[The shameful story of how 1 million black families have been
ripped from their farms. ] [[link removed]]

THE GREAT LAND ROBBERY  
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Vann R. Newkirk II
August 22, 2019
The Atlantic
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_ The shameful story of how 1 million black families have been ripped
from their farms. _

A sign on a utility pole to deter hunters, near the old Scott-family
homestead, Drew, Mississippi; Willena's brother Isaac Daniel Scott Sr.
amid soybeans in Mound Bayou. , Zora J. Murff

 

I. Wiped Out

“You ever chop before?” Willena Scott-White was testing me. I sat
with her in the cab of a Chevy Silverado pickup truck, swatting at the
squadrons of giant, fluttering mosquitoes that had invaded the
interior the last time she opened a window. I was spending the day
with her family as they worked their fields just outside Ruleville, in
Mississippi’s Leflore County. With her weathered brown hands,
Scott-White gave me a pork sandwich wrapped in a grease-stained paper
towel. I slapped my leg. Mosquitoes can bite through denim, it turns
out.

Cotton sowed with planters must be chopped—thinned and weeded
manually with hoes—to produce orderly rows of fluffy bolls. The work
is backbreaking, and the people who do it maintain that no other job
on Earth is quite as demanding. I had labored long hours over other
crops, but had to admit to Scott-White, a 60-something grandmother
who’d grown up chopping, that I’d never done it.

“Then you ain’t never worked,” she replied.

The fields alongside us as we drove were monotonous. With row crops,
monotony is good. But as we toured 1,000 acres of land in Leflore and
Bolivar Counties, straddling Route 61, Scott-White pointed out the
demarcations between plots. A trio of steel silos here. A post there.
A patch of scruffy wilderness in the distance. Each landmark was a
reminder of the Scott legacy that she had fought to keep—or to
regain—and she noted this with pride. Each one was also a reminder
of an inheritance that had once been stolen.

Drive Route 61 through the Mississippi Delta and you’ll find much of
the scenery exactly as it was 50 or 75 years ago. Imposing plantations
and ramshackle shotgun houses still populate the countryside from
Memphis to Vicksburg. Fields stretch to the horizon. The hands that
dig into black Delta dirt belong to people like Willena Scott-White,
African Americans who bear faces and names passed down from men and
women who were owned here, who were kept here, and who chose to stay
here, tending the same fields their forebears tended.

But some things have changed. Back in the day, snow-white bolls of
King Cotton reigned. Now much of the land is green with soybeans. The
farms and plantations are much larger—industrial operations with
bioengineered plants, laser-guided tractors, and crop-dusting drones.
Fewer and fewer farms are still owned by actual farmers. Investors in
boardrooms throughout the country have bought hundreds of thousands of
acres of premium Delta land. If you’re one of the millions of people
who have a retirement account with the Teachers Insurance and Annuity
Association, for instance, you might even own a little bit yourself.

A war waged by deed of title has dispossessed 98 percent of black
agricultural landowners in America.

TIAA is one of the largest pension firms in the United States.
Together with its subsidiaries and associated funds, it has a
portfolio of more than 80,000 acres in Mississippi alone, most of them
in the Delta. If the fertile crescent of Arkansas is included, TIAA
holds more than 130,000 acres in a strip of counties along the
Mississippi River. And TIAA is not the only big corporate landlord in
the region. Hancock Agricultural Investment Group manages more than
65,000 acres in what it calls the “Delta states.” The real-estate
trust Farmland Partners has 30,000 acres in and around the Delta.
AgriVest, a subsidiary of the Swiss bank UBS, owned 22,000 acres as of
2011. (AgriVest did not respond to a request for more recent
information.)

Unlike their counterparts even two or three generations ago, black
people living and working in the Delta today have been almost
completely uprooted from the soil—as property owners, if not as
laborers. In Washington County, Mississippi, where last February TIAA
reportedly bought 50,000 acres for more than $200 million, black
people make up 72 percent of the population but own only 11 percent of
the farmland, in part or in full. In Tunica County, where TIAA has
acquired plantations from some of the oldest farm-owning white
families in the state, black people make up 77 percent of the
population but own only 6 percent of the farmland. In Holmes County,
the third-blackest county in the nation, black people make up about 80
percent of the population but own only 19 percent of the farmland.
TIAA owns plantations there, too. In just a few years, a single
company has accumulated a portfolio in the Delta almost equal to the
remaining holdings of the African Americans who have lived on and
shaped this land for centuries.

This is not a story about TIAA—at least not primarily. The
company’s newfound dominance in the region is merely the topsoil
covering a history of loss and legally sanctioned theft in which TIAA
played no part. But TIAA’s position is instrumental in understanding
both how the crimes of Jim Crow have been laundered by time and how
the legacy of ill-gotten gains has become a structural part of
American life. The land was wrested first from Native Americans, by
force. It was then cleared, watered, and made productive for intensive
agriculture by the labor of enslaved Africans, who after Emancipation
would come to own a portion of it. Later, through a variety of
means—sometimes legal, often coercive, in many cases
legal _and_ coercive, occasionally violent—farmland owned by black
people came into the hands of white people. It was aggregated into
larger holdings, then aggregated again, eventually attracting the
interest of Wall Street.

