- [Announcer] Uprooted is made possible by the financial support of the Jeanette Travis Foundation, dedicated to improving the wellbeing of the Middle Tennessee community, a grant from the Tennessee Civil War National Heritage Area, Dell Technologies, we help you build your digital future and transform how you work, live and play, Cat Financial, First Horizon Foundation, Delta Dental of Tennessee and members of NPT.

(soft music) - As long as America has been America, there's been a linkage between land ownership and liberty.

So it speaks to the importance of land, but it also tells a somewhat sad and in some cases sinister story about their inability to hold on to this land.

- [Narrator] From slavery to the present day struggles of black farmers, the history of agriculture of the South is a complex and often painful one.

Join us as we explore the legacy of discrimination in the agricultural industry and how it has shaped the lives of black farmers and their families.

- Well, Butler Century Farm came to be in 1869.

It was part of a acreage that was purchased by my great-great grandfather, Joseph Butler.

He had a white co-signer and the Butler Century Farm legacy began.

With most farmers, people respect hard work because farmers know what it takes to survive, and my grandfather was well respected in this community.

- [Narrator] James Butler's great-great-grandfather was one of millions of newly freed slaves who had high hopes of creating a new life after centuries of bondage.

Tennessee, like much of the South, had been devastated by the Civil War.

Shaken to its very foundation, the southern economy, based primarily on the enslavement of millions of African Americans, had been crushed and freedmen wanted what they had long been denied.

- When I think about that particular moment in history, well, they want to reconnect their families.

They want to get an education, they want to become landowners.

Now, all of these things might not seem related, but they are, and I think the thing that runs below the surface is their notions of freedom tie all of these together.

As a matter of fact, it's a very basic Jeffersonian idea, right?

That the yeoman farmer are the most virtuous people in the world, people that are tied to the land.

Enslaved people here in the South see that the people that own land are the most powerful people.

These are the people that are making the laws.

These are the people that are being elected senator and congressmen into the state houses and governor and so forth.

These are the people that are in power.

They are landowners.

Then if I'm an enslaved person who belongs to a smaller farmer and I'm watching he's working to become one of these big planters, so it's only natural that once the Civil War ends, many of them will want to become landowners.

And you know, they might have some aversion against growing tobacco or cotton for that matter, but ultimately, that's where the money is and that's what they know how to do.

- Many slaves had all the skills it took to be farmers.

You know, after the Civil War, many of them were extremely industrious despite the black codes and other labor laws that they had to deal with.

So the ones who were resourceful and knew how to farm and knew how to get good money for their crops could buy land from white people who might sell them, you know, the worst acres they had.

But still, it was land and these farmers knew how to use it.

- Well, it had to have been tough work.

It had to have been a lot of hard work.

I talked with my dad.

There's like a couple of spots here that my dad farmed when he was a boy with my grandfather.

And so he was telling me the certain little places between the rocks where they would grow certain vegetables or what have you.

So they worked with the land to get the most out of it.

- [Narrator] The newly freed farmers took every opportunity to scrimp and save enough to realize their dream of owning land.

Some received help from the Freedmen's Bureau, which helped negotiate labor contracts between freedmen and planters, while others had saved money in the army.

- Occupying troops were often the US colored troops and some of them turned that income, which they had earned as soldiers too, into funds that they used to buy acreage and set up farms, build an infrastructure that includes a black community.

- Not far from here, we have a community called Promise Land.

Promise Land, Tennessee was established by soldiers who were getting out of the army.

They were being discharged, and they had a little money in their pocket and they were able to purchase land and they still own that land to this day.

Similar things happened all around Middle Tennessee.

This is a story I'm really working on right now.

When you get near Wilson County and you see a lot of exits that go away from Lebanon, most of those towns were established by African Americans after the Civil War, though they don't live there now.

Matter of fact, you ride out a little bit past Lebanon, you'll see a road in the middle of nowhere called Africa Road, and later found out that African-Americans had settled there.

- [Renee Moore] So they were the founders of this farm, John Moore and Harriet Strayhorn Moore.

- [Narrator] After emancipation, Renee Moore Williams' ancestors founded what would become the Moore Century Farm in Benton County.

- And John Moore was a shoemaker and his nickname was Shoemaker John.

He made shoes for the slaves on the plantation as well as people in the community and people would pay him for making shoes.

(cannons firing) And then the civil War broke out and the Moore plantation was heavily damaged.

Mr. Moore that owned the plantation, he was so distraught that he told his slaves that they could leave.

And then they got word that there was some land available in Tennessee that was being sold for a really good price, and that was in 1870.

They came here and started farming in the community.

- African American farmers were doing better than one might predict, and so over time, they accumulated a large amount of property and they were doing very well.

In spite of the Ku Klux Klan in the reconstruction era, and labor laws and peonage and other things, African American farmers were doing better than a lot of white people expected or would tolerate.

