A government program undermines African American farmers
The small farm is the base of the black community, Esser explains, and that base is disappearing. He worries that government efforts to shore up the system, such as Farmer's Home, a division of the Department of Agriculture that offered loans to buy rural homes and farms, actually hurt rural African Americans. He believes that the program's director, Larry Godwin, used the loans to deliberately damage the black community.
Citing this Excerpt
Oral History Interview with George Esser, June-August 1990. Interview L-0035. Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) in the Southern Oral History Program Collection, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Full Text of the Excerpt
One thing I want to talk about a little bit, George,
before we go back and talk about your youth in Virginia, and that is,
when you were talking about your work in the east, we didn't
really talk about agriculture, and that's a major component
down there. I want to know what's going on and what the state
in thinking and maybe North Carolina State Extension about the problems
of agriculture in the east of North Carolina.
- GEORGE ESSER:
-
Well, I'm not as well informed generally on agricultural
policy as I should be. I think it is interesting, however. First of all,
the small farm is disappearing, and with it the
base of the black community in farming. The black farms that are
remaining are very heavily along the northeastern rim of North Carolina,
from about, well, let's say, 1-85 east. Now, it goes down
more than one layer in some areas. I ran into a lot of anger against
Farmer's Home, for example, since '84.
Farmer's Home would, under some administrations, encourage
people to take more loans than they needed, and then under the Reagan
administration, until it was stopped, they were trying to foreclose.
- FRANCES WEAVER:
-
Call them in.
- GEORGE ESSER:
-
Call them in.
- FRANCES WEAVER:
-
Was that a deliberate ploy to run the small farmers out.
- GEORGE ESSER:
-
Oh, I think so, yeah.
- FRANCES WEAVER:
-
Probably.
- GEORGE ESSER:
-
There was more symbolic language used, such as, belief that you paid your
on bills and so forth, but there was no recognition on the part of
the… And we had a perfectly terrible man named, well, a
terrible man? He was probably very moral, I don't know. But
he was not interested in poor people or black people, and he was a Heims
protegee. The director of Farmer's Home under Reagan, named
Larry Godwin…
- FRANCES WEAVER:
-
That's a name I remember.
- GEORGE ESSER:
-
You would get projects right up to him, well, Roanoke-Amerant got right
up to him. And the Farmer's Home arrangements for loans for
construction in rural areas was much better than HUD's, but
he decided that available money should be spent on
rescue stations and volunteer fire departments, etc. I do know that the
poor black community, and here we're talking about more of
the small farmers in northeastern North Carolina, do not have confidence
in the Extension Service. They have confidence in some extension agents
who are black, but they do not have confidence in the service itself. I
think that it is clearly true that the Extension Service has been very
weak in its leadership for crops to replace tobacco.