 

Willena Scott-White's son Joseph White cutting grass at the edge of a
field on Scott-family land, Mound Bayou, Mississippi 
Zora J. Murff  //  The Atlantic
 

Owners of small farms everywhere, black and white alike, have long
been buffeted by larger economic forces. But what happened to black
landowners in the South, and particularly in the Delta, is distinct,
and was propelled not only by economic change but also by white racism
and local white power. A war waged by deed of title has dispossessed
98 percent of black agricultural landowners in America. They have lost
12 million acres over the past century. But even that statement
falsely consigns the losses to long-ago history. In fact, the losses
mostly occurred within living memory, from the 1950s onward. Today,
except for a handful of farmers like the Scotts who have been able to
keep or get back some land, black people in this most productive
corner of the Deep South own almost nothing of the bounty under their
feet.
 

II. “Land Hunger”

Land has always been the main battleground of racial conflict in
Mississippi. During Reconstruction, fierce resistance from the
planters who had dominated antebellum society effectively killed any
promise of land or protection from the Freedmen’s Bureau, forcing
masses of black laborers back into de facto bondage. But the sheer
size of the black population—black people were a majority in
Mississippi until the 1930s—meant that thousands were able to secure
tenuous footholds as landowners between Emancipation and the Great
Depression.

Driven by what W. E. B. Du Bois called “land hunger” among
freedmen during Reconstruction, two generations of black workers
squirreled away money and went after every available and affordable
plot they could, no matter how marginal or hopeless. Some found
sympathetic white landowners who would sell to them. Some squatted on
unused land or acquired the few homesteads available to black people.
Some followed visionary leaders to all-black utopian agrarian
experiments, such as Mound Bayou, in Bolivar County.

_[From March 1901: W. E. B. Du Bois’s ‘The Freedmen’s Bureau’
[[link removed]]]_

It was never much, and it was never close to just, but by the early
20th century, black people had something to hold on to. In 1900,
according to the historian James C. Cobb, black landowners in Tunica
County outnumbered white ones three to one. According to the U.S.
Department of Agriculture, there were 25,000 black farm operators in
1910, an increase of almost 20 percent from 1900. Black farmland in
Mississippi totaled 2.2 million acres in 1910—some 14 percent of all
black-owned agricultural land in the country, and the most of any
state.

The foothold was never secure. From the beginning, even the most
enterprising black landowners found themselves fighting a war of
attrition, often fraught with legal obstacles that made passing title
to future generations difficult. Bohlen Lucas, one of the few black
Democratic politicians in the Delta during Reconstruction (most black
politicians at the time were Republicans), was born enslaved and
managed to buy a 200-acre farm from his former overseer. But, like
many farmers, who often have to borrow against expected harvests to
pay for equipment, supplies, and the rent or mortgage on their land,
Lucas depended on credit extended by powerful lenders. In his case,
credit depended specifically on white patronage, given in exchange for
his help voting out the Reconstruction government—after which his
patrons abandoned him. He was left with 20 acres.

In Humphreys County, Lewis Spearman avoided the pitfalls of white
patronage by buying less valuable wooded tracts and grazing cattle
there as he moved into cotton. But when cotton crashed in the 1880s,
Spearman, over his head in debt, crashed with it.

Around the turn of the century, in Leflore County, a black farm
organizer and proponent of self-sufficiency—referred to as a
“notoriously bad Negro” in the local newspapers—led a black
populist awakening, marching defiantly and by some accounts bringing
boycotts against white merchants. White farmers responded with a posse
that may have killed as many as 100 black farmers and sharecroppers
along with women and children. The fate of the “bad Negro” in
question, named Oliver Cromwell, is uncertain. Some sources say he
escaped to Jackson, and into anonymity.

Like so many of his forebears, Ed Scott Sr., Willena Scott-White’s
grandfather, acquired his land through not much more than force of
will. As recorded in the thick binders of family history that Willena
had brought along in the truck, and that we flipped through between
stretches of work in the fields, his life had attained the gloss of
folklore. He was born in 1886 in western Alabama, a generation removed
from bondage. Spurred by that same land hunger, Scott took his young
family to the Delta, seeking opportunities to farm his own property.
He sharecropped and rented, and managed large farms for white
planters, who valued his ability to run their sprawling estates. One
of these men was Palmer H. Brooks, who owned a 7,000-acre plantation
in Mississippi’s Leflore and Sunflower Counties. Brooks was
uncommonly progressive, encouraging entrepreneurship among the black
laborers on his plantation, building schools and churches for them,
and providing loans. Scott was ready when Brooks decided to sell plots
to black laborers, and he bought his first 100 acres.

Unlike Bohlen Lucas, Scott largely avoided politics. Unlike Lewis
Spearman, he paid his debts and kept some close white allies—a
necessity, since he usually rejected government assistance. And unlike
Oliver Cromwell, he led his community under the rules already in
place, appearing content with what he’d earned for his family in an
environment of total segregation. He leveraged technical skills and a
talent for management to impress sympathetic white people and disarm
hostile ones. “Granddaddy always had nice vehicles,” Scott-White
told me. They were a trapping of pride in a life of toil. As was true
in most rural areas at the time, a new truck was not just a flashy
sign of prosperity but also a sort of credit score. Wearing starched
dress shirts served the same purpose, elevating Scott in certain
respects—always within limits—even above some white farmers who
drove into town in dirty overalls. The trucks got shinier as his
holdings grew. By the time Scott died, in 1957, he had amassed more
than 1,000 acres of farmland.

