Justice for Black Farmers Act

We have been and continue to be very concerned by the consistent, glaring, and very violent assault on small farmers, Black farmers, Indigenous farmers, and the right to self-determination in this country.

During the Summer of 2020, members of the National Black Food and Justice Alliance engaged in conversations with U.S. Senators Cory Booker (D-NJ) and Elizabeth Warren’s (D-MA) teams about what kind of legislation would be meaningful for Black farmers. Amid uprisings against state-sanctioned police violence, we engaged in numerous conversations about the history of discrimination, displacement, and other forms of violence against Black communities, particularly Black farmers. On November 19th, 2020, Senators Booker, Warren, and Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) announced landmark legislation aimed at addressing and correcting historic discrimination within the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). Prejudicial federal farm assistance and lending patterns have caused Black farmers to lose millions of acres and robbed Black farmers and their families of billions of dollars of inter-generational wealth. 

In just the last century, Black farmers have lost more than 12 million acres of farmland and the number of Black farmers has dwindled from 1 million to 45,500, according to the 2017 agricultural census. Today, Black farmers represent only one percent. The proposed legislation, the Justice for Black Farmers Act (S.300), intends to enact policies to end discrimination within the USDA, protect remaining Black farmers from losing their land, provide land grants to create a new generation of Black farmers and restore the land base that has been lost, and implement systemic reforms to help family farmers across the United States. 

Our contributions to the Justice for Black Farmers Act have been rooted in the wisdom of lessons from past failures and an investment in steps towards a radical reclamation of what we know our communities need and deserve. Educating the legislative team about historical and continued violence was important, but so too was naming our own solutions. Therefore, so much of what you see in this legislation was named by us, including our members. We all worked collaboratively with input from HEAL Food Alliance, and we also pointed the legislative drafting team to talk to some of our other patterns and comrades in the field. What resulted in these drafts is something we continue to be very proud of and hopeful for.

Policy has historically been and often continues to be unapologetically anti-Black and anti-Indigenous, so we must be unapologetic in our demands to name legislation that directly counters the racialized violence against our communities. We are very pleased with and excited about the outcomes of the Justice for Black Farmers Act. And we acknowledge that it does not explicitly address the harm and land theft of Indigenous communities who have protected and stewarded this land for millennia preceding colonization.

How to Support

If your organization would like to endorse the Justice for Black Farmers Act: