Thursday, October 10 ...articulating an image

Bravery in bronze
Want to see a statue of the first African-American fighter pilot? Take a trip down to Georgia.

Harriett Bullard White, far left, and William Bullard, far right,Harr join in applause after the statue of Eugene Bullard was unveiled Wednesday at the Museum of Aviation near Robins Air Force Base in Georgia.

(CNN)His father was born into slavery, but he would live to have a dogfight with German pilots in the skies over Europe.

Eugene Bullard, who became known as the Black Swallow of Death, was the first African-American pilot to fly in combat.

He now has a statue in his honor, unveiled Wednesday in Warner Robins, Georgia, at the Museum of Aviation next to Robins Air Force Base, and about 100 miles south of Atlanta.

His distant cousin, Harriett Bullard White, told CNN she wept with joy as she placed a wreath at the statue during a ceremony, attended by Air Force officers, nearly two dozen family members and several surviving members of the Tuskegee Airmen.

"All my life I'd known how great he was. Of course, no one else knew who he is," White said. "He's an American hero and someone all Americans should know about."

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Learning Target: I can analyze in detail how a complex primary source (text, image, map, graphic, etc.) is structured, including how key sentences, paragraphs, and larger portions of the source contribute to the whole

Coming up for Tuesday, October 15. Make sure you have read part 5: "Farmers in Suits"
In class: Using precise, descriptive language to communicate an image.

Terms: perpendicular
            horizontal
            vertical
            horizon line
            foreground
            background
            parallel
            
 Connecting to the text: 

On  June 7th, 1966, James Meredith, who had integrated the University of Mississippi in 1962, began the March Against Fear; an attempt to walk from Memphis, Tennessee, to Jackson, Mississippi, to promote black voter registration and defy entrenched racism. On the second day of the march Meredith was shot by an unknown gunman. Within hours, the nation's three principal civil rights organizations vowed to continue the march -- The Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), The Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). The three week march struggled with death threats, arrests, and tear gas, as well as internal tensions including leadership, routing, and use of the slogan "Black Power." James Meredith, sufficiently recovered, was able to rejoin the march by its conclusion in Jackson. SCLC's staff photographer Bob Fitch photographed the march, creating numerous enduring images including the triumphant voter registration of born-in-slavery 106-year-old El Fondren, moments of camaraderie and debate, and Stokely Carmichael's dramatic declaration that would captivate the globe, "Black Power."

"The March Against Fear" 2:12

READ FOR TUESDAY, OCTOBER 15

“This Land is Our Land” by Vann R. Newkirk

V. Farmers in Suits

but land is never really lost, not in America. Twelve million acres of farmland in a country that has become a global breadbasket carries immense value, and the dispossessed land in the Delta is some of the most productive in America. The soil on the alluvial plain is rich. The region is warm and wet. Much of the land is perfect for industrialized agriculture.

Some white landowners, like Norman Weathersby, themselves the beneficiaries of government-funded dispossession, left land to their children. Some sold off to their peers, and others saw their land gobbled up by even larger white-owned farms. Nowadays, as fewer and fewer of the children of aging white landowners want to continue farming, more land has wound up in the hands of trusts and investors. Over the past 20 years, the real power brokers in the Delta are less likely to be good ol’ boys and more likely to be suited venture capitalists, hedge-fund managers, and agribusiness consultants who run farms with the cold precision of giant circuit boards.

One new addition to the mix is pension funds. Previously, farmland had never been a choice asset class for large-scale investing. In 1981, what was then called the General Accounting Office (now the Government Accountability Office) released a report exploring a proposal by a firm seeking pension-investment opportunities in farmland. The report essentially laughed off the prospect. The authors found that only about one dollar of every $4,429 in retirement funds was invested in farmland.

Grain bins on Scott-family land, in Drew, once used for rice and now for soybeans. The Scott family’s farms reflect a larger economic pattern in the Mississippi Delta: the shift away from cotton, once predominant, toward other crops. (Zora J. Murff)

But commodity prices increased, and land values rose. In 2008, a weakened dollar forced major funds to broaden their search for hedges against inflation. “The market in agricultural land in the U.S. is currently experiencing a boom,” an industry analyst, Tom Vulcan, wrote that year. He took note of the recent entry of TIAA-CREF, which had “spent some $340 million on farmland across seven states.” TIAA, as the company is now called, would soon become the biggest pension-fund player in the agricultural real-estate game across the globe. In 2010, TIAA bought a controlling interest in Westchester Group, a major agricultural-asset manager. In 2014, it bought Nuveen, another large asset-management firm. In 2015, with Nuveen directing its overall investment strategy and Westchester and other smaller subsidiaries operating as purchasers and managers, TIAA raised $3 billion for a new global farmland-investment partnership. By the close of 2016, Nuveen’s management portfolio included nearly 2 million acres of farmland, worth close to $6 billion.

