Dispossession: Discrimination Against African American Farmers in the Age of Civil Rights by Pete Daniel (review)

Over half a million black farmers left the land between 1950 and 1975. In Dispossession, Pete Daniel analyzes why and how that happened. He convincingly argues that the United States Department of Agriculture worked with wealthy, capital-intensive farmers- a combination he describes as "Agribusiness and agrigovernment" (12)-to push small farmers off their farms. In the age of civil rights gains for the majority of African Americans, black farmers were left out. If anything, the Civil Rights movement made things worse, as it encouraged white farmers (aided by the USDA) to hone their skills in repression, bureaucratic discrimination, and mechanization. Daniel focuses on three agencies: the Agricultural Stabilization and Conservation Service, the Federal Extension Service, and the Farmers Home Administration. All of these had democratic elements, such as local and state committees with elected members, which obscured the extent to which the USDA undermined equal opportunity laws. Dispossession follows the themes of earlier works by Daniel: concern for what is lost in the victory of agribusiness over small farming; sympathy for the human costs borne by those on the margin, like the rural poor, African Americans, or small farmers; and documentation of the relationship between the government, big business, and rural transformation.

The New Deal saw the introduction of federal regulations and interventions so invasive that small farmers could no longer ignore them. Postwar USDA policies concentrated farming into a smaller and smaller numbers of big farmers. After the Brown decision (1954), striking down the legal doctrine of separate but equal, USDA leadership ignored the Supreme Court's decision while rank-and-file employees prepared for a fight to eliminate laws protecting equal rights. Daniel demonstrates in great detail how the USDA managed to hide such behavior until the civil rights moment had passed. As he describes for one ASCS election, local USDA employees used "bureaucratic ineptness, evasion, deceit, and obfuscation, while Washington administrators offered mock concern but no enforcement" (79). Local USDA employees simply refused to accept civil rights laws - they failed to tell black farmers about available government loans, confused and intimidated would-be clients with paperwork and regulations, and went to great lengths to keep black farmers off of the powerful county and state agricultural committees. When finally pressured to recognize black rights (and rarely did such pressure come from USDA leadership, but more often from outside groups or other government agencies, like the US Commission on Civil Rights), white USDA employees responded with denial, delay, and tokenism while encouraging local whites to retaliate against African Americans involved in the Civil Rights movement. Only constant insistence from the national USDA could keep local USDA employees enforcing laws regarding equal opportunity, but department leaders were more concerned about looking good on civil rights than actually protecting them.

Dispossession is in a sense a story of missed opportunities. By the time the Civil Rights movement began to improve conditions for black farmers, it was too late. Mechanization and federal discrimination were well along in the process of pushing black farmers off the land. These missed opportunities can largely be attributed to the USDA, or more specifically to the structure of the USDA. One of the most useful aspects of his book is Daniel's depiction of the USDA, a vast and self-contradictory bureaucracy that grew almost entirely beyond the direct control of its nominal leaders in the decades before World War II. The size, variety, and unclear connections within the USDA and its constituents (both claimed and actual) made it resistant to meaningful change or rapid reform. Daniel does not go into great detail about how USDA leaders in Washington might have realistically implemented civil rights changes in the 1960s and 1970s, but the sobering truth may be that such a change was practically impossible.

Daniel brings the story to an ambivalent end. The Pigford v.Glickman...