Forty acres and a screw
The call that changed the lives of George and Patricia Hildebrandt came late one evening in April 1997. They had just walked through the kitchen door of their Leavenworth farmhouse when Patricia picked up the ringing telephone. George’s sister, Barbara, was on the other end. Turn on the television quick, she told them. Maxine Waters and the Congressional Black Caucus are on CNN — and they’re talking about the black farmers.
That was the first George and Patricia heard of a class-action lawsuit making its way to the United States District Court for the District of Columbia. The lawsuit, Pigford v. Glickman (named for North Carolina farmer Timothy Pigford) would eventually pay out millions of dollars to black farmers as compensation for years of discrimination by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA). But the allegations the black farmers and California Congresswoman Maxine Waters were talking about with Secretary of Agriculture (and former Kansas Representative) Dan Glickman on that newscast were nothing new to George and his wife.
The Hildebrandts had been battling the Farm Service Agency (FSA) in nearby Effingham, Kansas, for nearly a decade, begging FSA officer Bruce Nutsch to give them loans, applications for assistance, or anything that would keep them going on the small farm that had been in George’s family for three generations. Their pleas fell on deaf ears, George says.
George’s two fields, one for organic vegetables and the other for wheat and soybeans, spread out half-planted that spring. He had scraped together enough money to begin his planting but was nearly a month behind. Meanwhile, shoots of green were already sprouting on the land owned by his white neighbors.
All of the farmers in the Missouri River bottoms of Kansas operated at the mercy of the elements. All had watched helplessly in 1993 when the river rose up and engulfed surrounding farms, submerging fields, crops, and the Hildebrandts’ home beneath 50 feet of muddy river. George and Patricia lost everything they owned in that flood. They later rebuilt their house, but being washed out and driven from their home was about all the Hildebrandts had in common with their neighbors.
Like the white farmers, George’s livelihood depended on staffers at the Farm Service Agency, whose offices were in place to loan money and offer other help to farmers when storms or droughts ravaged their crops or they needed to buy seed and equipment. The FSA was supposed to help George. Instead, he says, that agency has repeatedly thrown roadblocks in his way.
George knew that being a month behind in his planting would cost him. Even so, a greater burden had weighed upon his shoulders as he’d driven his old tractor across the fields that spring. He had a lot more to lose than a bountiful harvest. The flood four years earlier had wiped them out financially, causing him to fall behind on his mortgage payments and damaging his credit at the bank. The FSA had recently stepped up its attempts to foreclose on his farm. The Hildebrandts were just a few weeks away from losing their home.
George and Patricia were surprised to turn on CNN and hear that thousands of minority farmers were operating on next to nothing because the USDA hadn’t given them any help. Finally someone was paying attention, listening closely enough to hold a meeting with the United States Secretary of Agriculture. George could barely sit still. Patricia was excited too, but she had already seen too many years of dealing with FSA agents who were unresponsive, even hostile, to their needs.
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“When Maxine Waters started asking Dan Glickman questions, I was amazed,” she says. “I thought, ‘We’re going to get somewhere now.’ But when she asked him about the black farmers’ class-action suit, he said some will get it, and some won’t. That stuck in my heart, because I thought, ‘What did he mean by that?'”
Still, for the first time in months, George and Patricia went to bed without the threat of losing everything they had worked so hard to keep. A soft breeze blew through the open window. Even the river that rolled slowly by the edge of their land seemed harmless.
But there was something Patricia couldn’t quite put out of her mind. That comment by Glickman, that some will get the money and some won’t. She closed her eyes and tried to sleep, but the question kept returning. What did he mean by that?Patricia drove their children to school in the following weeks, her hopes rising with each trip up and down the dusty road to their farm.
“I heard this song on the radio every morning, and the song was saying, ‘A change is gonna come, just hold on, a change is gonna come,'” she remembers. “When I would hear this song, it was like I felt both hope and fear, like this is really possible, that this is going to be solved and then we won’t have any more problems. Just listening to that song kind of uplifted me, like somebody’s listening. We’re going to get some help.”
