Mississippi Today
Federal aid addresses discrimination for thousands of farmers after years of delay
The U.S. Department of Agriculture has sent out long-awaited payments to minority farmers and others in need of aid, but some say it’s not enough to offset years of discrimination.
The department issued more than $2.2 billion in payments to more than 43,000 farmers across the country in the last week of July, with much of that money going to farmers in theย Mississippi River delta states. That includes 1,265 farmers from Louisiana, over 13,000 in Mississippi, and 11,000 in Alabama.
Charlene Johnson *Gaston’s family farms beef cattle near Lexington, Mississippi and applied for the program, called the Discrimination Financial Assistance Program. She said they have faced decades of discrimination.
โI am excited about this money being disbursed. I’m thankful for the people who already received these settlements and I’m waiting on ours,โ said Johnson Gaston, who said she has yet to receive an official letter from the USDA.
โIt would mean justice for my family,โ she said.
The money aims to address a history of discriminatory lending practices by the USDA against Black and other minority farmers. A study shows that over the 20th century, Black farmers lost over $320 billion in land, partly due to that discrimination.
USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack said the Biden Administration hopes the money will help thousands stay on the farm.
โThis financial assistance is not compensation for anyone’s loss or the pain endured, but it is an acknowledgement by the department,โ he said at a White House press briefing on July 31.
Farmers have been waiting on this kind of money for years. An initial round of payments stalled after white farmers and banks sued over the first version of the program in the 2021 American Rescue Plan Act. The plan had a provision that set aside $4 billion for socially disadvantaged farmers, meaning those who had faced racial or ethnic discrimination.
A provision in the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 repealed that debt relief and replaced it with $3.1 billion for economically distressed farmers. Most of that money has already been doled out, Vilsack said.
The other component was the $2.2 billion for farmers who faced any type of discrimination by the USDA before 2021, not just racial. Black and brown farmers who were already expecting aid money had to fill out a new application and explain how they faced discriminated. That led some of them to sue the USDA.
Angie Provost and her husband June, who farm sugar cane in Louisiana’s Iberia Parish, helped push for the original legislation as they struggled to get loans in the past โ due, they said, to discrimination from their local USDA offices.
โAs [June] took over the farm, there have been numerous hurdles for him to cross that sort of harken back to the days of Jim Crow contract leasing and indentured servitude,โ Angie Provost said.
Provost and her husband are also suing the USDA separately. She said USDA could have made the application process easier and less stressful for them.
Many farmers in Louisiana had trouble with the long application and with gathering proof they had been discriminated against, according to Ebony Woodruff, director of the Southern University Law Center Agricultural Law Institute for Underserved and Underrepresented Communities.
โRemember, a lot of this stuff happened decades ago, and in a place like Louisiana, we have hurricanes coming through, houses are destroyed, people didn’t have the paperwork to supplement their applications,โ she said.
The USDA said it has tried to make it easier for farmers to get records from the agency to help them get proof.
โThe problem is now that you have put the burden back on the farmer to prove the discrimination,โ said Woodruff.
Monica Rainge, USDA Deputy Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights, said the question of discrimination on the application was left open-ended on purpose.
โThis was not an adversarial thing,โ said Rainge. โIt was really up to the producer to tell his or her own story about how they experienced discrimination.โ
Now that the funding has gone out, Woodruff said the USDA should keep trying to fix equity issues affecting Black farmers. She wants to see more transparency from the agency, and for those who discriminated against loan applicants to be removed from those positions.
โThe discrimination that’s happening in these local county committee offices is still occurring in 2024,โ she said.
She added that her institute has lobbied the USDA to make its loans process easier for producers. Rainge said the USDA shortened the application from 29 pages to 13 and has also invested in more assistance for producers interacting with their local USDA offices.
โThis program is a one-time payment, and we recognize that further investment will be needed to continue to level the playing field for farmers,โ Rainge said.
Tegan Wendland contributed to this story, which is a product of the Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk, an independent reporting network based at the University of Missouri in partnership with Report for America, with major funding from the Walton Family Foundation.
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
Mississippi Today
A Mississippi town moves a Confederate monument that became a shrouded eyesore
GRENADA (AP) โ A Mississippi town has taken down a Confederate monument that stood on the courthouse square since 1910 โ a figure that was tightly wrapped in tarps the past four years, symbolizing the community’s enduring division over how to commemorate the past.
Grenada’s first Black mayor in two decades seems determined to follow through on the city’s plans to relocate the monument to other public land. A concrete slab has already been poured behind a fire station about 3.5 miles (5.6 kilometers) from the square.
But a new fight might be developing. A Republican lawmaker from another part of Mississippi wrote to Grenada officials saying she believes the city is violating a state law that restricts the relocation of war memorials or monuments.
The Grenada City Council voted to move the monument in 2020, weeks after police killed George Floyd in Minneapolis. The vote seemed timely: Mississippi legislators had just retired the last state flag in the U.S. that prominently featured the Confederate battle emblem.
The tarps went up soon after the vote, shrouding the Confederate soldier and the pedestal he stood on. But even as people complained about the eyesore, the move was delayed by tight budgets, state bureaucracy or political foot-dragging. Explanations vary, depending on who’s asked.
A new mayor and city council took office in May, prepared to take action. On Sept. 11, with little advance notice, police blocked traffic and a work crew disassembled and removed the 20-foot (6.1-meter) stone structure.
“I’m glad to see it move to a different location,” said Robin Whitfield, an artist with a studio just off Grenada’s historic square. “This represents that something has changed.”
