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T A B L E+T A L K
Did the interview change your perception of Monica Lewinsky? Weigh in on Monica and Babs in the Politics area of Table Talk
R E C E N T L Y Genocide, and
drug-trafficking too Let the sexual healing
begin The war at home Burn, baby, burn California Republicans: "Circular
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$400 MILLION AND A MULE? | PAGE 1, 2, 3
Tim Pigford, 47, began fighting back in 1984, when he ran into the usual hurdles for blacks at the USDA loan office near Wilmington, N.C. "They treated me like pure dirt," he said. One official crumpled up his loan application and, with a big grin, tossed it in a wastebasket. At USDA headquarters, according to several accounts, one white manager kept a hanging noose in his drawer, which he took out and toyed with in front of his black subordinate. "People have died from the strain and aggravation of this issue," said Pigford, who's been out of work for two years. Long ago he lost his farm and house. He suffers from heart pains. His wife has ulcers. His son had a nervous breakdown at 18 after years of taunting from schoolmates. "For a year and 12 days before we lost the house, we lived with no lights, no telephone, no central heating or air," Pigford said wearily. "There's been days I didn't know where the next meal was coming from." He now rents the same house he once owned. In 1984 Pigford testified before a House Judiciary subcommittee looking into racial practices at the USDA, which had come to be called "the last plantation." Dan Glickman, then a Kansas congressman, now secretary of agriculture, was on the committee, which heard the same litany of woes written up 20 years earlier. A stack of other reports written over the years, right through 1997, confirmed the charges. Nothing happened until the black farmers' suit came to fruition in January. For years Congress didn't even know that Ronald Reagan's Agriculture Department had effectively abolished its civil rights enforcement office, scattering its functions among a warren of offices and departments. It would remain that way until President Clinton took office and appointed the first black man to run the department, Mike Espy. But not much changed under Espy, either, Pigford and other critics said. There were rounds of reorganizations. Key white officials stayed on. Blacks were appointed, both in Washington and the county councils, but several critics said they were as bad or worse than the whites they replaced. An indictment charging Espy with accepting gifts and favors from agribusiness corporations, for which he was recently acquitted, sapped his attention until he was forced to resign. "This is the biggest coverup -- this makes Monica Lewinsky look like child's play," Pigford exclaimed. "Dan Glickman -- every secretary of agriculture should've been fired, Mike Espy included. Mike Espy has apologized to me, since he has suffered some inconvenience at the hand of the government himself." Pigford and other black farmers met with Clinton after their protest outside the White House in December 1996. "He admitted there was a problem, that he hadn't done everything he was supposed to do," Pigford recalled. "He said he was amazed at the career employees here in Washington, not only at USDA." "Clinton was blaming things on the Reagan administration," Pigford said. "I finally said, 'Mr. President, it may be true that Ronald Reagan started all this, but what have you done since you've been here?' He just dropped his head and said, 'You're right.'" Ironically, the USDA's biggest accomplishment seems to have been finally facing up to its own execrable record of prejudice -- "bias, hostility, greed, ruthlessness, rudeness, and indifference," in the words of its own report. "Failure to change," it said, "will mean that minority farmers continue toward extinction."
N E X T+P A G E+| A slap in the face? - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - |
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