For a while, it looked as though Patricia was right. That year, USDA officials pledged to end the racial discrimination that had put black farmers out of business for decades. Glickman had empowered a Civil Rights Action Team (CRAT), which in February published a thick report confirming that black farmers frequently had been denied equal access to the very USDA programs designed to keep small farms in business. The report was relentless in its portrayal of USDA mismanagement and hostility toward black farmers. Many of those farmers, for example, had tried to apply for farm operating loans well in advance of planting season, only to be told by their FSA agents that no applications were available. Even if the farmers were eventually given applications, the process often dragged on for months until it was too late to plant crops.
“In some cases, the FSA loan never arrives, leaving the farmer without means to repay debts. Further operating and disaster loans may be denied because of the farmer’s debt load, making it impossible for the farmer to earn any money from the farm,” the CRAT reported. “The farmer will then have to sell the land or be foreclosed on to settle debts.”
All that summer, the CRAT report rumbled through the hallways and offices of the USDA. Black farmers all around the country started hearing about a class-action lawsuit and began contacting Alexander Pires, the plaintiffs’ lead attorney. The Hildebrandts were certain they could be part of the lawsuit. George’s living-room file cabinet overflowed with letters proving he had gone back and forth with his FSA office for years. His complaints of discrimination were already on record with the CRAT.
That song kept playing in Patricia’s head. A change was bound to come. But like Glickman’s offices in Washington, that change was a long way off. The class-action lawsuit was finally filed in August 1997 — with George listed as one of 647 plaintiffs — but the proceedings would drag on for another year and a half. In the meantime, George and Patricia resumed the struggle to save their farm.
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The Hildebrandts scheduled a meeting with FSA agent Bruce Nutsch at the end of May 1997. They had thought of a plan to stay afloat, and all they needed was his approval. If the cash flow from the Hildebrandts’ farm was not enough to meet FSA standards to restructure their current loan, they argued, their son Chris could co-sign the note for them. He was 27 years old, had a good job, assets of $28,000 and extra income that he could apply to the loan if necessary.
Nutsch, however, disagreed. He questioned the logic behind letting a single, 27-year-old man obligate himself to a $180,000 debt. In his report, he wrote that Chris would likely marry one day and need his non-farm income to support his own family. Chris got an application anyway and says he personally delivered it to Nutsch’s office in Effingham. On June 23, 1997, Nutsch sent the Hildebrandts a letter stating that Chris needed to have at least three years’ experience in operating a farm to be eligible for the loan. “This is the regulation that will have to be complied with in order for Chris to assume the debt that you have with FSA,” he wrote.
“Was that really his call?” George asks. “My son was raised here. He grew up here. He’s been helping me since he was 8 years old.” Chris’ experience echoed the findings of the CRAT report, which confirmed that the FSA often denied financing for young black men and women who wanted to take over their families’ farms or buy their own — even though the applicants had spent years working on farms or had advanced degrees in agriculture.
Although USDA Farm Ownership Loans require three years’ experience operating a farm, an applicant may be eligible if he “has participated in management and operation of a farm by virtue of being raised on a farm and has held significant responsibility for day-to-day management decisions for at least three complete production and marketing cycles.” Not only had Chris been raised on the farm, but he also owned a home on the land for which the FSA held the mortgage.
“I thought it was absurd,” Chris says of Nutsch’s contention that he did not have enough farm experience to qualify for a Farm Ownership Loan. “I told him, ‘I know how to do everything on a farm. We’ve had this place since 1980 and we’ve done it all. There is nothing about it I can’t do; it’s second nature to me.'”
Donn Teske, a farm analyst who attended the meeting between the Hildebrandts and Nutsch, also doubted the wisdom of letting Chris assume the loan. It’s hard enough to make a living farming nowadays, Teske told them, even without the additional responsibility of Chris taking on his parents’ debt. Teske tells PitchWeekly it’s not uncommon for farmers’ children to want to assume their parents’ debts and take over their farms. Nutsch’s reluctance had nothing to do with racism, he says, because white farmers’ children get turned down as well. He points out that most people think being raised on a farm makes them eligible for the farm-operating loan but that the problem lies in their lack of farm-management experience. “It’s one thing to work on a farm,” says Teske. “It’s another thing to manage it.”
“I like George and he probably has valid points,” Teske adds, “but I was always under the impression that the agencies working with him were fair. But I’m also certain that whenever I was in the situation, (the agents at the FSA) were on their best behavior.”
