The Curious Case of Oscar Lorick: Race, Markets, and Militancy during the Farm Crisis

Abstract

Of the thousands of bankrupt farmers in the 1980s, Oscar Lorick of Cochran, Georgia, was an unlikely rallying point. The sixty-six-year-old Lorick had been farming all of his life, but in the difficult agricultural economy of 1985, he had everything but his own skill as a farmer working against him. In an era of expanding farm sizes, Lorick farmed a mere seventy-nine acres, well below the national average, land which had been in his family since Reconstruction. Coming of age in the Depression-era Deep South, Lorick could neither read nor write, leaving the fate of his farm in the hands of lenders and bank officials. Worst of all for his odds of keeping his farm, Lorick was a farmer of color. As an African American farmer, he faced a long history of loan discrimination, including by the USDA itself, a phenomenon later litigated through the landmark case of Pigford v. Glickman.¹ The end of the Lorick family's 119-year tenure on the farm seemed to come in early November 1985. Lorick owed a dizzying ninety-six thousand dollars to his creditors, and his lender, the local Cook Banking Company, announced that it would foreclose on his property.

That was when the armed men came. They were white farmers and came from some seven states, ranging from Lorick's Georgian neighbors to as far afield as Oklahoma. They built hay and rope barricades around the tiny farm, draping signs on the barn and other outbuildings. “Oscar stays. Banks Go. Down with the Federal Reserve,” one sign proclaimed.² Another sign, not noted in the sympathetic coverage of Lorick's travails, condemned the “ZOG,” a popular Far Right acronym meaning “Zionist Occupied Government.”³ The protesters had been called into action by a fellow local farmer, Charles “Tommy” Kersey. Kersey had been a leader of Georgia farmers during the first American Agriculture Movement tractorcades, and while his farm seemed to be on solid footing in the worst years of the Farm Crisis, he worried about others. “Oscar's situation is like a lot of other farmers',” Kersey told People in December 1985. “Twenty thousand farmers in Georgia will be foreclosed in the next 18 months. Oscar ain't going to leave this farm.”⁴ Drawing on lessons and disappointments experienced over the past almost decade of farm activism, Kersey made two fateful phone calls for outside help—one to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and one to the Oklahoma-based Heritage Library, an organization that combined racist Christian Identity theology with anti-federal radicalism and conspiracist understanding of financial systems.

While an NAACP attorney pursued legal action in the Bleckley County courts to stop the eviction, two dozen armed men stood guard at the farm, now bedecked with a giant American flag extended across the garage roof. The local sheriff, Ed Coley, arrived on the farm and asked Lorick to vacate the premises. At first, Heritage Library President Lawrence Humphreys argued that the county's orders had no legal standing, but then NAACP field worker James Lingo joined in the conversation, telling Coley that his organization was looking into filing a lawsuit in federal court against the foreclosing bank. Coley said that he would wait until the legal situation was clearer, and then drove away. The gun-toting “visitors” fired a celebratory volley and vowed to stay in place until Lorick was allowed to keep his farm.

The diversity of actors in Oscar Lorick's drama demonstrates the degree to which anti-federalism represented a common thread uniting widely varied ideological commitments. Some of these commitments had, like Lorick's, long histories of personal, familial, and communal disappointment and discrimination. Others reflected the au courant bootstraps libertarianism prevalent in the pop economics of the Ronald Reagan era. Despite these differences, the ability of disparate interests and backgrounds to unite around common antipathy toward the federal government, even toward its claims of assistance, suggests that the Farm Crisis is at the center of a modern rural anti-federal consensus.

The story of Oscar Lorick suggests that scholarship of the political economy of the Farm Crisis should move beyond the grain belt of the Midwest and High Plains to include the South and other regions of agrarian mobilization. Examining the South places the farm activism of the 1980s on a timeline with the civil rights activism of the previous three decades. It picks up the narrative of the struggle against Black land loss from the 1940s to the 1970s described by Pete Daniel in Dispossession, in the decade after his book concludes but before the ruling in Pigford v. Glickman.⁵ Lorick's story also shines a light on the national-level mobilization that tied agrarian activists in Georgia to others in Oklahoma, Wisconsin, and beyond. Perhaps most crucially, this analysis of Oscar Lorick's story and the convergence of numerous anti-federal ideologies on a small farm outside of Cochran, Georgia, is part of a broader attempt by contemporary historians to hypothesize the longer-term implications of a decade of rural struggle and displacement.⁶ Building on these more recent works, this examination of the activism and ideologies that contributed to the ultimately successful fight to save Lorick's farm emphasizes the national implications of the Farm Crisis far beyond the formation of radical agrarian and anti-federal organizations. It demonstrates how various anti-federal ideologies converged in a rural America ravaged by financial crisis, divided by racism, and increasingly perceiving itself as isolated from the levers of political power.⁷

Given a long history of actual federal malfeasance that undoubtedly contributed to Lorick's predicament, the participation by Lorick in anti-federal protest should not be particularly surprising. In an era in which discrimination remained unchecked by the seminal ruling in Pigford v. Glickman, the drama surrounding Lorick's farm demonstrates the dovetailing of the paranoid and racist anti-federalism at the radical edges of the farm movement with more mainstream critiques of federal engagement as well as with critiques of specific federal policies and practices that had worked against farmers, or at least particular groups of them.

