In the summer of 1961, just before I began teaching at Eden Seminary, my then wife Mary and I led an ecumenical work camp. It was under the auspices of the National Council of Churches and was based near Rocky Mount, NC. Our home base was Franklinton Center, a congregational conference center presided over by the intrepid Dr. Judson King. The conference center was said to be the only place in North Carolina at the time where interracial meetings could be held. We were about fifteen persons, including folk from Jamaica, Lebanon, and India. Our daily work for eight weeks was to paint barns for small-acreage African American tobacco farmers. We painted with white creosote, not the most amenable concoction in hot weather!

The summer of 1961 in North Carolina, as in many places, was a time of acute racial tension. It was at the peak of Freedom Rides and Sit-ins. Judson King joked with us that the only safe way for us whites to travel with him as an African American was to have him pose as our chauffeur. We pretty much stayed at our work and at our common life as a community, and did not interact as much with the farm families as we might have done. We had only one external excursion when, one day, we all drove two hundred miles to get to an integrated sea coast where we could swim together. In retrospect I understood very little about the demanding dynamics of the socioeconomics of those farmers beyond the obvious reality of racial tension and the ominous sense that violence could not be very far away.

As a result I was not well prepared for the book I am currently reading, Dispossession: Discrimination against African American Farmers in the Age of Civil Rights, by Pete Daniel (2013). Daniel provides excruciating chapter and verse concerning the systemic way in which small-acreage Black farmers were squeezed into debt and eventually forced to give up their acreage of farm land. The pivot point of such systemic racist dispossession was in the US Department of Agriculture. Since Franklin Roosevelt, the Department has provided generous funds to sustain farmers. But the support and money of the Department was filtered through and administered by local county Extension Agents who were able to operate without accountability according to local racist assumptions. As a result, the money of the Department was regularly assigned to White farmers while Black farmers were denied access to funding. The Department in DC mostly disregarded the local racist administrators with “feckless acquiescence” (p. 135), though some Secretaries of Agriculture, among them Earl Butts and Clifford Hardin, actively colluded  in the practice, so that local offices were “being run like plantations” (p. 250).

The Department, moreover, opted for big farm operations, so that preferential treatment was given the farmers who themselves were already alert to the recent gains in research and equipment, all the same to squeeze out small farmers, both White and Black, but most especially Black farmers. Thus for example, 

In its analysis of interviews in Tuscaloosa, Greene, Sumter, Hale, and Dallas Counties in Alabama, the commission found that white cattlemen could take their bulls to Auburn for fertility testing but blacks could not. Nor did blacks share equally in the cotton acreage released each year and redistributed by the ASCS committee. White county agents worked on Cattlemen’s Association and Farm Bureau projects, but African Americans could not belong to the Cattlemen’s Association and rarely attended presentations by specialists in field crops, dairy, or livestock (45).

Daniel’s study especially focuses on the early 60s (exactly the time of our work camp), just after Brown v. Topeka and just as the Voting Rights Act was enacted. Along with these immensely important court rulings and congressional acts, the peak of sit-ins and freedom rides made the social context of Daniel’s study ripe with issues of civil rights. Thus he reports:

After the Brown decision and more intensely after the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Extension Service used its trifurcated federal-state-county identity to foil civil rights initiatives. Although it was a federal agency, its programs operated out of white land-grant universities, and because counties contributed to funding, there was also a substantial local dimension. USDA civil rights initiatives passed through these strata much like laundered money. Washington administrators announced support of civil rights, land-grant universities gave lip service but recast directives to suit their own purposes, and by the time regulations reached counties, they were unrecognizable as federal civil rights currency (34).

Daniel reviews in some detail the tribulation of James Mays and his brothers in Leesburg in Lee County, Alabama. Mays, a school teacher, secured an operating loan from FHA. But the county supervisor reviewed the decision and denied the loan. As a teacher Mays had defended a student paper that had critiqued the school:

He was asked to resign his teaching position in June 1962. That fall, he was denied an operating loan when the FHA questioned his ability to repay it and cited a negative character check. Mays did not appeal. He applied in October 1963 and was again denied. Unable to get credit from the FHA or from private sources in the county, he went outside the county for his loans. Two of Mays’s brothers were also denied loans, presumably because of their civil rights activity. All three Mays men had canvassed with SNCC workers during the summer of 1962….The treatment of the Mays family for its civil rights work epitomized the pressure that both the USDA and the business community brought on African Americans who transgressed their assigned place in the community (39).