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Chris says he never received a response from the application he gave to Nutsch. In fact, in a Dec. 22, 1997, letter to the USDA in response to a complaint George had filed, Nutsch denied receiving the application at all. But just one month earlier, in a letter to Forrest Buhler at Kansas Agricultural Mediation Services, Nutsch had written that “the Hildebrandts’ son, Chris, filed the papers to be put on the note as a co-signer, but this action was rejected by FSA.”
As far as George and Patricia were concerned, Nutsch was only giving them more of the same runaround they’d gotten all along. George says Nutsch spent years raising — and then dashing — their hopes. Nutsch once gave them an outdated loan application, which they spent hours completing, only to have him laugh at them and set it aside when they turned it in. By this time, George knew he would get nowhere with Nutsch. If no one in Kansas would listen to what he was saying, George decided, maybe someone in Washington would.Early one morning in October 1998, Patricia packed two small suitcases while George waited in their kitchen for her to come downstairs. In his coat pocket was an Amtrak ticket to Washington. He’d received a letter from Alexander Pires, the lead attorney for the plaintiffs, telling black farmers who had signed up for the lawsuit that Judge Paul Friedman was scheduled to meet with USDA representatives to discuss the terms of the pending consent decree. George set out for Washington to make his presence known.
It was before sunrise when George and Patricia drove away from their farm, and the chill of the autumn night was still in the air. At 6 a.m., George sat in the station in Kansas City and waited for the train that would take him to Friedman. That trip was the first of four that George would make to Washington. When he entered the courtroom, he found himself packed into the middle of almost 500 men — and a few women — clad in denim overalls and hats bearing logos of seed and tractor companies.
“Talking to those farmers was like talking to myself in a mirror,” says George, “because 99 percent of them had the same problems. Their agents told them there weren’t any funds in the programs and there was no money available. They wouldn’t give them applications, and if they did give them applications, they would take months to notify them whether the applications were good or bad.”
Three months later, in January 1999, Friedman signed a settlement between the USDA and attorneys representing black farmers. The ruling allowed black farmers to pursue one of two tracks. Track A, if a farmer’s claim was approved by an adjudicator, would pay him $50,000 and possibly forgive past government debts. Track B allowed a farmer to have a hearing before an independent arbitrator to seek larger damages.
Most of the farmers were confident they would receive the $50,000. “Every one of us thought, ‘Well, we’re going to be paid,'” George says.
By the time Friedman officially signed the consent decree in April 1999, more than 18,000 black farmers had signed up for the settlement. In June 1999, George and Patricia took their papers to a signup session in Kansas City and filed their claim with one of Pires’ attorneys.
“We thought it was going to be easy,” says Patricia. “I thought, ‘Maybe we’ll get through this and get our debt written off and then we’ll finally be free.'” That would be a nice Christmas present, she told George, if they got the money by December. A few more months went by and Patricia started saying, “Well, maybe by March.” But the crops would be harvested, with winter knocking at the door, before George and Patricia heard back from the USDA.
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In November 1999, the day before Thanksgiving, Patricia opened the mailbox to find a letter from Poorman-Douglas Corp., the facilitator responsible for assigning the Pigford v. Glickman claims to adjudicators for final decision. “I saw that letter and I froze,” Patricia recalls.
They had been told by Pires’ attorney that their claim was number 8,192 and that the claims would be processed in the order in which they had come. The last time she and George had checked the USDA Web site, only 1,000 claims had been settled. Now here was the result, so quickly. She brought the unopened letter back to the house and handed it to George.
“You think I ought to open it?” he asked her.
“I said, ‘I really don’t know.’ I told him, ‘I don’t want to hear about it,'” Patricia says. “Then George opened it up and read it, and the expression on his face was like somebody had shot him.”
“We’ve been denied,” he told her.
By this time, Patricia and George were no strangers to hardship. They had been flooded out of their home twice since 1984. The last time, in 1993, after the waters receded, they had to live in a trailer supplied by the Federal Emergency Management Agency and spent 18 hours a day rebuilding their home. Once, when they were living in the cramped trailer with their two children, Patricia woke up at 2 a.m. “I couldn’t breathe,” she recalls. “I shook George awake and told him I felt like I was dying. I opened up the door to the trailer and walked out and stood in my bare feet in the snow. I didn’t feel the cold; I didn’t feel anything. I just needed to breathe in the cold air, and it finally calmed me down.”
