For almost two decades, African-American farmers have contended that the U.S. government was violating their civil rights by discriminating against them on the basis of race.
The matter came to a head in 1999 with a proposed resolution of the class action suit Pigford, et al. v. Glickman . The Pigford settlement was hoped to be “a good first step towards assuring that the kind of discrimination that has been visited on African-American farmers since Reconstruction will not continue into the next century.”
