Abrams told me. “You sign up, they keep you for about a month, and then next thing you know, they drop you. Then a new one comes in, does the same thing.”

Generational wealth: Bernard Bates as a child on his family’s farm in Nicodemus, Kan., with his grandfather, who homesteaded 200 acres there, and other family members. (Courtesy of Bernard Bates’s family)
Bernard Bates had lost 950 acres of land, including some 200 acres originally homesteaded by his grandfather, who settled in Nicodemus, Kan., years after his own father fled the South after the Civil War. Bates told me that after a few difficult years in the 1980s, he tried to get a USDA loan but was denied an application. He joined Pigford, but his lawyer was of little use. “When we hooked up with Pigford, I thought we would have some help,” said Ava Bates, Bernard’s wife. “But in the end it was just a runaround. The lawyer lied all the way through. When we got back home and [Bernard] would try and get in touch with her, they would never answer their phone. They promised us a lot of stuff, but it wasn’t worth a hoot.”

In 2012, the former president of Bates’s local credit association signed an affidavit affirming that the lender’s board of directors, the federal land bank, and the local USDA office had colluded “to get Bernard out of farming” and that it had been decided they would “rather foreclose, even if they lost money, rather than to take Bernard’s money.” To this day, he has not gotten debt cancellation or his land back.

Attorney Tracy McCurty, the director of the Black Belt Justice Center and the co-organizer of a campaign to cancel the Pigford farmers’ debt, said there was a “ray of hope” in 2010, when Obama authorized $1.25 billion in debt cancellation funds for Black farmers who had been left out of the original class-action suit, a settlement that became known as Pigford II. But McCurty, Wright, and multiple farmers told me that because of poor oversight, much of the funding was squandered.

“Some of the attorneys informed the farmers that the agreement stated in black and white that ‘You’re going to get debt relief, so you really don’t need to continue to pay on this. Go ahead and buy feed and fertilizer and start farming,’” Wright told me. “So some of the farmers who could’ve struggled and paid their debts didn’t, because they were advised they didn’t have to. They ended up with interest and penalties accumulating for that five years, and it was so steep now they couldn’t pay. So many of them lost land that they otherwise would not have.”

Pires and his team were paid $15 million. After the second Pigford settlement, Judge Friedman granted a second team of lawyers a requested $90 million in attorneys’ fees and expenses. “They might have lined their pockets, but they didn’t do anything for the farmers,” said Everlyn Bryant, a Pigford legacy farmer from Arkansas. She and her late husband got $50,000—far short of the debt relief her family needed. They lost 900 acres to USDA foreclosure. “Even after the consent decree was done, I was telling the attorneys that $50,000 for a real farmer is nothing. It won’t even pay the diesel bill for one month.”

“Since the Pigford debacle, because farmers have these enormous debts, their credit is ruined with USDA. Their credit is ruined with other traditional lenders,” McCurty said. “How is it that these elder farmers in their 70s and 80s, who’ve suffered for over 30 years, are still having to present themselves pro se in federal court to delay foreclosure proceedings?”

“One of the things that really hurt was that I went across the country and talked with all these Black farmers. And this was supposed to make them whole again—and everything I told them was a lie,” Abrams told me. Living under the threat of foreclosure, his wife had a nervous breakdown; he has suffered from high blood pressure, diabetes, and kidney failure. “I thought that Pigford was going to make them whole again while they was living. A lot of them have died.”

In December 2020, President Biden nominated Tom Vilsack as agriculture secretary, infuriating many of the Pigford litigants. Lucas, the former president of the USDA Coalition of Minority Employees, said at the time that he was flooded with calls from Black farmers who worried that the appointment of Vilsack, who they believed had “shown such arrogance and indifference to civil rights,” confirmed their fear that they would never see justice. When Vilsack left the Agriculture Department at the end of Obama’s term in 2016, he presented a rosy picture of the strides the USDA had made to improve conditions for Black farmers and to end systemic racism within the agency. But according to Nathan Rosenberg and Bryce Wilson Stucki, who conducted a two-year analysis of Vilsack’s claims for The Counter, an investigative newsroom focused on food, the former agriculture secretary and his team distorted data to cover up the USDA’s continued failure to serve Black farmers. (Vilsack also made headlines in 2010 for firing Black USDA employee Shirley Sherrod based on false allegations.) After Vilsack asked Wright to return as head of the Civil Rights Office in 2009, his first task, Wright told me, was to tackle the 14,000 Bush-era discrimination complaints that had gone unaddressed, of which, he and his team determined, 4,000 had merit. Many of those complaints exceeded the two-year limit on receiving compensatory relief, so Wright and others attempted to find a fix. “We drafted a bill to extend the statute of limitations, and some members of the Congressional Black Caucus found the money to pay for it, and that bill passed twice in the House,” Wright said. But the bill hit roadblocks in the Senate. “My office didn’t have the same contacts in the Senate as we did in the House. I found out that not only were we not being helped by Secretary Vilsack, but that he may have been putting sand in the gears. He gave me zero help in trying to get it done.”

