Obama Signs Settlement for Black Farmers: At 5:30 p.m. on Wednesday, before a crowd of about 150 lawmakers from both parties, African-American activists and Native American leaders, President Barack Obama brought to a close decades of government-sponsored racial injustice -- or at least two chapters in a lengthy book.
Standing in the White House's South Court auditorium, the president signed into law H.R. 4783, otherwise known as the Claims Resolution Act. The act provides billions to fund two separate class-action-lawsuit settlements against the U.S. government: Cobell v. Salazar and Pigford v. Glickman.
In the first lawsuit, filed in 1996, Native American claimants alleged that the Interior Department had been conning them out of oil, gas and timber royalties since the late 1800s. In the second, brought by Timothy Pigford in 1997, African-American farmers argued that the Department of Agriculture systematically cheated them out of loans and other public assistance throughout the '80s and '90s. In the end, the Native Americans won a settlement worth $3.4 billion, and the African Americans won nearly $1.2 billion.