- Sometimes the most successful of black farm families were also the first to be the victims of violence, personal intimidation, and even lynching.

People who knew each other, white people, meted out violence against black people.

It was a personalized kind of violence that was rather unique to the South and very different from the kind of violence that occurred in northern cities in the context of race riots, for example.

- There are countless instances in Tennessee of people being driven off their land.

Congress brought people in to testify about what they had seen.

So they talked to African Americans, native Southerners, members of the clan, they talked to everybody.

There is example after example of that.

A farmer in Maury County, he was driven off his property and he remarked, he in telling the commission about what happened, the guys came looking for him, he was able to escape, and on his way to Nashville, he saw an African-American on the side of the road who had been skinned alive.

At the end of the day, it was all about terror and intimidation.

The Klan had initiation ceremonies up at Fort Negley.

The Maxwell House Hotel was where Nathan Bedford Forrest was sworn in as the first grand wizard of the KKK.

They were very much involved in getting these people off their land.

And a lot of African Americans say the heck with it, let's leave.

This movement starts during reconstruction when Benjamin Pap Singleton sets up shop here in Nashville and he says, hey, let's go to Kansas, and you have this big exo-duster movement.

- [Narrator] The vast majority of black Southerners had no choice.

They were forced to endure the persecution and the indignity of coming Jim Crow laws.

Eager to close what had been the most painful chapter in its young history, the United States turned its back on its most vulnerable citizens.

Promises of new rights, new freedoms would have to wait for nearly 100 years.

Through it all, however, African-American farmers continued to gain land against all odds.

But changes that would prove even more difficult for black landowners were on the way.

- [Learotha Williams] Well, you know, when Jim Crow is implemented during the 1890s, then there are certain restrictions that are placed upon them by law.

But American society, in terms of farming, was changing too.

You're going from where it's primarily manual labor to mechanized labor.

So farming has becoming mechanized and that has an impact on everyone.

African Americans were not able to adjust as quickly as their white counterparts could when things went awry.

And I'm saying this and I'm thinking of, you know, the floods or the boll weevil infestations that would occur.

Other times banks wouldn't loan money to African Americans, so they suffered in that regard.

- That's just a part of farming.

We were always battling just the forces of nature, just chance.

So many different things can happen.

I remember once that my dad and I, we had planted corn and gosh, it had been just dry and the corn was wilting.

Then we were up feeding the hogs and all of a sudden, rain came and my dad, who could be, he could be a character, he started crying and he was just overwhelmed, you know, with the rain because if it hadn't come, we would've lost all that we had out there that year.

So it's always a chance if the good Lord doesn't send what you need and when you need it, then all is lost.

- There were many ways that black farmers had to fight for survival and they did well up until the 1920s.

Maybe it started with the great migration.

- [Narrator] When the great migration began, black farmers had reached their pinnacle with more than 15 million acres of land.

But the oppression of Jim Crow and the promise of manufacturing jobs led to millions of African Americans leaving the rural south for urban areas in the north and west.

Many black farmers were part of the migration.

In addition to Jim Crow and mechanization, discriminatory practices used by the US Department of Agriculture left many black farmers unable to compete and forced to sell their land at a fraction of its value.

- In my opinion, the real issue started of land loss during the New Deal.

The fact was it changed the structure of agriculture in a lot of ways that were extremely important.

For one thing, the New Deal put in committees that allotted acreage and made loans and basically were the people who supervised the county's agriculture.

And these were invariably white people and they were, I think you could say invariably the most wealthy white farmers in the county.

And these people, according to records I've looked at, certainly discriminated against black farmers in not not giving out acreage allotments they deserved, denying loans to them, but they also, to a certain extent, denied poor white farmers some of the same things.

And this was because the agriculture under the New Deal and everything that had to do with farming was now federal.

And it was handled in a way that promoted the most wealthy farmers in the country and in the state and in the county.

For example, the loan agency had ways of dealing with black farmers who wanted loans.

And in most cases, a black farmer would walk into the Farmer's Home Administration and ask a question about applying for a loan.

They would just tell the black farmer that there was no money for what he wanted.

There was no loan program for what he wanted.

They would not explain to him what loan program that might help him or if there were any money that at all he could apply for.

- [Narrator] Another method of forcing small farmers, black and white, off their land was forcing the sale of real estate with an unclear title known as heirs' property.

- Heir property results when a landowner does not transfer the title legally.

So that can be if there's a handshake sale, there's no deed, or it can in most instances be the death of the landowner.

There was no will.

And even if there was a will, there was no ability or interest in probating it.

So without probating a will, you end up with no clear transfer of title.

And then everyone who is an heir to the owner owns an undivided share or undivided interest in that property.

- So if it's like 300 heirs out there, there's gonna be one of them out there that's gonna be willing to maybe sell his share to somebody else who might have the resources to take it all.

- [Narrator] During the 1950s, as the civil rights movement geared up, hardships for black farmers continued to grow as their numbers and acreage shrank.