Scott-White guided me right up to the Quiver River, where the legend
of her family began. It was a choked, green-brown gurgle of a thing,
the kind of lazy waterway that one imagines to be brimming with fat,
yawning catfish and snakes. “Mr. Brooks sold all of the land on the
east side of this river to black folks,” Scott-White told me. She
swept her arm to encompass the endless acres. “All of these were
once owned by black families.”

 

Members of the extended Scott family. From the right: Isaac Daniel
Scott Sr. and his wife, Lucy Chatman-Scott; Willena Scott-White; and
Willena's son Joseph White, with his daughter, Jade Marie White.
Zora J. Murff  //  The Atlantic
 

III. The Great Dispossession

That era of black ownership, in the Delta and throughout the country,
was already fading by the time Scott died. As the historian Pete
Daniel recounts, half a million black-owned farms across the country
failed in the 25 years after 1950. Joe Brooks, the former president of
the Emergency Land Fund, a group founded in 1972 to fight the problem
of dispossession, has estimated that something on the order of 6
million acres was lost by black farmers from 1950 to 1969. That’s an
average of 820 acres a day—an area the size of New York’s Central
Park erased with each sunset. Black-owned cotton farms in the South
almost completely disappeared, diminishing from 87,000 to just over
3,000 in the 1960s alone. According to the Census of Agriculture, the
racial disparity in farm acreage increased in Mississippi from 1950 to
1964, when black farmers lost almost 800,000 acres of land.

An analysis for _The Atlantic_ by a research team that included
Dania Francis, at the University of Massachusetts, and Darrick
Hamilton, at Ohio State, translates this land loss into a financial
loss—including both property and income—of $3.7 billion to $6.6
billion in today’s dollars.

_[Jesmyn Ward: Racism is ‘built into the very bones’ of
Mississippi
[[link removed]]]_

This was a silent and devastating catastrophe, one created and
maintained by federal policy. President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New
Deal life raft for agriculture helped start the trend in 1937 with the
establishment of the Farm Security Administration, an agency within
the Department of Agriculture. Although the FSA ostensibly existed to
help the country’s small farmers, as happened with much of the rest
of the New Deal, white administrators often ignored or targeted poor
black people—denying them loans and giving sharecropping work to
white people. After Roosevelt’s death, in 1945, conservatives in
Congress replaced the FSA with the Farmers Home Administration, or
FmHA. The FmHA quickly transformed the FSA’s programs for small
farmers, establishing the sinews of the loan-and-subsidy structure
that undergirds American agriculture today. In 1961, President John F.
Kennedy’s administration created the Agricultural Stabilization and
Conservation Service, or ASCS, a complementary program to the FmHA
that also provided loans to farmers. The ASCS was a federal
effort—also within the Department of Agriculture—but, crucially,
the members of committees doling out money and credit were elected
locally, during a time when black people were prohibited from voting.

Through these programs, and through massive crop and surplus
purchasing, the USDA became the safety net, price-setter, chief
investor, and sole regulator for most of the farm economy in places
like the Delta. The department could offer better loan terms to risky
farmers than banks and other lenders, and mostly outcompeted private
credit. In his book _Dispossession_, Daniel calls the setup
“agrigovernment.” Land-grant universities pumped out both farm
operators and the USDA agents who connected those operators to federal
money. Large plantations ballooned into even larger industrial crop
factories as small farms collapsed. The mega-farms held sway over
agricultural policy, resulting in more money, at better interest
rates, for the plantations themselves. At every level of
agrigovernment, the leaders were white.

Major audits and investigations of the USDA have found that illegal
pressures levied through its loan programs created massive transfers
of wealth from black to white farmers, especially in the period just
after the 1950s. In 1965, the United States Commission on Civil Rights
uncovered blatant and dramatic racial differences in the level of
federal investment in farmers. The commission found that in a sample
of counties across the South, the FmHA provided much larger loans for
small and medium-size white-owned farms, relative to net worth, than
it did for similarly sized black-owned farms—evidence that racial
discrimination “has served to accelerate the displacement and
impoverishment of the Negro farmer.”

In Sunflower County, a man named Ted Keenan told investigators that in
1956, local banks had denied him loans after a bad crop because of his
position with the NAACP, where he openly advocated for voting rights.
The FmHA had denied him loans as well. Keenan described how Eugene
Fisackerly, the leader of the White Citizens’ Council in Sunflower
County, together with representatives of Senator James Eastland, a
notorious white supremacist who maintained a large plantation there,
had intimidated him into renouncing his affiliation with the NAACP and
agreeing not to vote. Only then did Eastland’s man call the local
FmHA agent, prompting him to reconsider Keenan’s loan.

