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African Americans are the largest racial minority in Virginia. According to the 2010 Census, more than 1.5 million, or one in five Virginians is "Black or African American". African Americans were enslaved in the state. [3] As of the 2020 U.S. Census, African Americans were 18.6% of the state's population. [4]
John Wesley Boyd Jr. (born September 4, 1965) is an African-American farmer, civil rights activist and the founder of the National Black Farmers Association (NBFA). He owns and operates Boyd Farms, which has 1,500-acre (6.1 km 2) [1] across three farms in Baskerville, Virginia where he grows soybean, corn and wheat and currently raises one hundred and fifty head of beef cattle.
The role of African Americans in the agricultural history of the United States includes roles as the main work force when they were enslaved on cotton and tobacco plantations in the Antebellum South. After the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863-1865 most stayed in farming as very poor sharecroppers , who rarely owned land.
As of 2013, 90,000 African-American, Hispanic, female and Native American farmers had filed claims, some fraudulent, or even transparently bogus. [ 28 ] On August 26, 2020, the National Black Farmers Association filed a lawsuit in a St. Louis court seeking to force Monsanto and its parent company Bayer to end the sale of Roundup . [ 29 ]
After 1900, African Americans, the majority of the population in most of the Black Belt, were rarely allowed to vote, apart from a few ministers, businessmen and schoolteachers. Political power was in the hands of a relatively closed white elite comprising the major landowners, along with local merchants and bankers.
Jewel Hairston Bronaugh is an American government official who served as the 14th Deputy Secretary of Agriculture. She previously served as the 16th commissioner of the Virginia Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services from 2018 to 2021. Bronaugh is the first African-American to be Deputy Secretary of Agriculture.
NFA was a localized movement in Virginia around 1927. H.O. Sargent, Federal Agent for Agricultural Education, and G.W. Owens, Teacher-Trainer at Virginia State College, were two of the earliest proponents of an organization for African-American farm youth.
The twentieth-century Great Migration of blacks from the rural South to the urban North reduced Virginia's black population to about 20%. [5] Today, African-Americans are concentrated in the eastern and southern Tidewater and Piedmont regions where plantation agriculture was the most dominant. [31]