Grass Tops Democracy: Institutional Discrimination in the Civil Rights Violations of Black Farmers

Introduction On the banks of the Roanoke River in Halifax County, North Carolina, lies the Matthew and Florenza Moore Grant family farm, a single-family homestead that was part of a New Deal experiment in land reform known as Tillery Farms. The farm now imperceptibly settling back into the alluvial soil lies mostly idle. What land is under till is rented out to a nearby farmer one of only four functioning Black farmers remaining in the Tillery area. Unlike each of the other previous heads of the local chapter of the NAACP, Matthew Grant (deceased 2001) and his family has not lost their land to the White power structure that controls agriculture in the county. For the nearly twenty-five years prior to his death and the ten years since, the family has been in a battle with the USDA to make a living and save the land. Heroically, the land is still owned by the Grant family despite the protracted foreclosure dispute with the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the actions of county officials who enforce federal agricultural policy. The local implementation of federal agricultural policy via county committees primarily comprised of more well-off and mostly White farmers gives considerable power to local elites in what we call, grass tops democracy. The Grants battled this system for over thirty years and when a county committeeman threatened that are going to sell you out, Matthew, they knew full well what this meant. (1) Their story is not unique. Instead, the story of the Grant family stands as an unfortunately typical case in the long, local, battle for the racialized control of America's farmland and the economic opportunity it entails. We return to it below as we sketch out a connecting thread from Black landownership efforts in the mid-1930s through the class-action Pigford v. Glickman lawsuit of the 1990s. One of the arguments we present here refers to grass tops democracy, where local elites have considerable leeway in making critical decisions regarding farming operations in their counties. In addition, while we highlight the legally contested administrative matters around access to credit that are central to the Pigford Case as perhaps the most visible difference between Black and White farmers, our primary focus is how Black farmers' interaction with the USDA fits within a larger institutional context of deprivation and oppression. This larger context involves racialized access to considerable amounts of real wealth and intersects with lingering, and perhaps renewed, racialized understandings of the social order. Taken together, the racialized legacy and immense value of real assets created an unlikely context for the successful legal relief for thousands of Black farmers who suffered at the hands of our public institutions. This larger context is crucial to any understanding of credit and matters of racial equality and fits neatly with recent findings concerning the racialized effects from the housing mortgage crisis of the early 2000s. We begin by overviewing a little known experiment in land reform from the 1930s that not only helped create Tillery, North Carolina, but also yields an example of a corrective strategy for ameliorating the longstanding inequalities between Blacks and Whites. We then provide a brief background that introduces the Pigford case and frames the patterns of discrimination as learned behaviors within institutional contexts. Next we discuss the community of Tillery and the Grant family, the Pigford Case and the Consent Decree, and the hopeful changes embodied in the Obama administration and the 2008 Farm Bill. Finally, we offer some thoughts on the current climate within the USDA in the aftermath of these legal findings. The New Deal Origins of Tillery, North Carolina The Resettlement Community of Tillery, North Carolina, was once several large plantations in Halifax County. Under Franklin D. Roosevelt's 1935-36 Resettlement Administration (RA), large tracts were purchased, improved, subdivided and ultimately sold as roughly 60 to 100 acre farms to qualified clients who did not own land. …

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