Her nerves were shot, a doctor told her the next day. Patricia says her panic attack stemmed from a conversation she’d had with Dean Altenhofen, their FSA county supervisor at the time, immediately after the flood. She had called Altenhofen after receiving a letter from Leavenworth National Bank advising flood victims of the many emergency programs and funds available. “He told me, ‘Patricia, there’s nothing we can do for you,'” she says. “After that happened, I’d walk around from day to day and I could still hear Dean Altenhofen saying that to me.”
Two years later, George and Patricia’s son, George Hildebrandt III, was killed on a nearby road by a drunk driver. George and Patricia adopted his two children, Brooklyn, who was 4 at the time, and Spencer, who was only 2.
Now the USDA had denied their claim in the black farmers’ class-action suit.
“All I could think was, okay, here comes USDA, and they’re going to foreclose on us. They’re going to wipe us out,” says Patricia. She got on the phone with co-lead attorney Phillip Fraas. “I said, ‘Mr. Fraas, if we get thrown off this farm, we have no place else to go. I’ve got grandkids to raise, and I’ve got my kids still to raise. Where are we going to go?’ I finally gave the phone over to George and just sat in my chair and kept crying because I didn’t know what else to do.” Patricia had already proven herself a strong woman, but the USDA’s denial of the claim seemed an impossible blow to withstand. Now she and George could only sit in silence and stare at this piece of paper, the letter that held so much power over the rest of their lives.
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George, however, wasn’t ready to give up. “We’re going to fight this thing,” he told her. According to the rules of the consent decree, a farmer whose claim has been denied can appeal to the USDA if a court-appointed monitor determines that the adjudicator made an error in processing the claim. This past February, George prepared his appeal and drove to Washington to hand-deliver the claim to Poorman-Douglas. The independent adjudicators who decide the black farmers’ claims base their decisions on records available in the farmers’ USDA files. But George’s denial read like a work of fiction.
On George’s original claim form, he noted that he had tried to apply for an emergency loan in 1988 but his FSA agent told him that no money was available. George wrote that the FSA agent hadn’t even given him an application. “USDA records tell a different story than the claim,” reads the adjudicator’s statement of decision. “Claimant was approved for and executed a promissory note for the 1988 emergency loan and there are no records to show that he did not receive a check.”
But in fact, real estate documents at the Leavenworth County Courthouse show a record of George’s original loan for $120,000 from Farmers Home Administration (FmHA, which is now FSA) in 1981, along with a $9,400 emergency loan granted to him in 1984, but there is no record of any loan in 1988. The legal file for the impending foreclosure on the Hildebrandts’ farm also contains copies of promissory notes for loans they received from FSA but makes no mention of any loan in 1988.
“On my claim decision, they told nothing but lies,” says George. “They told me I had never asked for any loan applications, that they had restructured my note six times, and that they had given me a loan in 1988.”
The statement of decision continues, “There is a running record of a conversation with claimant in 1993 in which he told an agent that he had never applied for a loan because he was told it wouldn’t do any good.”
That “running record” appears to be Nutsch’s notes of his conversations with the Hildebrandts, of which George received a copy when he obtained his USDA file through the Freedom of Information Act.
“I never applied for the loans because they wouldn’t give me the applications,” says George. “They don’t tell you that part. They told me it wouldn’t do any good, but they never gave me the application either.”
Nutsch declined to answer any of PitchWeekly‘s questions or talk about anything related to the black farmers’ lawsuit.
“Claim is denied as there is not substantial evidence of discrimination,” wrote the adjudicator. “The records do not support the claim, as it appears that claimant did receive applications and did not seek the aid he now alleges that he did.” George and Patricia would receive no relief under the consent decree. George’s statements carried no weight against those of his FSA agent. The adjudicator had relied on Nutsch’s records — the agent George says discriminated against him in the first place — to prove that there was no evidence of discrimination.
