Year after year the National Black Farmers' Association (NBFA) has invited the Deere company to display its equipment at the NBFA's annual conference. Repeatedly John Deere executives have curtly declined the invitation.

View original content: September 2020 Magazine Issue

Meet John Boyd Jr., a fourth-generation farmer and the founder and president of the National Black Farmers Association, which advocates for Black farmer’s rights in America. In order to raise awareness about the plight of Black farmers, who are often denied loans and other support from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, he rode his mules and wagon for 17 days to reach Washington D.C. and lobby legislatures there.

Women and Latinos who were discriminated against on farm loans have until May 1 to file bias claims.

I’m a fourth-generation farmer, and my dad is a farmer. My dad’s father was a farmer, his father was a farmer, and his father was a slave. The farm that my grandfather had has been in the family for over 100 years and passed down from generation to generation.

In the late 1980s, John Boyd was a hard working fourth-generation Virginia farmer just trying to stay ahead. When his loan request was turned down again and again by the Dept. of Agriculture and his requests for other forms of state assistance available for farmers were ignored, John turned his deep frustration into action.

Forty-four days late, justice finally showed up for Trayvon Martin and his family. Florida Special Prosecutor Angela B. Corey announced yesterday that she will charge George Zimmerman with second-degree murder for the shooting death of the unarmed teenager on February 26 in Sanford, Florida.

This week marks the 47th anniversary of "Bloody Sunday," the violent assault by Alabama police and state troopers on peaceful Civil Rights marchers seeking voting rights for black Americans. Yet, even as that landmark event in Selma is recalled in a symbolic repeat of the march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge, a national voter suppression campaign is creeping across the land, through actions by some state legislatures.

Black History Month is a time to reflect on how far we have come as a people and all we have left to do. As President Obama has said, it is "a story of resilience and perseverance."

Black farmers in the United States are disappearing. Their numbers shrank from approximately 900,000 in the 1920s down to about 43,000 in the last U.S. Census -- down to less than 1 percent of America's farmers.

When President Barack Obama signed a $1.25-billion bill that would fund a settlement between the Agriculture Department and Black farmers who were discriminated against in December of 2010, Boyd knew the battle had reached an important milestone but was not over.

Some of the Republicans vying for their party's presidential nomination have contracted a disease that can best be called "black tongue disease." Whether they are sending subtle or coded messages to white voters, or simply displaying commonplace racist attitudes, these candidates clearly appear afflicted with the age-old American condition of racism. The pattern is not hard to see.

The Kings Landing Women’s Service Club will hold its 37th Annual Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Breakfast on Monday, January 16, 2012 at Martin’s West, 6817 Dogwood Road, Woodlawn, MD.

My name is John Boyd and I am the great grandson of a slave and the grandson of a sharecropper.

The Roanoke Branch NAACP held its 61st Life Membership Luncheon and Freedom Fund-raiser Saturday, Dec 3 at the Sheraton Hotel and Conference Center.

A 30-year fight against discrimination culminated with a billion dollar settlement between the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the nation's black farmers. Friday, a central figure in that struggle urged Roanoke students to "never give up."

The U.S. District Court approved a settlement in the ongoing saga between Black farmers and the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) providing an additional $1.2 billion for thousands of plaintiffs in a class-action lawsuit.

Congressman Robert C. "Bobby" Scott issued the following statement on today's approval by the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia of the settlement between the Department of Agriculture (USDA) and plaintiffs in the Pigford II class action lawsuit.

United States Senator Kay R. Hagan (NC) today praised the U.S. District Court’s approval of the settlement between the Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the African American Farmers who filed the PigfordII lawsuit.

A decade-long effort to compensate black farmers who suffered discrimination at the hands of U.S. government is nearing completion. A federal judge Thursday approved a $1.25 billion settlement of the case.