This is a YouTube video titled "The Decline Of The Black Farmer" containing a conversation recorded in December 2019. The discussion features Ask AI Mark and another speaker addressing the historical injustices faced by African-American farmers, including broken promises of land, systemic violence, and government discrimination, highlighting the legacy and impact of these issues on black land ownership in the U.S.
Most people aren't aware that Lincoln, when he freed the slaves, promised 40 acres and a mule, which Andrew Johnson, the president who got impeached right after him, revoked. And it's been estimated that if that was in place, that there'd be a land worth $4.6 trillion in the African-American community, which has been used for them. And then at the turn of the century, 14% of farms compared to less than 1% of farmers now were African-American and they were in the South and they were threatening the existing status quo down there. And the people who were running those farms were lynched, their homes were burned, their farms destroyed, their land was taken over. And it's just, it's a legacy that people just don't realize that this was sort of an injustice that's never been talked about, that really never been really addressed. And maybe we need to get back that. $4.6 trillion of land.
We absolutely do.
You mentioned reparations and I think that's what made me think about it.
Yeah, because 40 acres and a mule was a broken promise. All of the land that black folks got was purchased off their own dime despite the oppressive sharecropping and convict leasing conditions. And it wasn't just the violent lynching and terrorism that drove people off the land, it was the federal government itself. The USDA in the 1962 Commission of Civil Rights Report was named as the number one culprit in the decline of the black farmer. Reagan later closed that office. He didn't like their findings, but that's why black farmers sued the government. They won a settlement of two billion dollars in 1999, the Pigford case, which was the largest civil rights settlement in U.S. history. But by then, most of the farmers were in their 90s and 50, 000 is not going to get you back your land. So it was really a symbolic Victory.