A landmark 2001 investigation by the Associated Press into extortion,
exploitation, and theft directed against black farmers uncovered more
than 100 cases like Keenan’s. In the 1950s and ’60s, Norman
Weathersby, a Holmes County Chevrolet dealer who enjoyed a local
monopoly on trucks and heavy farm equipment, required black farmers to
put up land as collateral for loans on equipment. A close friend of
his, William Strider, was the local FmHA agent. Black farmers in the
area claimed that the two ran a racket: Strider would slow-walk them
on FmHA loans, which meant they would then default on Weathersby’s
loans and lose their land to him. Strider and Weathersby were
reportedly free to run this racket because black farmers were shut out
by local banks.

Thousands of individual decisions by white people, enabled or
motivated by greed, racism, existing laws, and market forces, all
pushed in a single direction.

Analyzing the history of federal programs, the Emergency Land Fund
emphasizes a key distinction. While most of the black land loss
appears on its face to have been through _legal _mechanisms—“the
tax sale; the partition sale; and the foreclosure”—it mainly
stemmed from _illegal _pressures, including discrimination in federal
and state programs, swindles by lawyers and speculators, unlawful
denials of private loans, and even outright acts of violence or
intimidation. Discriminatory loan servicing and loan denial by
white-controlled FmHA and ASCS committees forced black farmers into
foreclosure, after which their property could be purchased by wealthy
landowners, almost all of whom were white. Discrimination by private
lenders had the same result. Many black farmers who escaped
foreclosure were defrauded by white tax assessors who set assessments
too high, leading to unaffordable tax obligations. The inevitable
result: tax sales, where, again, the land was purchased by wealthy
white people. Black people’s lack of access to legal services
complicated inheritances and put family claims to title in jeopardy.
Lynchings, police brutality, and other forms of intimidation were
sometimes used to dispossess black farmers, and even when land
wasn’t a motivation for such actions, much of the violence left land
without an owner.

In interviews with researchers from the Smithsonian’s National
Museum of American History in 1985, Henry Woodard Sr., an African
American who had bought land in the 1950s in Tunica County, said he
had managed to keep up for years through a combination of his own
industry, small loans from the FmHA and white banks, and the rental of
additional land from other hard-pressed black landowners. Then, in
1966, the activist James Meredith—whose 1962 fight to integrate Ole
Miss sparked deadly riots and a wave of white backlash—embarked on
the famous March Against Fear
[[link removed]].
The next planting season, Woodard recalled, his white lenders ignored
him. “I sensed that it was because of this march,” he said. “And
it was a lady told me—I was at the post office and she told me, she
said, ‘Henry, you Negroes, y’all want to live like white folks.
Y’all don’t know how white folks live. But y’all are gonna have
to be on your own now.’ ”

Woodard’s story would have been familiar to countless farmers in the
Delta. In Holmes County, a crucible of the voting-rights movement, a
black effort to integrate the local ASCS committees was so successful
that it was subject to surveillance and sabotage by the Mississippi
State Sovereignty Commission, an official agency created by Governor
J. P. Coleman in 1956 to resist integration. Black landowners involved
in running for the committees or organizing for votes faced fierce
retaliation. In 1965, _The New Republic_ reported that in Issaquena
County, just north of Vicksburg, the “insurance of Negroes active in
the ASCS elections had been canceled, loans were denied to Negroes on
all crops but cotton, and ballots were not mailed to Negro wives who
were co-owners of land.” Even in the decades after the passage of
the 1965 Voting Rights Act, formal and informal complaints against the
USDA poured out of the Delta.

These cases of dispossession can only be called theft. While the
civil-rights era is remembered as a time of victories against
disenfranchisement and segregation, many realities never changed. The
engine of white wealth built on kleptocracy—which powered both Jim
Crow and its slave-state precursor—continued to run. The black
population in Mississippi declined by almost one-fifth from 1950 to
1970, as the white population increased by the exact same percentage.
Farmers slipped away one by one into the night, appearing later as
laborers in Chicago and Detroit. By the time black people truly gained
the ballot in Mississippi, they were a clear minority, held in thrall
to a white conservative supermajority.

_[Nikole Hannah-Jones: Freedom Summer, 1964: Did it really change
Mississippi?
[[link removed]]]_

Mass dispossession did not require a central organizing force or a
grand conspiracy. Thousands of individual decisions by white people,
enabled or motivated by greed, racism, existing laws, and market
forces, all pushed in a single direction. But some white people
undeniably would have organized it this way if they could have. The
civil-rights leader Bayard Rustin reported in 1956 that documents
taken from the office of Robert Patterson, one of the founding fathers
of the White Citizens’ Councils, proposed a “master plan” to
force hundreds of thousands of black people from Mississippi in order
to reduce their potential voting power. Patterson envisioned, in
Rustin’s words, “the decline of the small independent farmer”
and ample doses of “economic pressure.”

An upheaval of this scale and speed—the destruction of black
farming, an occupation that had defined the African American
experience—might in any other context be described as a revolution,
or seen as a historical fulcrum. But it came and went with little
remark.
 