The aggressive role played by the USDA has continued in recent years. Now and then it has been checked by court rulings. Most important is Strain v. Philpott in 1971. Willie Strain was a Black advocate who eventually brought suit against Auburn University. (Philpott was the name of the president of the university.)  The brave and courageous federal judge, Frank Johnson, ruled on behalf of Strain against the university. He traced out the intricate way in which the university, through like-minded administrators, had denied Strain and other Black persons equal access to money and opportunity:

Judge Frank Johnson’s decision dismembered the ACES rationale for its purportedly integrated structure. It attacked white presumptions and exposed qualifiers that perpetuated discrimination and obstructionist strategies that typified extension programs throughout the South. Johnson directed the ACES to give former African American county agents and county home-demonstration agents “first priority for consideration for all future promotions to County Extension Chairman and Associate County Extension Chairman positions respectively.” If for some reason the ACES assigned a white person to such a position, it had to justify the appointment with ample documentation. Willie Strain, Thomas Agnew, and Bertha Jones “shall be given priority for consideration for all future promotions in the subject area in which they have had training and experience whether prior or subsequent to the merger of 1965”…The Strain decision and its implementation went a long way in erasing white privilege in Alabama’s Extension Service (207-209).

A second court ruling that mattered decisively to the issue was Timothy Pigford v. Dan Glickman in 1999. Judge Paul. L. Friedman ruled on behalf of Black farmers (259-260). The judge took pains to notice that Black farmers were likely to lack documentation for their claims, and made allowances for their historic disadvantage. The legal redress in this matter of debt as dispossession was and is enormously important. At the same time, it is urgent to recognize that the insidious work of systemic racism continued and continues to be pervasive. That systemic effort everywhere and often does what it can to resist, reduce, and reverse the redress offered by the courts.

As I thought about the vulnerable Black farmers of our work camp experience and as I pondered Daniel’s exposé, it was not a surprise that I was led, yet again, to the narrative of Naboth’s vineyard (I Kings 21). The narrative is quite parallel concerning the dangerous contest between a peasant farmer and a ruthless ruler, or alternatively, a contest between a covenantal notion of inherited land and a commercial understanding of land as a tradable commodity. The narrative stands as a mighty exposé of land dispossession of the vulnerable by the powerful. In the case of Naboth, the dispossession was directly violent. In the cases cited by Daniel, the dispossession was through indebtedness that remained unresolved by government aid, even though government aid was generously available to other embedded farmers, namely, big time White farmers who had access to all the bounty that the USDA could muster for them.

In the case of US Black farmers, the important but modest redress was accomplished through the courts. In the case of Naboth, there was no such court that could stand over against the crown. Nonetheless, the Naboth narrative does not end with the death of Naboth and the seizure of his land by Ahab (v. 16). The narrative continues in verses 17-29 with the appearance of Elijah. Indeed, it may be hypothesized that Elijah functions not only as the prosecutor but as the Supreme Court of the insistent governance of YHWH who, it turns out, is the ultimate arbiter of land transactions. Elijah’s “ruling” is terse and prompt. The verdict is put as a question:

Have you killed and also taken possession? (v. 10)

The sentence is swift and uncompromising:

Thus says the Lord: In the place where dogs licked up the blood of Naboth, dogs will also lick up your blood.

The matter is elaborated so that the king will not misunderstand the future generated by his predatory action:

Because you have sold yourself to do what is evil in the sight of the Lord, I will bring disaster on you; I will consume you, and will cut off from Ahab every male, bond or free, in Israel; and I will make your house like the house of Jeroboam son of Nebat, and like the house of Baasha son of Ahijah, because you have provoked me to anger and have caused Israel to sin. Also concerning Jezebel the Lord said, “The dogs shall eat Jezebel within the bounds of Jezreel.” Anyone belonging to Ahab who dies in the city the dogs shall eat; and anyone of his who dies in the open country the birds of the air shall eat (I Kings 21:20-24).

Ahab’s show of remorse in verse 27 allows for a mitigation of the sentence, but it is not retracted. The prophetic condemnation lingers and resurfaces in royal history. First, it concerns the death of Jezebel who aided and abetted the dispossession of Naboth:

When they came back and told him, he said, “This is the word of the Lord, which he spoke by his servant Elijah the Tishbite, ‘In the territory of Jezreel the dogs shall eat the flesh of Jezebel; the corpse of Jezebel shall be like dung on the field in the territory of Jezreel, so that no one can say, This is Jezebel.’” (II Kings 9:36-37)

 Then it concerned the entire royal family:

Know then that there shall fall to the earth nothing of the word of the Lord, which the Lord spoke concerning the house of Ahab; for the Lord has done what he said through his servant Elijah. So Jehu killed all who were left of the house of Ahab in Jezreel, all his leaders, close friends, and priests, until he left him no survivor (II Kings 10:10-11).

And finally the mop-up action is said to be sure and complete:

When he came to Samaria, he killed all who were left to Ahab in Samaria, until he had wiped them out, according to the word of the Lord that he spoke to Elijah (II Kings 10:17).