Lorick's family had farmed the same small parcel in Bleckley County since the heady post–Civil War days of 1866. Over the years the farm had grown and then began to diminish again as Lorick sold off parcels. In the early 1970s, when the USDA continued to encourage farmers to take loans against their farms in order to modernize production, Lorick had done just that. But as the farm economy collapsed in the late 1970s, he went further and further into debt. Lorick sought to modernize his property, investing in special fertilizers and physical improvements to his farm, but even as he did so, he was haunted by the possibility that his self-proclaimed illiteracy allowed others to take advantage of him.

According to court records from 1979, Lorick claimed that he had been “fraudulently induced to enter into agreements” with a fertilizer agent, complaining that the agent was aware of his illiteracy and had written a sales agreement that did not guarantee the fertilizer's improved performance. When Lorick's crop yield dropped, he brought suit against the company but failed to recoup his losses.⁸ Lorick would use a similar account to explain how he had ended up, by November 1985, owing over one hundred thousand dollars in debt and property taxes. “When my father died, I didn't know how to read or write and people tried taking advantage of me,” Lorick told members of the Beulah Baptist Church a month after the tense standoff.⁹ Lorick was, in this regard, far from alone. A 1976 study presented at the National Rural Landowners Conference found that “illiteracy among rural blacks has contributed to land loss, primarily because of their inability to effectively negotiate during real estate transactions.”¹⁰

Lorick, the only Black landowning farmer remaining in Bleckley County, was also a victim of federally sanctioned and even sponsored discrimination. His repeated borrowing in 1974 and 1977 from the Cook Banking Company was a likely legacy of the fact that Black farmers rarely knew of or believed in the availability of the more lenient loans from the Farmers Home Administration (FmHA), intended to serve as a lender of last resort for desperate farmers. “If you don't know what programs to ask for, [Farmers Home will] tell you they've got nothing for you, they don't help you at all,” one Black Georgia farmer told a reporter from the Los Angeles Times less than a year after the standoff at Lorick's. “They (loan supervisors) don't like you to sit up straight, or talk up. . . . You got to say ‘yassir’ and ‘nossir’ and not look them in the eye,” another Black farmer said.¹¹

Three years before Lorick's eviction orders came through, the US Commission on Civil Rights issued a bombshell report on the state of Black farmers, in which the commission complained that although “FmHA credit programs have the capability to provide immediate direct assistance to black farmers to make their farms more viable and to prevent further loss of their lands,” in fact, “despite their disproportionate need, black farmers are not fully benefitting from FmHA loan programs.”¹² More glaringly, the report's initial letter of transmittal warned that “in some cases, FmHA may have hindered the efforts of black small farm operators to remain a viable force in agriculture.”¹³

Critically, this key government study on Black land loss was conducted by the US Commission on Civil Rights rather than within the Department of Agriculture, the federal agency ostensibly responsible for tracking and acting on demographic trends observed in America's rural communities.¹⁴ The commission was established as part of the Civil Rights Act of 1957 to conduct fact-finding studies on the status of civil rights in the United States, including within its purview both civic society and governmental institutions, with an eye toward shaping effective policy to advance civil rights. Beyond casting blame for discriminatory lending on the FmHA, the report warned that amid national activism to preserve what was increasingly known as the “family farm,” the plight of Black farmers like Lorick had reached cataclysmic proportions. “While displacement from the land looms as a threat to all small farmers,” the report acknowledged, “land loss has occurred most severely among black farm operators. Almost 94 percent of the farms operated by blacks have been lost since 1920, while the number of white-operated farms declined 56.4 percent during the same period.”¹⁵ More ominously, the study noted that “the rate of land loss shows no sign of tapering for blacks, even though it has slowed somewhat for white farmers. . . . At this rate of loss, there will be virtually no blacks operating farms in this country by the end of the next decade.”¹⁶

Lorick, who had been farming since childhood, had long operated in the shadow of federal discrimination. In 1965, as the tide of civil rights swept across the South, the Commission on Civil Rights issued a report in which it documented specific findings of discrimination across the USDA farm assistance programs. A middle-aged farmer in his forties in the 1960s, Lorick would have experienced the fallout of the long list of discriminatory practices. The Cooperative Extension Service, meant to educate and modernize agricultural practices and rural life, was characterized by “separate and unequal administrative structures providing inferior services to Negro farmers, youth, and homemakers.”¹⁷ The FmHA, the 1965 report documented, offered “a different kind of service to the two races, with Negro farmers receiving for the most part subsistence loans with limited supervision, while white farmers received supervised loans for capital expenditures.”¹⁸ The Soil Conservation Service, the report found, offered “little service at all to many Negro landowners in areas where no Negro staff members are employed” and in the state extension services, “Negro staff members have often been required to provide to Negro farmers technical services outside their area of training, while white farmers have received assistance from specialists in these areas.” If, in the late 1970s, Lorick found himself struggling to keep his diminished farm viable in a changing agricultural economy, his struggle was doubtless magnified by the phenomenon described in the 1965 report, that “many thousands of Negro farmers are denied access to services provided to white farmers which would help them to diversify, increase production, achieve adequate farming operations or train for off-farm employment.”¹⁹ Working to realize the Civil Rights Act of 1964 alongside his efforts to improve rural life through his War on Poverty, President Lyndon Johnson acknowledged the unusual challenges facing Lorick and other Black farmers in the South. “The difficulties faced by many of our rural and farm families are of great concern to the Administration and we recognize that these problems are even more burdensome for those who suffer from the wasteful and divisive practices of racial discrimination,” Johnson wrote in a 1965 letter included in the report's final printing.²⁰

