The Story of How Black Farmers Won the Largest Civil Rights Case Against the US Government

An attorney friend once commented to Greg Francis that Francis is “the most successful civil rights attorney in America that nobody knows.” That’s because Francis represented thousands of Black farmers and their descendants in settling the largest civil rights case in US history. It’s called Pigford vs. Glickman, and it played out starting in the late 1990s. Black farmers accused the US Department of Agriculture of systematically discriminating against them. The US government didn’t even try to deny it and, instead, settled with the farmers, then reopened the case to allow more Black farmers to receive total compensation of $1.25 billion. Attorney Greg Francis has written a book about the case called “Just Harvest.”