- I was surprised when I first started studying what happened after Brown v Board of Education because I expected, as most people would, that a decision that important that ended, ended I say with qualification, school segregation would translate and transfer into other parts of rural life, such as helping black farmers.

But the opposite was true.

In a way, Brown V Board frightened white southerners the way nothing else had because it was a Supreme Court decision that the federal government could enforce to end school segregation.

And they argued if you could end school segregation, you can do anything, the federal government can do anything.

And in the thinking of white southerners who were raised up on segregation the same way they were raised up on fundamental religion, it was something that you don't tamper with.

And so the people who were most racist spread vicious rumors that this will mean that black kids will be in school with white girls and they mushroomed that into fantasies about black attacks on white girls.

And this went on and on and disturbed the people.

And as far as farmers, this franticness among whites translated and transferred into the local county people who were administering agriculture programs.

So what they wanted was to end support for black farmers hoping that if they failed, they would leave the county and that school segregation wouldn't be implemented.

And this is pretty much what I wrote my book, "Dispossession" about.

At a time when one would expect that Brown v Board and then civil rights movement and the the laws passed in the mid 60s would help everyone who was black, but instead, the Department of Agriculture used its tools to discriminate even more.

And even though that's counterintuitive, that's what happened.

- I don't know, and I don't mean to sound too pessimistic, but talking about history sometimes can cause pessimism, I think.

Once we figure out something that's a problem that has to be dealt with, we'll figure out something, even if it's just in a superficial way.

But I don't know if we have the heart or the commitment to do it, 'cause everything that I've read over the last couple of months seems to suggest that black farmers are still being overlooked and disregarded.

- [Narrator] By the turn of the century, 90% of black-owned farmland had been lost.

The loss has had a ripple effect throughout black communities, leading to economic instability and a loss of generational wealth.

In 1999, a group of African American farmers filed a class action lawsuit against the USDA, alleging that they had been systematically denied loans and other resources due to their race.

The lawsuit known as Pigford versus Glickman, resulted in a settlement of over $1 billion for the affected farmers.

The current value of the farmland lost is conservatively estimated to be $326 billion.

- Much of my work involves my interaction with African-Americans that are living in rural Tennessee, just small churches or African-American heritage groups that don't want their churches torn down or their history erased.

Two to one, all of them were farmers.

I went to a funeral a couple of weeks ago.

As I'm riding with one of the heirs of the property, I was like, "Who owned the land that the cemetery's on?"

And she says, "Uncle Joe's land."

She says, "All of this belonged to him."

And for them, that land represents affirmation.

Land represents a source of power in a way that it's like this is dirt that my ancestor got after he fought in the Civil War and we are still holding onto it.

And this land still holds the bones of our ancestors.

There is a certain sense of power there as well.

- John Henry Moore married Inez Parsons.

And so they became sole owners of the farm and they were able to build a second school building and that's where all the children of color would attend school and it was a one room brick building and it served as both a church and a school.

I think they've done a lot to contribute to the county and to the state of Tennessee, so I think Benton County would be proud of what we've been able to contribute to the community.

- And what we are witnessing right now is a migration.

A lot of them are elderly now, but they're coming back home because this is still what they consider to be home.

I worked on a project with Promise Land where we just interviewed people that had left.

They have a big festival every year where they come back and they talk about their life there but they all pause for a moment when they talk about home and this place still being their home and their desires to come back.

- [Moore Family] This is home!

- I've had people come to church up there when we'd be having a program at church and the first thing they would tell me is that we feel something here.

This is sacred ground.

Every other year we have a family reunion and we try to bring out the successes of those ancestors, like John Henry Moore, the success he had with his farm and other members of our family who have done great things like doctors and lawyers and things like that.

And we try to encourage our younger generation to be interested in entrepreneurship and trying to do something on your own.

Not just be a employee somewhere, but have something of your own and be able to be proud of what you've done.

- My great-grandmother, Ida Belle Menzies, and my grandmother Evelyn, they always told me stories.

She always talked about how important it was to know where you came from and never forget, you know, cherish what you have.

- It feels like that it is a part of us.

The memories that we have here are knowing what our ancestors went through to get it and to keep it.

Walking with my father and my father telling me stories about him walking it with his father, listening to those stories and realizing that I'm walking the same plots of grounds that my ancestors walked, it means a lot.

It gives you a sense of pride.

It gives you a sense of place, a sense of purpose.

And prayerfully the next generation won't have to struggle as much to keep it as we did.

You know, I just pray that it lasts another hundred years.

(soft music) - [Announcer] Uprooted is made possible by the financial support of the Jeanette Travis Foundation, dedicated to improving the wellbeing of the Middle Tennessee community, a grant from the Tennessee Civil War National Heritage Area, Dell Technologies, we help you build your digital future and transform how you work, live and play, Cat Financial, First Horizon Foundation, Delta Dental of Tennessee and members of NPT.