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And George soon found out that a lot of other black farmers wouldn’t get any relief, either. As the number of denied claims has risen this summer to 39 percent, discontent has grown among the farmers involved with the lawsuit. Four times this year, farmers have held demonstrations at the USDA’s Washington offices; at two of those protests, when they demanded to speak with Glickman, several were arrested for obstructing an entrance (a hearing to appeal the consent decree is scheduled for July 31). To complicate matters, several farmers from Arkansas slated to receive the $50,000 allege they are being harassed by officials from the U.S. Department of Justice and the FBI. An untold number of others have just given up, weary of wrestling with a bureaucracy that flattens them at every turn. Like George, some vowed to fight. On Monday, June 5, at the Ramada Inn in Leavenworth, 40 black farmers and their wives wait for Rosalind Gray, USDA Director of Civil Rights. A letter that George, who is president of the Kansas Black Farmers Association, wrote to President Clinton in January prompted Gray’s visit. Most of the farmers have stacks of papers spread out on the tables before them. This is the first time anyone of any prominence from the USDA has ventured out to discuss the settlement with the Sunflower State’s black farmers.
But these farmers have come from all over. They’ve driven in from Oklahoma, Arkansas, Missouri, and the far corners of Kansas. Now, over a meal of barbecued ribs and applesauce, they wait like hungry cats ready to pounce all at once on a single mouse.
Kenneth Wallingford rummages through a massive pile of ripped-open envelopes and wrinkled letters. Wallingford, who lives in Effingham, eventually finds his claim’s rejection, which he received in January.
“They said I got a loan in 1994, so I’ve got nothing to complain about. That’s why my claim was denied,” says Wallingford. He pulls out a copy of an appeal decision from 1994, which shows he was denied an emergency loan because of a history of substandard farm production. “Why would the adjudicator say I got a loan when I’ve got the paperwork saying I was denied?” he asks. “Surely they must know that somebody would catch on to that.” He is equally puzzled by the statement that he received 17 loans over a period of 18 years. Wallingford says that is simply not true.
Nearly an hour passes before Gray steps up to the podium to talk about all the USDA is doing to assist black farmers. When Clinton appointed Gray director in 1998, civil rights complaints at the USDA had been piling up in a room, mostly untouched, since the USDA disbanded its Office of Civil Rights Enforcement and Adjudication (OCREA) in 1983. Even though the OCREA closed, civil rights complaints from farmers and USDA employees had continued to pour in as they always had. Over the years, the USDA attempted to organize its civil rights department several times, never coming up with anything that really worked. Instead, constant reorganization created chaos and upheavals among its civil rights staff. Closing down OCREA wasn’t the only evidence that civil rights weren’t a high priority at the USDA. According to the CRAT report, less than 1 percent of the USDA’s budgetary resources at that time was allocated to civil rights.
Gray’s first priority after being appointed was to hire a staff to plow through 15 years of backlogged complaints.
She stands at the front of the room and tells the farmers the latest statistics on Pigford v. Glickman claims. She assures them that her staff has made its way through most of the backlogged civil rights complaints. The group listens politely, but it soon becomes clear that the civil rights department is the least of their concerns. They want to know what Gray can do for black farmers.
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“I filed a civil rights complaint in 1994 and my son filed one in ’95,” a farmer from Oklahoma tells Gray. “We didn’t receive any reply until ’97. So we’re sitting out here and after three years, we finally hear back from the civil rights department. So we chose to go over to the lawsuit, and now we’ve had nothing but lies and delays.”
Around the room, farmers nod their heads and exchange knowing glances. A woman leans back in her chair, disgusted. One after another, the farmers level complaints of mistreatment by the FSA.
“What about the USDA lying on our claim denials?” George asks Gray. Maxine Waters has requested all of the denied claim forms, Gray tells him, and the congresswoman’s office will review them. Waters also plans to bring the Arkansas farmers’ concerns about FBI harassment to the attention of the U.S. Department of Justice.
“We know that the consent decree was basically written by the USDA,” one man says angrily. Not so, says Gray. Attorneys for the plaintiffs and the Justice Department drafted the consent decree and sent it to the USDA at various stages for comment and review (the plaintiffs’ attorneys wouldn’t even allow the USDA to be present for meetings during which they drafted the decree). But that doesn’t stop these farmers from saying whatever is on their minds. Wallingford, whose claim was denied, sits quietly throughout the meeting. Another farmer, Joe Robinson, from Harrisonville, Missouri, stands at the side of the room, trying to interject. “Excuse me,” he says again and again. “Can I ask my question?” But it isn’t Gray who won’t allow him to speak; the floor belongs to a few vocal farmers. Robinson is one of the few farmers in the room who actually received their checks for $50,000 — but he never gets a chance to ask his question.The session with Gray goes on for three hours, until almost 9 p.m. Eventually the farmers wear themselves down. They’ve had their say and someone finally listened. Gray hangs on until the end, taking lots of notes and fielding even more questions after the meeting breaks up.
