Owensboro, KY (1888PressRelease)
July 03, 2007 - The alternative and minority press and radio, together with minority authors and publishers, provide a necessary service to Americans of all ethnic and political persuasions. They reach out to subjects that the mainstream media and publishers either will not purposely cover, or can not cover because of ignorance.
Such is the case of an African American farmer in Kentucky. Harry Young has had an ongoing dispute with the Farm Services Administration over what he says is an illegal government sale of his farmland, land which contains up to $750,000,000 in coal reserves.
Operating a one man campaign to get his land back, Harry Young has written so many letters to the editor of his local paper, that editors refuse to publish more of them. He has also filed a class action lawsuit against the federal government. Last Thursday, Young, together with white farmer-activists who drove a thousand miles from Michigan to Kentucky, participated in a historic march in front of the Federal Building in Owensboro, Kentucky.
Thousands of press releases were sent out to national, regional and local press outlets, but not a single local media outlet carried the story. The only other known story was broadcast from the only black owned and operated radio station in the area.
One local newspaper, the very same one that has refused to print additional letters from Young, had reporters on site to cover another injustice to blacks and farmers—the confiscation by the federal government of thousands of acres of farmland in Western Kentucky for a military base, Camp Breckenridge.
That land, according to the understanding of remaining claimants and their heirs, was supposed to be returned to the farmers/landowners at the end of the war. That never happened, and the government has earned millions in mineral wealth from the gas, oil, and coal reserves, which lie beneath the land. Some of Young’s story is available in a work by Monica Davis, Land, Legacy and Lynching: Building the Future in Black America.
Available on line http://www.lulu.com/content/458691
Synopsis:
A century ago, the segregated South had a deep secret--black farmers owned the majority of farmland in the region. Then came the 1910 Census results along with an organized effort to drive black farmers off the land. Through lynching and intimidation, and predatory use of federal farm loan programs, hundreds of thousands of black farmers, 90% of African-American farmers, were driven from the land through a 60 year orgy of lynching, murder, intimidation and theft. Many found refuge in factory towns and became middle class through factory work, especially in the auto industry. Others gathered in segregated ghettos in the nation's urban hell holes and continue to fuel the nation's prisons. Many claim the goal of federal farm policy is to drive family farmers out of business in favor of corporate agri-businesses.
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