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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 ]
The New Farmers of America (NFA) was organized in Tuskegee, Alabama and became a national organization for African-American young men in 1935.The organization was formed to serve agriculture students in southern states where schools were segregated by law.
The current generation of Black students in Tennessee has shown an interest in careers in agriculture as the changing field offers new opportunities.
The strength of African-American activism and, to a lesser extent, the moderation of elite planters meant that in the black belt Reconstruction essentially worked. Sharecropping developed as a compromise that allowed white planters to make money while black workers preferred its relatively greater autonomy in comparison to slavery.
African Americans in the United States have a unique history of homesteading, in part due to historical discrimination and legacies of enslavement. Black American communities were negatively impacted by the Homestead Act's implementation , which was designed to give land to those who had been enslaved and other underprivileged groups.
Black American farmers are more likely to rent rather than own the land on which they live, which in turn made them less likely to be able to afford to buy land later. [17] In the year 2010, President Barack Obama authorized the payment of 1.25 billion dollars from the USDA to black American farmers as a settlement in Pigford v. Glickman.
Pigford v. Glickman (1999) was a class action lawsuit against the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), alleging that it had racially discriminated against African-American farmers in its allocation of farm loans and assistance from 1981 to 1996.