Columns

Last year, my wife and I visited for the first time the sights in Philadelphia, which included an informative exhibit "Distant Echoes: Black Farmers in America" at the African American Museum there. The exhibit featured the poignant, award-winning photographs of John Francis Ficara. The photographs depict what Ficara considers the last decade of black agriculture in the United States. Ficara spent several years documenting the experience of black farmers, which for many years has been in crisis after decades of prejudice and discrimination. According to the exhibit, Black farmers are losing their property at approximately 1,000 acres a day. 

From 1999 to 2002, Ficara traveled around the country photographing 60 farmers and their families in Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Maryland, Michigan, Mississippi, North Carolina, and South Carolina. Farmers described their struggles to keep their farms sufficiently productive to provide income. To many, this is land their parents and grandparents plowed, seeded, and harvested. 

As a result of slavery, blacks were not allowed to own land or real property. African Americans began to equate land ownership to independence, wealth, and full citizenship. Despite their efforts to keep land in their families, aging black farmers are losing property to farm conglomerates or by family members' departure from the land. 

The saga began with "40 acres and a mule." On January 16, 1865, Union General William T. Sherman issued Special Field Order No. 15. Sherman prescribed the 40 acres in that Order, but not the mule. The mule would come later. This idea for massive land redistribution was the result of a discussion that Sherman and Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton had with 20 leaders of the black community in Savannah, Georgia. The meeting was unprecedented in American history as the federal government had confiscated private property -- some 400,000 acres -- formerly owned by Confederate land owners, and redistributed it to former Black slaves. 

However, three months after Sherman issued his Field Order No. 15, the U.S. Congress created the Freedman's Bureau, which was supposed to ensure the welfare of the millions of slaves who were being freed by the war. One task of the Freedmen's Bureau was to be the management of lands confiscated from those who had rebelled against the United States. The intent of Congress was to break up the plantations and redistribute the land so former slaves could have their own small farms. In April 1865, Andrew Johnson became president following the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. And on May 28, 1865, Jackson issued a proclamation of pardon and amnesty to citizens in the South who would take an oath of allegiance. As part of the pardon process, lands confiscated during the war would be returned to white landowners, thus thwarting the mass redistribution of land. Approximately 40,000 former slaves received grants of land under Sherman's order and then the land was taken away from them. 

Denied the opportunity to own their own land, the former slaves were forced to live under sharecropping where they would work a plot of the landowner's land and receive a share of the crop as payment. Basically, sharecropping replaced the plantation system. 

Since 1865, when President Johnson rescinded General Sherman's Special Field Order No. 15, Black farmers in America have been largely forsaken and forgotten by failures of government resettlement programs, relentless droughts, and the discriminatory practices of the U.S. Department of Agriculture.  

In 1920, Black farmers comprised nearly 14 percent of all farmers in the U.S., working over 16 million acres of land. At that time, almost 25 percent of all Americans worked as famers.  

The 2012 Census shows that there were over 33,000 black farmers across the country. Almost half of the country saw a decrease in the number of black farmers over the past five years with 19 states reporting fewer black farmers in 2012 than reported in 2007. In 2007, about 1.3 percent of all farmers were Black. Black farmers are most heavily concentrated in the Southeast, with eastern Texas and Mississippi having the highest numbers of black farmers. Other top states include Alabama, Louisiana, South Carolina, Georgia and North Carolina — which closely follows the states with some of the greatest concentration of African Americans in general. Despite their efforts to keep land in their families, aging Black farmers are losing property in disparate proportions to farm conglomerates or by the departure of family members from the land. 

John Francis Ficara's photographs may not change the course of history, but they do document the plight of Black farmers in America.