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The U.S. Department of Agriculture has paid black farmers more than $575 million since April 1999 for past discrimination in the largest civil-rights award in U.S. history. But some black farmers believe USDA still wants them off the land. Insight sent a team to investigate their claims.

It was a stunning political turn-around. One week before last year's highly charged presidential election--while the Rev. Jesse Jackson and leaders from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People were jetsetting across America for Al Gore -- a group of black farmers from North Carolina and Georgia came out publicly for George W. Bush.

Just a few months earlier, in June 2000, these farmers had stood in solidarity on Capitol Hill with members of the Congressional Black Caucus who bitterly opposed Bush. But something had happened in the meantime that turned the farmers around. Republican Reps. Jay Dickey of Arkansas and J.C. Watts of Oklahoma picked up the farmers' cause and sponsored legislation to help them collect on their lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and to prevent foreclosure on their land. Rather than join the Republicans and help the black farmers, the Black Caucus killed the GOP bills. It was politics as usual in Washington.

But the farmers fought back. After endorsing Bush at a press conference the mainstream media ignored, the farmers changed tactics and worked actively to defeat Democratic members of Congress who had voted against the relief they sought, starting with Black Caucus member Sanford Bishop Jr. (D-Ga.).

"We went back home and started campaigning," says Eddie Slaughter, vice president of the Black Farmers and Agriculturist Association (BFAA) who hails from Buena Vista, Ga. "We got on the radio and talked about this guy who had betrayed black farmers like Judas had betrayed Jesus. We said what he did was no better than black-on-black crime. The Democratic Party had to spend a million dollars to save his seat."

Bishop narrowly won re-election, but had to rely heavily on hefty contributions from agribusiness, big labor and the Democratic leadership's political-action committees (PACs). In all, PAC and party money accounted for more than 60 percent of the $1 million he spent, according to records on file at the Federal Election Commission. His Republican opponent, Dylan Glenn, spent nearly as much, but 88.4 percent of his money came from individual contributors.

Top Republican political strategist Karl Rove understood the politics of the Bishop race and welcomed Slaughter and BFAA President Gary Grant to the White House on March 29 when they returned to Washington for a visit. Rove ushered them in for a 15-minute meeting with President Bush to state their case.

They gave Bush petitions signed by more than 400 farmers from across the South asking for prompt action on the April 1999 consent decree with the USDA to provide relief for black farmers who were losing their land to foreclosure at an alarming rate. What began as a massive settlement to correct past discrimination by the USDA had turned into a nightmare for the very farmers it was supposed to benefit.

If Bush agreed to help them, they urged, the wheel of America's long and troubled racial history would come round to where it started. Indeed, their story has deep roots that go back to the days of Reconstruction, when Republicans helped black farmers become independent with 40 acres and a mule.

Today, many of the black farmers Insight interviewed in Virginia, Georgia and North Carolina believe that the government wants to take their land away from them. They say the USDA settlement, which provides $50,000 in cash plus a promise of debt relief to farmers who can prove they were unfairly treated when seeking loans in the 1980s and 1990s, had been doled out by the Clinton administration primarily to people who are not active farmers, many of whom live in urban housing projects. Meanwhile, real farmers with real cases of discrimination were losing their land as they were shut out of the settlement and the USDA foreclosed on their property.

"I have heard these complaints," USDA acting General Counsel J. Michael Kelly tells Insight. "We hope that these allegations are not true. We hope that people are not having their claims approved and are receiving payments who are not truly eligible and deserving."

And yet, according to the official tally of the 12,779 claims paid out by USDA to date, fewer than 10 percent of the successful claimants had loans with USDA that were identified for cancellation, and of these only 135 individuals have loans that still are open. "What that means," says Slaughter, is that most of these people were never farmers, because the farmers had loans."

Paying down debt was supposed to be a major piece of the settlement but, as of today, the USDA has forgiven just 198 loans worth only $8.5 million, a relative drop in the bucket.

The Concerned Black Farmers of Tennessee tracked the 70 individuals in Tipton County who filed claims and found 63 percent of those who were approved had no records to establish that they ever had farmed the land. Each of those individuals received a check from USDA for $50,000. Meanwhile, 73 percent of those whose claims were denied had presented loan documents, crop-payment receipts and other records showing a sustained presence on the land.

"We are in a difficult position to respond because judgment of these cases has been taken completely out of our hands," says Kelly. "We have a facilitator, an adjudicator and a monitor--all paid by us but independent from us. They are the ones who decide which claims are eligible for payment."

Because the decision of the adjudicator (the Poorman-Douglas Corp.) is final, farmers whose claims are rejected find themselves in a worse position than they were before the consent decree. "Black farmers stand to lose 1.5 million acres of land through that consent decree," says BFAA President Grant. "As long as you're in the lawsuit, foreclosures can't proceed. But once you've been rejected, you have no recourse and USDA can accelerate the payment schedule and seize your land."

Grant and other farmers interviewed by Insight noted a whole host of pretexts used by the adjudicator to reject claims. "One man was denied because he misspelled the white farmer's name who had gotten a loan under similar circumstances when the black farmer had been denied," Grant says. "A Mississippi man was denied because he was a nonvoting member of the county committee that approved the [USDA] loans, and the adjudicator said that delegitimized his complaint. Another man was denied because his claim sounded too much like others coming from his same area. Yet another was denied because he misspelled the name of his county."

The USDA's Kelly denied that the department had a policy of seizing the land of black farmers. "We want our programs delivered without discrimination," he says. "We want all farmers, all customers, to be treated fairly. That doesn't mean there won't be some borrowers who fail to meet the requirements of their loans and whose loans are ultimately accelerated and foreclosed. The economics of farming are very tough, especially for small farmers. And we realize that."

Grant believes the black farmers were sold out by Alexander Pires, the lawyer who negotiated the Pigford v. Glickman consent decree on behalf of the farmers. "No farmer had ever seen the consent decree before it was signed," Grant tells Insight. "We were outraged when we finally saw it. Pires cut a deal with USDA to narrow the scope of the lawsuit, so now everybody is being paid but the farmers."

Pires acknowledges the difficulties many of the farmers are having. "I don't know of any case I've ever done that is more controversial than this one," he tells Insight. "Our position is it's the most successful civil-rights case in the history of this country. You could add up all the other class-action settlements over the past 20 years and they come out to less. Claimants in the Avis discrimination suit got less than $1,000. Those in Denny's got $300. In the Japanese internment case you got $20,000 for being taken from your home in California and put in a concentration camp for the duration of World War II. Black farmers got $50,000 tax free, no court fees and free lawyers. We did the best we could considering the novel nature of the case."

U.S. District Court Judge Paul Friedman, with whom Pires negotiated the consent decree, doesn't agree and recently slapped stiff fines on Pires and his law firm for failing to process claims in a timely fashion. USDA sources tell Insight that Pires is trying to push paper as fast as possible to avoid the fines and that inevitably undeserving claims are getting through. "The biggest problem now is that they want to stop paying the farmers because there is too much fraud in the system," BFAA Vice President Slaughter says.