Bias Payments Come Too Late for Some Farmers - NYTimes.com: On a recent Sunday in rural Macon, N.C., John W. Boyd Jr., the president of the National Black Farmers Association, went to his fourth funeral in a week.Mr. Boyd has been burying his group’s members with bitter frequency, attending two or three funerals most weeks. Each death makes him feel as if he is running out of time.
Wrangling over the federal budget in Washington has delayed payouts from a $1.25 billion settlement that Mr. Boyd and several others helped negotiate with the federal government to compensate black farmers who claimed that the Agriculture Department had discriminated against them in making loans.
“I thought that the elderly farmers would get their money and get to live a few happy days of their lives,” Mr. Boyd, a Virginia farmer who is not a plaintiff in the settlement, said in an interview. “They deserve the money before they leave God’s earth.”
A lawyer at one of the firms handling the farmers’ claims said last week that a majority of eligible farmers were over 65 and most were in poor health. Younger relatives, she said, often filed claims for farmers who are ill or dead. The lawyer, who asked that her name and that of her firm be withheld because she was not authorized to speak on the matter, added, “We have a lot of death certificates."