IV. The Catfish Boom

World War II transformed America in many ways. It certainly
transformed a generation of southern black men. That generation
included Medgar Evers, a future civil-rights martyr, assassinated
while leading the Mississippi NAACP; he served in a segregated
transportation company in Europe during the war. It included
Willena’s father, Ed Scott Jr., who also served in a segregated
transportation company. These men were less patient, more defiant, and
in many ways more reckless than their fathers and grandfathers had
been. They chafed under a system that forced them to relearn how to
bow and scrape, as if the war had never happened. In the younger
Scott’s case, wartime service sharpened his inherited land hunger,
pushing him to seek more land and greater financial independence, both
for himself and for his community. One of his siblings told his
biographer, Julian Rankin, that the family’s deepest conviction was
that “a million years from now … this land will still be Scotts’
land.”

Upon his return to the Delta, Scott continued down his father’s hard
path, avoiding any interface with the FmHA and the public portions of
the agrigovernment system, which by that time had spread its tendrils
throughout Sunflower and Leflore Counties. He leaned on the
friendships he and his father had made with local business owners and
farmers, and secured credit for growing his holdings from friendly
white bankers. Influenced by the civil-rights movement and its
emphasis on community solidarity and activism, Scott borrowed from
Oliver Cromwell’s self-sufficiency playbook too. He used his status
to provide opportunities for other black farmers and laborers.
“Daddy said that everyone who worked for us would always be able to
eat,” Willena Scott-White told me. He made sure of more than that.
Scott sent relatives’ and tenants’ children to school, paid for
books, helped people open bank accounts and buy their own land. When
civil-rights activists made their way down for Mississippi’s Freedom
Summer, in 1964, he packed up meals and brought them to rallies.

When Scott-White thinks of her father, who died in 2015, she seems to
become a young girl again. With allowances for nostalgia, she recalls
a certain kind of country poorness-but-not-poverty, whereby children
ran barefoot and worked from the moment they could walk, but ate well,
lived in houses with solid floors and tight roofs, and went to high
school and college if they showed skill. “We lived in something like
a utopia,” Scott-White told me. But things changed at the tail end
of the 1970s. Plummeting commodity prices forced highly leveraged
farmers to seek loans wherever they could find them. Combined with the
accelerating inflation of that decade, the beginnings of the
farm-credit crisis made farming at scale without federal assistance
impossible. Yet federal help—even then, two decades after the Civil
Rights Act—was not available for most black farmers. According to a
2005 article in _The Nation_, “In 1984 and 1985, at the height of
the farm crisis, the USDA lent a total of $1.3 billion to nearly
16,000 farmers to help them maintain their land. Only 209 of those
farmers were black.”

As Rankin tells it in his biography, _Catfish Dream_, Scott made his
first visit to an FmHA office in 1978. With the assistance of Vance
Nimrod, a white man who worked with the black-owned Delta Foundation,
a nonprofit promoting economic advancement for black Mississippians,
Scott secured an operating loan for a season of soybeans and rice from
the FmHA agent Delbert Edwards. The first time was easy—although,
crucially, Nimrod accompanied him to the Leflore County office, in
Greenwood. When Scott returned the next year without Nimrod, driving a
shiny new truck the way his father used to, Edwards asked where Nimrod
was. According to Rankin, Scott told the agent that Nimrod had only
come to help secure that first loan; he wasn’t a business partner.
When Edwards saw Scott’s vehicle, he seemed perplexed. “Who told
you to buy a new truck?” he asked. Edwards ended up denying the
requested loan amount.

At the same time, Edwards and the FmHA were moving to help local white
farmers weather the storm, often by advising them to get into raising
catfish. Commercial catfish farming was a relatively new industry, and
it had found a home in the Delta as prices for row crops crashed and
new legislation gave the USDA power and incentive to build up domestic
fish farming. FmHA agents pushed white farmers to convert wide fields
on the floodplain into giant catfish ponds, many of which would become
contract-growing hubs for Delta Pride Catfish, a cooperative that
quickly evolved into a local monopoly. The federal government poured
millions of dollars into the catfish boom by way of FmHA loans, many
of which were seized on by the largest white landowners, and kept
those white landowners solvent. Mississippi became the catfish capital
of the world in the 1970s. But the FmHA did not reach out to Scott,
nor is there evidence that it supported the ambitions of any black
farmers who might have wanted to get into catfish.

Scott decided to get into catfish anyway, digging eight ponds in
fields where rice had grown the season before. He found his own
catfish stocks and learned the ins and outs of the industry pretty
much on his own. Scott finished digging his ponds in 1981, at which
point, according to Rankin, Edwards of the FmHA visited the property
and told him point-blank: “Don’t think I’m giving you any damn
money for that dirt you’re moving.” The Mississippi FmHA would
eventually compel Edwards to provide loans for Scott’s catfish
operation for 1981 and 1982. But as court records show, the amount
approved was far less than what white catfish farmers usually
got—white farmers sometimes received double or triple the amount per
acre that Scott did—and enough to stock only four of the eight
ponds. (Edwards could not be reached for comment on any of the
episodes recounted here.)

