1619 · The New York Times

The Land of Our Fathers, Part 2

October 12, 2019·37 min·2 clips

William Husband says First Guarantee Bank was photocopying June Provost’s signatures.

The episode opens at a father's gravesite. A son stands among the flowers left since Father's Day and says the prayers that have stayed with him. He also says that after what happened, it became hard to return. The family had hoped the farm would pass to children and grandchildren, and he names the ache of feeling that he let his father down. From there, the story turns to the legal fight. A lawyer explains how Black farmers brought complaints against the USDA after being forced out of farming, and how he wrote the complaint that moved those stories into court. The issue is not just one bad decision. It is a process that looks simple on paper but turns discriminatory at the county level, where local committees decide who gets crop-loan money. The episode stays close to the ground. County by county, parish by parish, the listener hears how the system worked. Black farmers are shown as highly skilled at the crops they farmed year after year for white landowners. Then some began to ask why they should not lease land and farm for themselves. That question threatened white farmers in three ways: losing labor and skill, gaining a new competitor, and facing a challenge to their interests. The county committee system gave decision-making power to overwhelmingly white local boards. Even in places with many Black farmers, those boards shaped who could get loans. The result is a portrait of discrimination that feels both ordinary and devastating: a form, a committee, a signature, and then the difference between staying on the land or being pushed out of farming. The ending returns to the emotional weight of the opening. The son is left carrying memory and inheritance, trying to live with what happened without pretending it can be erased.

As heard by us

A family loss opens into a clear-eyed account of land, loans, and exclusion.

The episode opens with a graveside prayer and stays close to that grief as it moves into Black farming, USDA crop loans, and the local committees that controlled access. That balance gives the piece its force: the farm is not just setting, it is what is at stake.

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Why you'd press play

A graveside memory opens into a fight over farmland, cane fields, and USDA loans.

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