Federal payments to Black Kansas farmers come too late for generations hurt by discrimination

At his home in northwest Kansas, Bernard Bates thumbs through a stack of faded color photographs nearly 40 years old.

One shows a group of men in county sheriff’s jackets standing in front of a combine. In another, two men inspect plowing equipment on a flatbed truck.

“That’s when they loaded up my machinery,” Bates said. “They sold our machinery first. Then they sold the land.”

In the early 1980s, weather wiped out the crops on his 950-acre farm in Nicodemus, the last remaining African American settlement west of the Mississippi River. Bates tried to get his loans extended to make it to the next season. But he was denied.

Read more: https://www.thepitchkc.com/federal-payments-to-black-kansas-farmers-come-too-late-for-generations-hurt-by-discrimination/