Just Harvest

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"Just Harvest: The Story of How Black Farmers Won the Largest Civil Rights Case Against the U.S. Government details the improbable story of how an African-American attorney helped orchestrate the largest civil rights discrimination settlement in US history. Greg Francis provides readers with behind-the-scenes details of a class-action lawsuit that led to about 18,000 Black farmers, mostly from the South, receiving checks totaling $1.2 billion. In this gripping underdog story, Francis details how so many Black farmers, who were promised forty acres and a mule more than a century ago, faced decades of systemic discrimination by federal officials, who denied them loans and other assistance because of the color of their skin. At issue was the inability of Black farmers, or other Blacks who wanted to farm, to get loans and grants from the US Department of Agriculture as a result of discrimination at local offices, primarily in the Southeast. The systemic discrimination caused Black farmers to lose 80 percent of their land. In 1910, there were 925,000 African-American farms in the US. Today, there are fewer than 18,000."--book jacket.