The long road to justice for Virginian John W. Boyd Jr. and other black farmers did not end Dec. 8, 2010.
On that day, President Barack Obama signed a $1.15 billion legal settlement for black farmers who'd claimed discrimination by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
The original class-action lawsuit, Pigford v. Glickman, was settled in 1999, with the government paying out $1 billion to about 16,000 farmers who had been denied farm loans, price supports and disaster payments in what a former U.S. agriculture secretary conceded was a pattern of discrimination.
Last year, the USDA reached a new settlement called Pigford II to resolve claims by late filers who said they were not notified and were unfairly left out of the earlier settlement.
But since Obama signed the appropriation bill, no money has been paid for Pigford II claims. Meanwhile, conservative bloggers, lawmakers and media personalities are alleging fraud by black farmers.
"After 26 years, nothing else surprises me," said Boyd, president of the National Black Farmers Association. "But I can tell you, I'm glad to have the political process behind me."
Among the most persistent voices crying foul is conservative online activist Andrew Breitbart.
That he has the temerity to accuse anyone of fraud is beyond irony. Breitbart was behind the deceptive video of USDA official Shirley Sherrod, whose speech was edited to make her appear as a racist who refused to help a white farmer facing bankruptcy. In reality, the family credited Sherrod with saving their farm.
Breitbart is a guy who should have zero credibility, but he's not alone. Reps. Bob Goodlatte, a Republican from Virginia's 6th District, Michele Bachmann, R-Minn., and Steve King, R-Iowa, have also accused the black farmers of fraud.
Since none of the Pigford II farmers have pocketed a dime, it's hard to see how fraud has occurred. How will anyone know until their claims are adjudicated?
"To call black farmers frauds who have not had the chance to have their cases heard and arbitrated ... here again, has some racial undertones to it," said Boyd, a Mecklenburg County farmer.
"They're wasting time beating up on poor black farmers," he said. "We don't have anything anyway. Why waste your time beating up on black farmers proven to have been discriminated against by the government?
"They (the farmers) haven't even gone through the process. If something is wrong with any of those cases, the process will catch it," he said.
Boyd will speak April 27 at the College of William and Mary. "It's in my home state, and I'm looking forward to doing it," he said, adding that he will be talking, from a historical perspective, about politics and how it relates to small farmers.
Boyd wishes critics of the settlement would take a long view of the black farmer, from slave to sharecropper to landowner.
"They really need to take a look at historically what has happened to black farmers in this country — the role that we have played in the agricultural fabric of this country."
It's a struggle that, contrary to the Breitbarts of the world, continues to this day.
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