Black farms fade as a generation passes

Foreclosure, lost records and sparring heirs hasten loss of lands

ENFIELD -- If a man's life could be summed up in numbers, then Roland Hardy's amounted to this: 294 acres. This land where he was born, and where he died, was to be his legacy -- a guarantee that his heirs would never know the poverty that his enslaved ancestors did. Instead, less than a year after his death, the Halifax County property is in foreclosure, and his widow is fighting to remain in their home.

The Hardy family has joined the ranks of thousands of black land owners across North Carolina and the nation watching the land they worked to amass slip away.

Small farms such as Hardy's, both black- and white-owned, are going out of business statewide as agriculture shifts toward industrialized operations and younger generations abandon farming. But blacks are losing their land faster than whites, researchers say, often because of foreclosure, lost deeds or disputes among heirs.

The loss of land is keenly felt by some blacks returning to the South to find that their family land is mired in debt or split among so many heirs that it is all but useless.

"We're losing a way of life, farming," said Lloyd Wright, a land loss activist and former director of the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Office of Civil Rights. "But we're also talking about a loss of wealth for the entire African-American community."

The national Agricultural Economics and Land Ownership Survey shows that the amount of farmland owned by blacks has declined by half, to about 7 million acres, since 1920, while white ownership has remained about constant.

The USDA's Census of Agriculture also shows that, nationally and in North Carolina, black farmers have disappeared at rates far greater than whites.

State Sen. Charlie Albertson, a Duplin County Democrat who is chairman of the Senate Agriculture Committee, said that in a time when all farms are threatened by development, black farmers face even greater challenges than their white neighbors. Their farms were often smaller and less profitable, and their heirs have become more scattered as many blacks migrated north.

"Farmers are being squeezed from all sides," Albertson said. "And it's probably worse for them."

Land granted power

Land ownership has a special significance for black families, many of whom are only a few generations removed from slavery. Even after emancipation in 1863, many blacks remained sharecroppers with little hope of escaping poverty.

Only after blacks began to amass their own land in the early 1900s, thanks in part to government programs, were they able to form communities, build schools and churches. And when the civil rights movement began in the 1950s, it was land ownership that afforded blacks the independence to speak out.

"My grandfather taught us early on that if you didn't have any land, you didn't have any power in this country," said John Boyd, 42, a Virginia farmer who founded the National Black Farmers Association. "He taught us that his raggedy farm was better than a good job because nobody could fire him."

Many in Boyd's generation did not take that advice. They fled farms for city jobs. Now, as some try to return to their family farms, they are finding that land ownership is no guarantee.

Elsie Herring, 59, of Duplin County in rural eastern North Carolina, grew up on land that her grandfather bought in the late 1800s.

Her father worked from sunup to sundown with few tools but a mule, a plow and the hands of his children. Many mornings, she rose at dawn to work the fields before she left for school.

She was one of 15 children, most of whom abandoned the hardscrabble farm life and moved north. Herring, who returned to Duplin County from New York in 1993, said she always assumed that her family land would be there for her retirement.