Still, Whitfield, who is white, said she wishes Grenada leaders had invited the community to engage in dialogue about the symbol, to bridge the gap between those who think moving it is erasing history and those who see it as a daily reminder of white supremacy. She was among the few people watching as a crane lifted parts of the monument onto a flatbed truck.
“No one ever talked about it, other than yelling on Facebook,” Whitfield said.
Mayor Charles Latham said the monument has been “quite a divisive figure” in the town of 12,300, where about 57% of residents are Black and 40% are white.
“I understand people had family and stuff to fight and die in that war, and they should be proud of their family,” Latham said. “But you’ve got to understand that there were those who were oppressed by this, by the Confederate flag on there. There’s been a lot of hate and violence perpetrated against people of color, under the color of that flag.”
The city received permission from the Mississippi Department of Archives and History to move the Confederate monument, as required. But Rep. Stacey Hobgood-Wilkes of Picayune said the fire station site is inappropriate.
“We are prepared to pursue such avenues that may be necessary to ensure that the statue is relocated to a more suitable and appropriate location,” she wrote, suggesting a Confederate cemetery closer to the courthouse square as an alternative. She said the Ladies Cemetery Association is willing to deed a parcel to the city to make it happen.
The Confederate monument in Grenada is one of hundreds in the South, most of which were dedicated during the early 20th century when groups such as the United Daughters of the Confederacy sought to shape the historical narrative by valorizing the Lost Cause mythology of the Civil War.
The monuments, many of them outside courthouses, came under fresh scrutiny after an avowed white supremacist who had posed with Confederate flags in photos posted online killed nine Black people inside the historic Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015.
Grenada’s monument includes images of Confederate president Jefferson Davis and a Confederate battle flag. It was engraved with praise for “the noble men who marched neath the flag of the Stars and Bars” and “the noble women of the South,” who “gave their loved ones to our country to conquer or to die for truth and right.”
A half-century after it was dedicated, the monument’s symbolism figured in a voting rights march. When the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights leaders held a mass rally in downtown Grenada in June 1966, Robert Green of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference scrambled up the pedestal and planted a U.S. flag above the image of Davis.
The cemetery is a spot Latham himself had previously advocated as a new site for the monument, but he said it’s too late to change now, after the city already budgeted $60,000 for the move.
“So, who’s going to pay the city back for the $30,000 we’ve already expended to relocate this?” he said. “You should’ve showed up a year and a half ago, two years ago, before the city gets to this point.”
A few other Confederate monuments in Mississippi have been relocated. In July 2020, a Confederate soldier statue was moved from a prominent spot at the University of Mississippi to a Civil War cemetery in a secluded part of the Oxford campus. In May 2021, a Confederate monument featuring three soldiers was moved from outside the Lowndes County Courthouse in Columbus to another cemetery with Confederate soldiers.
Lori Chavis, a Grenada City Council member, said that since the monument was covered by tarps, “it’s caused nothing but more divide in our city.”
She said she supports relocating the monument but worries about a lawsuit. She acknowledged that people probably didn’t know until recently exactly where it would reappear.
“It’s tucked back in the woods, and it’s not visible from even pulling behind the fire station,” Chavis said. “And I think that’s what got some of the citizens upset.”
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
Crooked Letter Sports Podcast
Podcast: New Orleans sports columnist and author Jeff Duncan joins the podcast to talk about his new Steve Gleason book and the new-look New Orleans Saints.
Jeff Duncan went from the Mississippi Book Festival in Jackson on Saturday to Jerry World in Dallas on Sunday where he watched and wrote about the Saints’ total dismantling of the Dallas Cowboys. We talk about both events and also about what happened in high school and college football last weekend and what’s coming up this weekend.
Stream all episodes here.
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
Mississippi Today
On this day in 1899
Sept. 18, 1899
Scott Joplin, known as โthe King of Ragtime,โ copyrighted the โMaple Leaf Rag,โ which became the first song to sell more than 1 million copies of sheet music. The popularity launched a sensation surrounding ragtime, which has been called America’s โfirst classical music.โย
Born near Texarkana, Texas, Joplin grew up in a musical family. He worked on the railroad with other family members until he was able to earn money as a musician, traveling across the South. He wound up playing at the World’s Fair in Chicago in 1893, where he met fellow musician Otis Saunders, who encouraged him to write down the songs he had been making up to entertain audiences. In all, Joplin wrote dozens of ragtime songs.
After some success, he moved to New York City, hoping he could make a living while stretching the boundaries of music. He wrote a ragtime ballet and two operas, but success in these new forms eluded him. He was buried in a pauper’s grave in New York City in 1917.
More than six decades later, his music was rediscovered, initially by Joshua Rifkin, who recorded Joplin’s songs on a record, and then Gunther Schuller of the New England Conservatory, who performed four of the ragtime songs in concert: โMy faculty, many of whom had never even heard of Joplin, were saying things like, โMy gosh, he writes melodies like Schubert!’โ
Joplin’s music won over even more admirers through the 1973 movie, โThe Sting,โ which won an Oscar for the music. His song, โThe Entertainer,โ reached No. 3 on Billboard and was ranked No. 10 among โSongs of the Centuryโ list by the Recording Industry Association of America. His opera โTreemonishaโ was produced to wide acclaim, and he won a Pulitzer Prize in 1976 for his special contribution to American music.ย
โThe ragtime craze, the faddish thing, will obviously die down, but Joplin will have his position secure in American music history,โ Rifkin said. โHe is a treasurable composer.โ
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
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