Losing Ground
Reveal
The Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX
4.7 • 8K Ratings
🗓️ 9 April 2022
⏱️ ? minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In 2021, the Biden administration approved $4 billion in loan forgiveness for Black farmers and other farmers of color, as part of the $1.9 trillion pandemic relief package. The aid was supposed to make up for decades of discrimination. However, White farmers have sued, and that aid has yet to be paid out as the issue makes it way through the courts.
Eddie Wise is one farmer who claimed to face discrimination. He was the son of a sharecropper. In 1996, he and his wife, Dorothy, bought a farm with a loan from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Twenty years later, the USDA foreclosed on the property and evicted him.
John Biewen of “Scene on Radio” teamed up with Reveal to investigate Wise’s claim of race-based discrimination. Wise’s story is one piece of the puzzle explaining how Black families went from owning nearly a million farms in 1920 to now fewer than 36,000.
The federal government has admitted it was part of the problem. In 1997, a USDA report said discrimination by the agency was a factor in the decline of Black farms. A landmark class-action lawsuit on behalf of Black farmers, Pigford v. Glickman, was settled in 1999. But advocates for Black farmers say problems persist.
This episode was originally broadcast in July 2017.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | From the Center for Investigative Reporting in PRX, this is revealed. I'm Alex. |
| 0:06.0 | For Eddie Wise, owning a farm was a lifelong dream. |
| 0:10.0 | But for a black man born in North Carolina in the 1940s, it wasn't that easy. |
| 0:15.0 | His father, grandfather, and great-grandfather were all sharecroppers. |
| 0:20.0 | But Eddie wanted a farm of his own. To get that, he felt like he'd have to go into the world. |
| 0:26.0 | When I turned 18, I signed up to go into Army. |
| 0:30.0 | Eddie was working in a tobacco field when an Army recruiter showed up. |
| 0:35.0 | And I raised both hands and said, here I come. |
| 0:40.0 | When he walked off that farm, he made himself a vow. |
| 0:44.0 | I said, the next time I'm on a farm, I'm going to be owning that bable. I'm not working on a farm for nobody else. |
| 0:51.0 | Years later, Eddie would get his own farm. But he says that over a 25-year period, |
| 0:58.0 | the U.S. Agriculture Department discriminated against him and his wife Dorothy because of their race |
| 1:04.0 | and finally drove them off their land. |
| 1:07.0 | We first brought you this story back in 2017. |
| 1:10.0 | John B. Win of the podcast, seen on radio, followed the wisest for years, and investigated what happened to them. |
| 1:18.0 | So, what's the day today? |
| 1:22.0 | The day is the...what? I don't know. I think it's 20th. |
| 1:27.0 | Oh, the day is January 20th, Wednesday. |
| 1:34.0 | January 20th, 2016, 8.40 am. I've just arrived at Eddie Wise's farm. |
| 1:41.0 | It's a small 106-acre hog operation on rolling land near Rocky Mount North Carolina. |
| 1:47.0 | The driveway bends around a grove of trees leading to the mobile home where Eddie lives with his wife Dorothy. |
| 1:53.0 | I've driven out this morning because Eddie called and said something was about to go down. |
... |
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