Mike Thornton of Full Logic Reverse interviews Gary Grant, former president of the Black Farmers and Agriculturalists Association, about the events surrounding the Pigford Consent Decree. According to the BFAA, “The USDA finally admitted to both Congress and the federal courts—what Black farmers had been asserting and otherwise stating through public outcries for decades—that the USDA was engaged in a systematic effort to expropriate the land that African Americans had acquired since slavery, back to the sons and daughters of the original plantation owners. The USDA had developed a sophisticated system of allowing its agents to discriminate against Black farmers by delaying, denying and otherwise frustrating the efforts of African American farmers and their heirs from obtaining loan assistance necessary to maintain their lawful and constitutional right to engage in the vocation of farming.”

The relatively ‘minor’ events at the South Central Farm here in Los Angeles remind us again that there still is a struggle for the land here in the United States of America, that there are people who are willing to work according the most ancient, authentically conservative world view: the people directly toward the land and the land directly toward the people. That the very idea of Black people actually wanting to farm for a living is almost laughable for most urbane North Americans is yet another towering example of the mind control powers of the centrally-controlled mass media. Africans were stolen away to this country to work the land. To match the cynicism and Dadaism of pop culture, we can call this horrible experience a job training program that should have made a majority of us the best farmers in the world. Gary Grant details some of the reasons why this is not the case.