Naboth is given a bloody vindication. The claim is that the ruthless dispossession of the vulnerable does not go unanswered in a world where YHWH governs. We may conclude that the court action for Black farmers cited above constituted a civic articulation of that same conviction. The matter is not as unambiguous in the contemporary case as it is in the ancient case. But the affirmation is the same; and the outcome is the same, a defense of the vulnerable victims of predation.

The power of predatory dispossession nonetheless continued with great effectiveness. Daniel summarizes:

By 1910 African Americans held title to some 16 million acres of farmland, and by 1920, there were 925,000 black farms in the country. After peaking in these decades, however, the trajectory of black farmers plunged downward. In a larger sense, there was an enormous decline among all farmers at mid-century. Between 1940 and 1969, the rural transformation, fueled largely by machines and chemicals and directed by the USDA, pushed some 3.4 million farmers and their families off the land, including nearly 600,000 African Americans. From 1959 to 1969 alone, 185,000 black farmers left the land, and only 87,000 remained when Richard Nixon entered office. Farm failures were endemic, and in the 1950s, about 169,000 farm families failed annually; between1960 and 1965, some 124,000 failed each year; and 94,000 per year failed between 1966 and 1968 (p. 6).

As we are well aware, every advance taken by the US government toward racial equality is met by fierce resistant negation. Thus in the generative years of the mid-60s in the wake of court actions and the Voting Rights legislation, the deliberate resistance of the US Department of Agriculture continued in virulent fashion.

It is hard to imagine (plus embarrassing!) how little I knew about these realities during our weeks at the work camp. Several times during our eight weeks of work we engaged the company of some of the children of the farmers. Among other things, some of the girls entertained us by singing. I recall that they sang for us the words of Engelbert Humperdinck that bore compelling witness to the divided world we occupied:

Two different worlds

We live in two different worlds

For we’ve been told

That a love like ours could never be

So far apart

They say we’re so far apart

And that we haven’t the right

To change our destiny.

In retrospect, their singing was a playful, sly acknowledgment that the world of privilege of white people in a work camp and the families of Black tobacco farmers did indeed occupy different worlds. These are, writ large, the world of debt and the world of ownership. But these girls went on to sing of Humperdinck’s great hope:

But we will show them

As we walk together in the sun

That our two different worlds are one.

Their singing was a gentle bit of truth-telling and buoyant bit of hope-telling, just right for those of us who had so much yet to learn.

Now it strikes me that the sore point is that I (we) did not know about this. We did not know the economic jeopardy of small-acreage Black farmers. We did not know about the long term resistance of the Department of Agriculture. We did not know about the pattern of predatory dispossession. And we did not know that we lived in a world of assets while these neighbors lived in a world of dangerous debt. We did not know, in our comfort zone so carefully protected from reality. That much has not changed. James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (1985), has shown how the poor and vulnerable have a way to know the little controlling secrets of the ownership class, whereas the ownership class has little clue about or access to the hidden life of the poor and vulnerable.

The work of learning is an urgent responsibility, to see how and why “the other half”—the half of debt—lives and suffers and resists and fears as it does. There are testimonies, witnesses, and advocates along the way if we pay heed. In ancient Israel Elisha was exactly such a teacher, witness, and advocate who noticed the “left behind.” He embraced them in ways of restoration. (See Walter Brueggemann, Testimony to Otherwise: The Witness of Elijah and Elisha, 2001.)  Jesus was such a teacher, witness, and advocate who invested his transformative capacity exactly in the left out in his society. (See Thomas Brodie, The Crucial Bridge: The Elijah-Elisha Narrative as an Interpretive Synthesis of Genesis-Kings and a Literary Model for the Gospels, 2000.)  We could only draw the conclusion that the church is to be a teacher, witness, and advocate for just such a company. Imagine, if local congregations and their pastors took up their roles of teacher, witness, and advocate, so that the cruel work of dispossession did not go unnoticed and unanswered among us. Such work by the church would require that we face our ignorance that protects our advantage, that we cross from our comfort zones for the sake of such neighbors. But then, nobody has yet suggested that discipleship can be a zone of ignorant comfort. We are given a clue about the fresh learning even YHWH faced upon hearing the cries of the slaves!

Out of their slavery their cry for help rose up to God. God heard their groaning and God remembered his covenant with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. God looked upon the Israelites, and God took notice of them…Then the Lord said, “I have observed the misery of my people who are in Egypt; I have heard their cry on account of their taskmasters. Indeed, I know their sufferings, and I have come down to deliver them (Exodus 2:23-25, 3:7-8).

Our awakened sensibility is a first urgent step toward neighborly restoration. It is a step the church makes in its defining vocation. I imagine that Naboth (like the ancient slaves) must have groaned and cried out in great fear and anguish at his execution. Naboth continues to cry out in every verdict of dispossession. His cry sounds among us in many different cadences and in many different dialects, including among us the cadences and dialects of Black Americans. What a work for the church to be listening and responding to that shrill cry!

Walter Brueggemann

October 26, 2022