 

The official opening of the processing plant for Scott's Fresh
Catfish, February 1983. Seated, far left: Ed Scott Jr., founder and
owner. Next to Scott: Jim Buck Ross, Mississippi's longtime
commissioner of agriculture and commerce.
Courtesy of Willena Scott-White  //  The Atlantic
 

Scott’s Fresh Catfish opened in 1983. As a marker outside the old
processing shed now indicates, it was the first catfish plant in the
country owned by an African American. But discrimination doomed the
enterprise before it really began. Without enough capital, Scott was
never able to raise fish at the volume he needed. He claimed in court
and later to Rankin that he had also been denied a chance to purchase
stock in Delta Pride—a requirement to become a contract
grower—because he was black. Without access to a cooperative, he had
to do the processing and packaging himself, adding to the cost of his
product. In 2006, Delta Pride and Country Select Catfish were combined
into a new business entity, Consolidated Catfish Producers. When
reached for comment, a spokesperson for Consolidated Catfish said that
no employee at the new company could “definitively answer”
questions about Scott or alleged discrimination against him.

Scott was in his 60s by the time his plant got off the ground. The
effort took a toll. He slowly went blind. Arthritis claimed his
joints. His heart began to fail. The plant limped quietly through the
’80s and then shut down. Lenders began the process of foreclosing on
some of Scott’s cropland as early as 1983. In 1995, the FmHA
approved a request from Scott to lease most of his remaining acres.
The USDA itself had claimed most of his land by the late 1980s.

The downfall of the Scott catfish enterprise was proof of the strength
and endurance of what the federal government would later state could
be seen as a federally funded “conspiracy to force minority and
disadvantaged farmers off their land through discriminatory loan
practices.” The Scotts were not small-timers. They had the kind of
work ethic and country savvy that are usually respected around the
Delta. When the powers that be finally prevailed over Ed Scott Jr.,
they had completed something decisive, something that even today feels
as if it cannot be undone.
 

V. Farmers in Suits

But land is never really lost, not in America. Twelve million acres of
farmland in a country that has become a global breadbasket carries
immense value, and the dispossessed land in the Delta is some of the
most productive in America. The soil on the alluvial plain is rich.
The region is warm and wet. Much of the land is perfect for
industrialized agriculture.

Some white landowners, like Norman Weathersby, themselves the
beneficiaries of government-funded dispossession, left land to their
children. Some sold off to their peers, and others saw their land
gobbled up by even larger white-owned farms. Nowadays, as fewer and
fewer of the children of aging white landowners want to continue
farming, more land has wound up in the hands of trusts and investors.
Over the past 20 years, the real power brokers in the Delta are less
likely to be good ol’ boys and more likely to be suited venture
capitalists, hedge-fund managers, and agribusiness consultants who run
farms with the cold precision of giant circuit boards.

One new addition to the mix is pension funds. Previously, farmland had
never been a choice asset class for large-scale investing. In 1981,
what was then called the General Accounting Office (now the Government
Accountability Office) released a report exploring a proposal by a
firm seeking pension-investment opportunities in farmland. The report
essentially laughed off the prospect. The authors found that only
about one dollar of every $4,429 in retirement funds was invested in
farmland.

 

Grain bins on Scott-family land, in Drew, once used for rice and now
for soybeans. The Scott family's farms reflect a larger economic
pattern in the Mississippi Delta: the shift away from cotton, once
predominant, toward other crops.
Zora J. Murff  //  The Atlantic
 

But commodity prices increased, and land values rose. In 2008, a
weakened dollar forced major funds to broaden their search for hedges
against inflation. “The market in agricultural land in the U.S. is
currently experiencing a boom,” an industry analyst, Tom Vulcan,
wrote that year. He took note of the recent entry of TIAA-CREF, which
had “spent some $340 million on farmland across seven states.”
TIAA, as the company is now called, would soon become the biggest
pension-fund player in the agricultural real-estate game across the
globe. In 2010, TIAA bought a controlling interest in Westchester
Group, a major agricultural-asset manager. In 2014, it bought Nuveen,
another large asset-management firm. In 2015, with Nuveen directing
its overall investment strategy and Westchester and other smaller
subsidiaries operating as purchasers and managers, TIAA raised $3
billion for a new global farmland-investment partnership. By the close
of 2016, Nuveen’s management portfolio included nearly 2 million
acres of farmland, worth close to $6 billion.

Investment in farmland has proved troublesome for TIAA in Mississippi
and elsewhere. TIAA is a pension company originally set up for
teachers and professors and people in the nonprofit world. It has
cultivated a reputation for social responsibility: promoting
environmental sustainability and respecting land rights, labor rights,
and resource rights. TIAA has endorsed the United Nations–affiliated
Principles for Responsible Investment, which include special
provisions for investment in farmland, including specific guidelines
with regard to sustainability, leasing practices, and establishing the
provenance of tracts of land.

Each black farmer who left the region represented a tiny withdrawal
from one side of a cosmic balance sheet and a deposit on the other
side.