The Counter’s investigation found that those farmers never had their unwarranted debts settled. “USDA actually foreclosed on some of them and attempted to foreclose on others before their cases were resolved—despite a moratorium, mandated as part of the 2008 farm bill, on exactly this practice,” Rosenberg and Stucki reported. In fact, from 2006 to 2016, the USDA foreclosed on “Black-owned farms at a higher rate than on any other racial group…. The agency was more than six times as likely to foreclose on a Black farmer as it was on a white one,” they wrote.
“They just can’t assume that every time they aren’t successful it’s because of discrimination,” Vilsack would later state. “I think you can do a service to your client by not only fighting hard for them, but also explaining why they didn’t get the help that they thought they were entitled to, and it wasn’t anything to do with the color of their skin or their culture or whatever.”

“The reason why we do not trust Tom Vilsack is because during his administration, farmers continued to lose their land,” Wright told me. After all, the discrimination that spurred the Pigford lawsuit isn’t in the past. A Politico study revealed that the USDA “granted loans to only 37 percent of Black applicants last year in one program that helps farmers pay for land, equipment and repairs but accepted 71 percent of applications from white farmers.”
Wright is not hopeful Black farmers will ever get their due. “Trump was able to pay farmers these soybean payments when the product price went down because China was not buying soybeans,” he said. “If you want to do something, you get it done. If you don’t want to do it, you do process. And all the Department of Agriculture has done since this administration got in is process, as it relates to people of color.”

The USDA has said it plans to fight the lawsuits that are currently holding up debt cancellation payments to Black farmers. But in August, the agency failed to appeal one of the preliminary injunctions by the appointed deadline. McCurty, who has been aiding Black farmers with legal issues for years, believes that winning the court challenges is a long shot in any case. She has pushed for Senator Raphael Warnock, who proposed the $4 billion in debt cancellation in stand-alone legislation in February, and Senate cosponsor Cory Booker to seek more creative solutions. In September, Booker announced plans to include debt erasure for Black and other minority farmers in the budget reconciliation package that Democrats are currently drafting.

In order to sidestep the lawsuits that are preventing the funds allocated by the Covid relief act from being disbursed, the proposed bill would amend the American Rescue Plan by eliminating any mention of “socially disadvantaged farmers.” Instead, the bill’s provisions include 100 percent loan cancellation to USDA farm loan borrowers who fall under the category of “economically distressed.” It also allots $1 billion to debt restructuring for farmers. And just over another billion is divided among various services, including $350 million to those “determined to have suffered discrimination in Department of Agriculture farm lending programs.”

Wright, McCurty, and Lucas, who are advising Democrats on how to move forward with the bill, caution that history shows that if the USDA doesn’t explicitly make provisions for Black farmers, they are almost certain to be discriminated against yet again. To that end, Wright has suggested that “historically underserved farmers” should be one qualifier of eligibility for full debt cancellation, and that the $350 million allotted to victims of USDA discrimination be raised to $1 billion.

But whether any reconciliation bill will be passed at all remains to be seen. And every few months, another Pigford legacy farmer dies without seeing the federal government, or this country, do right by them. “Martin Luther King once said to tell Black folks to wait is the same as saying ‘never,’” Wright told me. “I’m not optimistic that they’ll get relief from any of these provisions, although I’m convinced that the president really intended that these programs be fairly implemented. The last plantation hasn’t caught up yet with that.”

This article was originally published in The Nation.