Investment in farmland has proved troublesome for TIAA in Mississippi and elsewhere. TIAA is a pension company originally set up for teachers and professors and people in the nonprofit world. It has cultivated a reputation for social responsibility: promoting environmental sustainability and respecting land rights, labor rights, and resource rights. TIAA has endorsed the United Nations–affiliated Principles for Responsible Investment, which include special provisions for investment in farmland, including specific guidelines with regard to sustainability, leasing practices, and establishing the provenance of tracts of land.

Each black farmer who left the region represented a tiny withdrawal from one side of a cosmic balance sheet and a deposit on the other side.

The company has faced pushback for its move into agriculture. In 2015, the international nonprofit Grain, which advocates for local control of farmland by small farmers, released the results of an investigation accusing TIAA’s farmland-investment arm of skirting laws limiting foreign land acquisition in its purchase of more than half a million acres in Brazil. The report found that TIAA had violated multiple UN guidelines in creating a joint venture with a Brazilian firm to invest in farmland without transparency. The Grain report alleges that when Brazil tightened laws designed to restrict foreign investment, TIAA purchased 49 percent of a Brazilian company that then acted as its proxy. According to The New York Times, TIAA and its subsidiaries also appear to have acquired land titles from Euclides de Carli, a businessman often described in Brazil as a big-time grileiro—a member of a class of landlords and land grabbers who use a mix of legitimate means, fraud, and violence to force small farmers off their land. In response to criticism of TIAA’s Brazil portfolio, Jose Minaya, then the head of private-markets asset management at TIAA, told WNYC’s The Takeaway: “We believe and know that we are in compliance with the law, and we are transparent about what we do in Brazil. From a title perspective, our standards are very focused around not displacing individuals or indigenous people, respecting land rights as well as human rights … In every property that we have acquired, we don’t just do due diligence on that property. We do due diligence on the sellers, whether it’s an individual or whether it’s an entity.”

TIAA’s land dealings have faced scrutiny in the United States as well. In 2012, the National Family Farm Coalition found that the entry into agriculture of deep-pocketed institutional investors—TIAA being an example—had made it pretty much impossible for smaller farmers to compete. Institutional investment has removed millions of acres from farmers’ hands, more or less permanently. “Pension funds not only have the power to outbid smaller, local farmers, they also have the long-term goal of retaining farmland for generations,” the report noted.

Asked about TIAA’s record, a spokesperson for Nuveen maintained that the company has built its Delta portfolio following ethical-investment guidelines: “We have a long history of investing responsibly in farmland, in keeping with our corporate values and the UN-backed Principles for Responsible Investment (PRI). As a long-term owner, we bring capital, professional expertise, and sustainable farming practices to each farm we own, and we are always looking to partner with expansion-minded tenants who will embrace that approach and act as good stewards of the land.” The company did not comment on the history of any individual tract in its Delta portfolio.

But even assuming that every acre under management by big corporate interests in the Delta has been acquired by way of ethical-investment principles, the nature of the mid-century dispossession and its multiple layers of legitimation raise the question of whether responsible investment in farmland there is even possible. As a people and a class, black farmers were plainly targets, but the deed histories of tax sales and foreclosures don’t reveal whether individual debtors were moved off the land because of discrimination and its legal tools.

In addition, land records are spotty in rural areas, especially records from the 1950s and ’60s, and in some cases it’s unclear exactly which records the investors used to meet internal requirements. According to Tristan Quinn-Thibodeau, a campaigner and organizer at ActionAid, an anti-poverty and food-justice nonprofit, “It’s been a struggle to get this information.” The organization has tried to follow the trails of deeds and has asked TIAA—which manages ActionAid’s own pension plan—for an analysis of the provenance of its Delta portfolio. Such an analysis has not been provided.

What we do know is that, whatever the specific lineage of each acre, Wall Street investors have found a lucrative new asset class whose origins lie in part in mass dispossession. We know that the vast majority of black farmland in the country is no longer in black hands, and that black farmers have suffered far more hardships than white farmers have. The historian Debra A. Reid points out that “between 1920 and 1997, the number of African Americans who farmed decreased by 98 percent, while white Americans who farmed declined by 66 percent.” Referring to the cases studied in their 2001 investigation, Dolores Barclay and Todd Lewan of the Associated Press observed that virtually all of the property lost by black farmers “is owned by whites or corporations.” The foundation of these portfolios was a system of plantations whose owners created the agrigovernment system and absorbed thousands of small black-owned farms into ever larger white-owned farms. America has its own grileiros, and they stand on land that was once someone else’s.