The company has faced pushback for its move into agriculture. In 2015,
the international nonprofit Grain [[link removed]], which
advocates for local control of farmland by small farmers, released the
results of an investigation accusing TIAA’s farmland-investment arm
of skirting laws
[[link removed]]
limiting foreign land acquisition in its purchase of more than half a
million acres in Brazil. The report found that TIAA had violated
multiple UN guidelines in creating a joint venture with a Brazilian
firm to invest in farmland without transparency. The Grain report
alleges that when Brazil tightened laws designed to restrict foreign
investment, TIAA purchased 49 percent of a Brazilian company that then
acted as its proxy. According to _The New York Times_
[[link removed]],
TIAA and its subsidiaries also appear to have acquired land titles
from Euclides de Carli, a businessman often described in Brazil as a
big-time _grileiro_—a member of a class of landlords and land
grabbers who use a mix of legitimate means, fraud, and violence to
force small farmers off their land. In response to criticism of
TIAA’s Brazil portfolio, Jose Minaya, then the head of
private-markets asset management at TIAA, told WNYC’s _The Takeaway_
[[link removed]]:
“We believe and know that we are in compliance with the law, and we
are transparent about what we do in Brazil. From a title perspective,
our standards are very focused around not displacing individuals or
indigenous people, respecting land rights as well as human rights …
In every property that we have acquired, we don’t just do due
diligence on that property. We do due diligence on the sellers,
whether it’s an individual or whether it’s an entity.”

TIAA’s land dealings have faced scrutiny in the United States as
well. In 2012, the National Family Farm Coalition found
[[link removed]]
that the entry into agriculture of deep-pocketed institutional
investors—TIAA being an example—had made it pretty much impossible
for smaller farmers to compete. Institutional investment has removed
millions of acres from farmers’ hands, more or less permanently.
“Pension funds not only have the power to outbid smaller, local
farmers, they also have the long-term goal of retaining farmland for
generations,” the report noted.

Asked about TIAA’s record, a spokesperson for Nuveen maintained that
the company has built its Delta portfolio following ethical-investment
guidelines
[[link removed]]: “We
have a long history of investing responsibly in farmland, in keeping
with our corporate values and the UN-backed Principles for Responsible
Investment (PRI). As a long-term owner, we bring capital, professional
expertise, and sustainable farming practices to each farm we own, and
we are always looking to partner with expansion-minded tenants who
will embrace that approach and act as good stewards of the land.”
The company did not comment on the history of any individual tract in
its Delta portfolio.

But even assuming that every acre under management by big corporate
interests in the Delta has been acquired by way of ethical-investment
principles, the nature of the mid-century dispossession and its
multiple layers of legitimation raise the question of whether
responsible investment in farmland there is even possible. As a people
and a class, black farmers were plainly targets, but the deed
histories of tax sales and foreclosures don’t reveal whether
individual debtors were moved off the land because of discrimination
and its legal tools.

In addition, land records are spotty in rural areas, especially
records from the 1950s and ’60s, and in some cases it’s unclear
exactly which records the investors used to meet internal
requirements. According to Tristan Quinn-Thibodeau, a campaigner and
organizer at ActionAid, an anti-poverty and food-justice nonprofit,
“It’s been a struggle to get this information.” The organization
has tried to follow the trails of deeds and has asked TIAA—which
manages ActionAid’s own pension plan—for an analysis of the
provenance of its Delta portfolio. Such an analysis has not been
provided.

What we do know is that, whatever the specific lineage of each acre,
Wall Street investors have found a lucrative new asset class whose
origins lie in part in mass dispossession. We know that the vast
majority of black farmland in the country is no longer in black hands,
and that black farmers have suffered far more hardships than white
farmers have. The historian Debra A. Reid points out that “between
1920 and 1997, the number of African Americans who farmed decreased by
98 percent, while white Americans who farmed declined by 66
percent.” Referring to the cases studied in their 2001
investigation, Dolores Barclay and Todd Lewan of the Associated Press
observed that virtually all of the property lost by black farmers
“is owned by whites or corporations.” The foundation of these
portfolios was a system of plantations whose owners created the
agrigovernment system and absorbed thousands of small black-owned
farms into ever larger white-owned farms. America has its own
_grileiros_, and they stand on land that was once someone else’s.

 

Clockwise from the left: Johnny Jackson, a seasonal worker employed by
the Scott family; Willena talking with her brother Isaac-up in the
tractor cabin-as he works a field in Mound Bayou; a Roundup sprayer
Zora J. Murff  //  The Atlantic
 

VI. A Deeper Excavation

As we drove through the patchwork remnants of the Scotts’ land,
Willena Scott-White took me to the site of Scott’s Fresh Catfish.
Gleaming steel silos had turned into rusting hulks. The ponds were
thick with weeds and debris. The exterior walls of the plant itself
had collapsed. Rusted beams lay atop ruined machinery. Fire ants and
kudzu had begun nature’s reclamation.

Late in Ed Scott Jr.’s life, as he slipped into Alzheimer’s,
Willena and his lawyer, Phil Fraas, fought to keep his original hopes
alive. In the _Pigford v. Glickman_ lawsuit of 1997, thousands of
black farmers and their families won settlements against the USDA for
discrimination that had occurred between 1981 and the end of 1996; the
outlays ultimately reached a total of $2 billion. The Scotts were one
of those families, and after a long battle to prove their case—with
the assistance of Scott-White’s meticulous notes and family
history—in 2012 the family was awarded more than $6 million in
economic damages, plus almost $400,000 in other damages and debt
forgiveness. The court also helped the Scotts reclaim land possessed
by the department. In a 1999 ruling, Judge Paul L. Friedman of the
U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia acknowledged that
forcing the federal government to compensate black farmers would
“not undo all that has been done” in centuries of
government-sponsored racism. But for the Scotts, it was a start.

