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In 1997, the United States Department of Agriculture admitted something shameful and long suspected: Its programs had routinely discriminated against Black farmers.
A Black tenant farmer named Timothy Pigford in North Carolina believed he and other farmers deserved not just an apology, but compensation. So he sued the federal government.
Pigford v. Glickman snowballed into the largest civil rights court case in U.S. history, with 30,000 Black farmers joining in on the class action lawsuit. (The defendant, Dan Glickman, was the U.S. Agriculture Secretary at the time.)
“We cannot get loans. Our loans are deliberately delayed in processing. Checks are held up. It's just unbelievable,” Pigford told a reporter for the Christian Science Monitor in 1996. Pigford died in August 2026 at the age of 74.
A judge ultimately ruled in favor of the farmers, and they were promised a collective payout of nearly $2.2 billion. But all of these years later, some families still haven’t received anything.
Now, decades later, the lawsuit and the discrimination it targeted is the focus of “Tending,” a six-part podcast series from North Carolina poet, producer, and musician Shirlette Ammons.
“The USDA had a long history of basically keeping Black folks from owning and stewarding land,” says Ammons. “The local, county committees often denied their loan applications, or just did everything in their power to keep Black folks from owning land.”
One of the original plaintiffs of Pigford v. Glickman was Kansan Bernard Bates, whom Ammons focused on for the series.
In the early 1980s, weather wiped out the crops on Bates’ 950-acre farm in Nicodemus, Kansas. Nicodemus was founded in 1877 by formerly enslaved Black folks, and today it’s the last remaining African American settlement west of the Mississippi River.
Bates told David Condos of the Kansas News Service in 2021 that he tried to get his loans extended to make it to the next season, but the USDA denied him. Eventually his farm was foreclosed on.
As it turns out, the denial was discriminatory. The president of the regional credit association at the time signed an affidavit in 2012 admitting, “There was a plan to get Bernard out of farming, and it was decided that [the Production Credit Association of Stockton, Kansas] would rather foreclose, even if they lost money, rather than to take Bernard’s money.”
When Black residents’ farms were foreclosed on like this, the farmland was often transferred to their white neighbors.
Bates died in 2022. Neither he or his family ever received a check from the Pigford v. Glickman settlement. And at the time of his death, none of Nicodemus’ other residents actively farmed.
Dr. JohnElla Holmes is Bates’ niece, and the president of the Kansas Black Farmers Association, which was founded in Nicodemus in 1999 and aims to “preserve the Kansas minority farmer legacy through education.” Holmes says despite Bates never getting his farm back, his activism has still made a lasting impact.
She partly credits the organization’s founding to her uncle, and his documentation of the discriminatory practices that cost him his farm.
“ He just stayed on it. Nothing deterred him,” Holmes told Ammons. “He was the voice in Kansas, and so these farmers then gathered around him.”
This episode of A People’s History of Kansas City comes to us from the series Tending, which aired on the Gravy podcast from the Southern Foodways Alliance. It was reported and produced by Shirlette Ammons, Mosi Secret, and Andrea Weigl. Additional reporting by David Condos and the Kansas News Service.