George is in a good mood. By the time most of the farmers walk out into the Ramada parking lot, the sun has already set. They get in their cars and drive away, knowing that Gray is but one person in a department that took civil rights seriously only after getting slammed with a class-action lawsuit. They go back home to hoe their fields, chug along in tractors that should have been retired long ago, and wait for the USDA to come through on its promises. “There certainly wasn’t any particular problem that hasn’t been brought to my attention by other minority farmers,” Gray tells PitchWeekly later, from her office in Washington. She has made the rounds of the Southern states, talking with groups of farmers in Mississippi, Alabama, Arkansas, and Louisiana. Everywhere she goes, she hears the same complaints. The USDA may finally have committed to preserving farmers’ civil rights, but that attitude has yet to reach the FSA’s county offices.
“I continue to be puzzled about why with (civil rights and outreach) departments in each state, the service is so poor,” Gray says. “I think we have to do a better job of trying to identify small, socially disadvantaged farmers and making sure they are aware of our programs and procedures.” But in the meantime, if George Hildebrandt needs loans or FSA programs, he has no choice but to go to Bruce Nutsch, the same FSA agent he says has discriminated against him all along.
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In 1920, one in every seven farmers in the United States was African-American. In 1999, fewer than 18,000 black farmers remained, about 1 percent of the farming population. When Pigford v. Glickman was settled in January of last year, attorneys estimated that 3,000 black farmers would join the lawsuit. But as of June 8 of this year, 20,667 former and current farmers filed claims — 19,673 of them for Track A and the $50,000.
As a woman at the Leavenworth meeting with Gray said, “Everyone who could tie their shoes and lift their head has signed up for this lawsuit.” So far, the USDA has paid more than $240 million in settlements; 61 percent of the claims have been approved. The other 39 percent received statements from adjudicators telling them they did not have sufficient evidence of discrimination.
Mary Beth Schultheis, a USDA spokeswoman, declined to address specific questions about George Hildebrandt’s claim, citing reasons of privacy. However, she emphasized the USDA’s commitment to becoming a civil rights leader. “Since taking a look at some of the civil rights issues at the Department, we have made it a top priority to improve USDA’s record on civil rights and ensure that all of our employees and customers are treated with fairness, dignity, and respect,” says Schultheis.
But behind the USDA’s reports and pledges to become a leader in civil rights are farmers like George and Patricia Hildebrandt, who wait in Leavenworth for the results of their appeal, no longer certain that they will receive the money the consent decree promised them.
On a Saturday afternoon in June, George works his way up and down the rows of his 12-acre vegetable field. On the other side of his home are 135 acres of soybeans. He roots with a hoe around a row of potato plants and stoops to brush the dirt away from a potato that is cracking through the ground. Then he pats the soil down over it again and looks up at the sky, which is dropping sprinkles of rain.
“The whole system would rather there not be any black farmers,” says George. The problem lies in getting Glickman’s enthusiasm for civil rights out to the rank and file of the state and county FSA offices. “They feel like we’re so far beneath them, we shouldn’t even be in existence. The USDA evidently feels that way; all you’ve got to do is look at their record.”
“Kansas is no better, and much worse, than you find in states in the deep South,” George adds. “We can’t just walk in the bank and say, ‘We’ll pay you.’ We’ve always got to prove ourselves.”
A strand of Christmas lights still hangs on the front porch, strung up by the Hildebrandts’ children last December. Once again, Patricia hopes they will receive their money by Christmas. But now her hope seems as out of place as the festive lights dangling from a farmhouse porch in the middle of summer.
“We know the FSA is laying to foreclose on us if we get denied in this appeal,” says Patricia, who has resigned herself to accept whatever happens next. She’s noticed that the black farmers’ lawsuit rarely makes the news anymore. As far as the rest of the world is concerned, black farmers have been taken care of and the USDA has a new commitment to civil rights. Patricia knows otherwise.