“The telling factor, looking at it from the long view, is that at
the time of World War I there were 1 million black farmers, and in
1992 there were 18,000,” Fraas told me. The settlements stemming
from _Pigford_ cover only specific recent claims of discrimination,
and none stretching back to the period of the civil-rights era, when
the great bulk of black-owned farms disappeared. Most people have not
pushed for any kind of deeper excavation.

Any such excavation would quickly make plain the consequences of what
occurred. During my drive with Scott-White, we traveled through parts
of Leflore, Sunflower, and Washington Counties, three of the counties
singled out by Opportunity Insights, a Harvard University research
group, as among the worst in the country in terms of a child’s
prospects for upward mobility. Ten counties in the Delta are among the
poorest 50 in America. According to new data from the Centers for
Disease Control and Prevention on all 74,000 U.S. census tracts, four
tracts in the Delta are among the lowest 100 when it comes to average
life expectancy. More than 30 tracts in the Delta have an average life
expectancy below 70. (The national average is 79.) In some Delta
counties, the infant mortality rate is more than double the nationwide
rate. As if to add gratuitous insult to injury, a new analysis from
ProPublica finds that, as a result of the Internal Revenue Service’s
intense scrutiny of low-income taxpayers, the Delta is audited by the
IRS more heavily than any other place in the country
[[link removed]]. In sum, the
areas of deepest poverty and under the darkest shadow of death are the
ones where dispossession was the most far-reaching.

 

The Scott-family cemetery.
Zora J. Murff  //  The Atlantic
 

The consequences of dispossession had long been predicted. Fannie Lou
Hamer, a Sunflower County activist whose 1964 speech to a Democratic
National Convention committee
[[link removed]]
galvanized support for the Voting Rights Act, spoke often of the need
for land reform as a precondition for true freedom. Hamer’s utopian
Freedom Farm experiment stressed cooperative landownership, and she
said the concentration of land in the hands of a few landowners was
“at the base of our struggle for survival.” In her analysis, mass
dispossession should be seen as mass extraction. Even as the U.S.
government invested billions in white farmers, it continued to extract
wealth from black farmers in the Delta. Each black farmer who left the
region, from Reconstruction onward, represented a tiny withdrawal from
one side of a cosmic balance sheet and a deposit on the other side.
This dynamic would only continue, in other ways and other places, as
the Great Migration brought black families to northern cities.

This cosmic balance sheet underpins the national conversation—ever
more robust—about reparations for black Americans. In that
conversation, given momentum in part by the publication of Ta-Nehisi
Coates’s “The Case for Reparations”
[[link removed]]
in this magazine in 2014, I hear echoes of Mississippi. I hear echoes
of Hamer, the Scotts, Henry Woodard Sr., and others who petitioned the
federal government to hold itself accountable for a history of
extraction that has extended well beyond enslavement. But that
conversation too easily becomes technical. How do we quantify
discrimination? How do we define who was discriminated against? How do
we repay those people according to what has been defined and
quantified? The idea of reparations sometimes seems like a problem of
economic rightsizing—something for the quants and wonks to work out.

Economics is, of course, a major consideration. According to the
researchers Francis and Hamilton, “The dispossession of black
agricultural land resulted in the loss of hundreds of billions of
dollars of black wealth. We must emphasize this estimate is
conservative … Depending on multiplier effects, rates of returns,
and other factors, it could reach into the trillions.” The large
wealth gap between white and black families today exists in part
because of this historic loss.

But money does not define every dimension of land theft. Were it not
for dispossession, Mississippi today might well be a majority-black
state, with a radically different political destiny. Imagine the
difference in our national politics if the center of gravity of black
electoral strength had remained in the South after the Voting Rights
Act was passed.

Politics aside, how can reparations truly address the lives ruined,
the family histories lost, the connection to the land severed? In
America, land has always had a significance that exceeds its economic
value. For a people who were once chattel themselves, real property
has carried an almost mystical import. There’s a reason the fabled
promise that spread among freedmen after the Civil War was not a
check, a job, or a refundable tax credit, but 40 acres of farmland to
call home. The history of the Delta suggests that any conversation
about reparations might need to be _more _qualitative and intangible
than it is. And it must consider the land.

Land hunger is ineffable, an indescribable yearning, and yet it is
something that Americans, perhaps uniquely, feel and understand. That
yearning tugged at me hardest as Willena Scott-White rounded out her
tour of the fields, the afternoon slipping away. Out among the
Scotts’ fields is a clearing with a lone, tall tree. In the clearing
is a small cemetery. A handful of crooked, weathered tombstones stand
sentinel. This is where Ed Scott Jr. is buried, and where some of
Willena’s older siblings now rest. Willena posed for a picture
beside her parents’ grave. She told me that this is where her own
bones will rest after her work on Earth is done.

“This is_ our_ land,” she said.

_[Vann R. Newkirk II
[[link removed]] is a staff writer
at The Atlantic, where he covers politics and policy.]_

_This article appears in the September 2019 print edition with the
headline "This Land Was Our Land."_

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