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Black farmers rally in S.C. for $1.15B settlement with USDA
COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP) — About 200 black farmers in South Carolina gathered Friday to hear about a proposed $1.15 billion settlement of their decades-old discrimination claims against the USDA.

The deal being brokered by the National Black Farmers Assoc. (NBFA) would allow about 80,000 black farmers who missed a filing deadline to get the same settlement as others who participated in a lawsuit in the 1990s. That initial settlement in 1999 provided more than 14,000 farmers with $50,000 each and tax credits for discrimination they experienced when they were rejected for loans and subsidies from the USDA, from 1981 through 1997.

“If you’re out here toiling in the soil and trying to make a living from the earth, it gets rough when at the same time, you have to deal with discrimination,” Clarendon County farmer Henry King Jr. said Friday.

King, a 64-year-old former tobacco farmer who now raises livestock, said he got money from the original settlement, but was at Friday’s rally to encourage others to take the steps they need to get their money.

“The main catch is you must follow through. You have to cross every ‘t’ and dot every ‘i’ ... you have to take that on your own,” King told the crowd.

The $1.15 billion proposed settlement has not been funded but is in President Obama’s 2011 federal budget, said John Boyd, founder and president of the NBFA. Now Congress must approve the money. For that, Boyd called on South Carolina farmers to join thousands of other farmers across the South and the rest of the country in calling their representatives and senators and in attending a rally Monday in Washington, D.C.

After Friday’s event, Shirley Wilson, 56, was trying to coordinate a church bus to take some people to the Washington rally. She said her family’s Williamsburg County farm has gone mostly idle as the generation that worked the land got older and younger generations moved away.

“I grow a garden and stuff right now. I don’t know how to farm. And we’ve got animals – cows and horses,” Wilson said.

She said she filed a claim in the original lawsuit in 1998 and was told she was too late. But she said Friday that she is hopeful the new settlement will be approved and she will get money.
“I’m standing on God’s word that it’s going to happen,” Wilson said. “I have the faith that it’s going to happen before May.”
Like Wilson, many of those at the South Carolina meeting have gotten out of farming.

“The $50,000 is not going to bring their farm back,” Boyd said. “What it does do to an elderly black farmer is gives them just a little flexibility in their later years to do some things, to maybe catch up on some bills and give them a little bit of peace of mind. It does not put them back into farming.”
2/17/2010