John Boyd of the Black Farmers Association Talks Land Rights and Ownership

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Transcript

00:00Hello, everybody. My name is John Boyd, founder and president of the National Black Farmers

00:04Association, and I'm glad to be here with Ebony. I'm a fourth-generation farmer and I learned

00:10everything I know about farming. My father, John Boyd Sr., taught me about the importance of land

00:19ownership, which I think is vitally important for Black people to hear. Everything you do or try to

00:24acquire requires land ownership. Clean drinking water, temple-to-build houses,

00:30fresh food to raise your family on. He said to walk on the land was a sense of freedom,

00:36and owning land was the only way Black people could be free. I bought my first farm in 1983

00:42from actually another Black farmer, 110.5 acres, and I was young and green. I didn't

00:50know anything about financing or borrowing money. I told him I wanted to buy the farm,

00:56but I didn't have any money. He said, well, under the Carter administration, there's a program for

01:05Black farmers that they're supposed to lend low-interest rate money to Blacks.

01:10He said, but good luck with that. There's no better program for farmers in this country

01:16than our own federal government programs. So I want to say that. They're the best programs in

01:21the world. It's the most awful people that administer the programs, which make it difficult.

01:27This man tore my application up one year, threw it in the trash can while I'm sitting there looking

01:32at him. Spat tobacco juice on my shirt. And keep in mind, farmers need money every year. That's

01:41why we wind up at USDA in the first place. I've been suing the government since the 80s,

01:46and that's the whole issue. So we've been in and out of court for a very, very long time.

01:52This piece came by an act of Congress in section 22007 of the Inflation Reduction Act that put

02:00$2 billion for farmers who have faced discrimination. And it specifically lays out

02:07the chronological order of how Black farmers were discriminated against at the turn of the century.

02:13There were one million Black farm families in the United States,

02:17tilling 20 million acres of land. Today, we're down to three and a half million acres of land

02:25and roughly 50,000 Black farmers. When we announced the program, the NBFA went out and held

02:3360 meetings around the country. Outreach meetings. I sent out 130,000 postcards to all of our members.

02:40Advertising the program, and they always make things difficult for Black people.

02:46The application was 40 pages long, and it took us on average, with my routine,

02:51about three hours to fill out each application. So this wasn't an easy process. So 60,000

03:00applications were turned in for farmers who said that they were discriminated against at the hands

03:06of USDA. 15,000 of those applications were denied by the third party neutral in this process.

03:1545,000 checks went out to Black farmers around the country and other farmers of color.

03:24This is the first real national payout in United States history that put this kind of real money

03:32into the pockets of Blacks. Two billion dollars is nothing to sneeze at people. Is it enough?

03:37Absolutely, unequivocally, no, it's not enough. But I think it's a huge victory, and we need to

03:42look at the model by means of which I put this thing together that people could use in the

03:47reparations movement. I want to tell Blacks that if you're out here fighting for something,

03:52the arc of justice has been long and slow. And if you're Black, it's been slower. Don't never,

03:58ever, ever give up on yourself, and don't never, never give up on justice. God is sitting high,

04:03and he's looking low, and he don't like what's going on, and he's going to fix it.