Even the end of de jure segregated land grant colleges and local extension programs failed to create effective change or even a will to change within the USDA. The Commission on Civil Rights had issued follow-up reports on the civil rights violations starting in 1968, and continuing in 1971, 1973, and 1975, but the subsequent reports' evisceration of the USDA for discriminatory practices in almost all of the department's outreach and assistance programs was doomed to repeat itself time and time again.²¹ If anything, as inflation increased and farmers across the country felt the tightening strains of the worst farm economy since the Great Depression, discriminatory lending practices worsened. A 1979 report on inequality in housing revealed that FmHA housing loans to Black borrowers as a percentage of all loans decreased by almost 50 percent from 19.6 percent of all FmHA housing loans in 1972 to 9.45 percent in 1976.²²

The difficult conditions surrounding the agricultural economy in the late 1970s spurred a new wave of agrarian activism in the United States, increasingly centered on an effort to ensure that farmers had enough income—even with historically low crop prices—to service the debts they had incurred as they sought to modernize and expand their farms in the early years of the decade. The newly formed American Agriculture Movement (AAM) positioned itself at the forefront of the resurgent activism, staging massive tractorcade protests and even attempting a nationwide farm strike in an effort to secure parity pricing for farm commodities.²³ These spectacle-based protests drew inspiration from the mass protests of the civil rights movement but the actual civil rights concerns of Black farmers were not specifically addressed by the new farm movement.

Instead, activism to save Black-operated farms was frequently confined to small regional holdovers from civil rights days over a decade earlier, even as the movement to save small family farms—and Black-operated farms were frequently among America's smallest—picked up speed and urgency as rising interest rates led to still more bankruptcies. When acknowledged at all, the plight of Black farmers was frequently isolated from the broader phenomenon of depopulation in American agriculture and even outside of the normative discourse on civil rights. In 1980 rural sociologist Thomas Lyson warned that “if blacks are to remain a recognizable part of America's farm sector, policies and programs must be designed and implemented that not only remove longstanding barriers to success, but that also assist and motivate new talent to enter farming.” Lyson added with clear bitterness that he found it “ironic that while supporters of the civil rights movement and proponents of affirmative action programs have geared their efforts toward facilitating equal occupational opportunity throughout a broad spectrum of the labor market, little (if any) attention has been paid to keeping blacks in this occupation, in which it is as difficult to gain a foothold as in any in America.”²⁴

While Lyson critiqued the civil rights community for its noninvolvement in the Black farm crisis, the newly emerging AAM and its allies were also mostly silent about the plight of Black farmers and their unique struggles as well. Many of the crisis-era organizations, like AAM and Women Involved in Farm Economics, were initially established in the Midwest and Great Plains regions, while Black-operated agriculture was overwhelmingly concentrated in six Deep South states. A 1986 study on Black farmers noted that over 90 percent of all Black-operated farms were located in the South.²⁵ It was only in the shadow of the Lorick standoff that both Black activists and farm activists gave increasing attention to the double crisis of Black farm loss—its causes and its possible solutions.

Veterans of the long civil rights struggle recognized Lorick's case as both exceptional and exemplary. Lorick's well-publicized national story would serve as a jumping-off point toward providing a face to the data on Black land loss published in the late 1970s and early to mid-1980s. In December 1985 the pastor of the Beulah Baptist Church in southeast Atlanta reflected to his congregation that “if those had been black men on Mr. Lorick's farm with guns, we know what would have happened. . . . Mr. Lorick would have lost his farm and the men would have been put in jail.”²⁶ In the previous year, the perhaps best-recognized civil rights figure of the era, Rev. Jesse Jackson, had worked with North American Farm Alliance's Merle Hansen to bring white midwestern farm activists into his coalition of the dispossessed. Rhetoric and coverage around this alliance tended to focus on the racial dichotomy that read urban as Black and rural as white rather than mentioning the intense suffering of Black farmers. It was, however, a month after Lorick's standoff that Black leaders' protest led to the passage of a 1985 Farm Bill that included requirements for the FmHA to allocate “funds to meet the immediate needs of small-scale farmers and permitted land-grant colleges to establish training programs that assisted small-scale farmers with financial matters such as bookkeeping.”²⁷ In the year after the standoff, Jet, Ebony, and Black Enterprise each published multiple articles drawing attention to the struggles of Black farmers in the South.²⁸

Lorick's high-profile standoff, and ultimately the attempts to seek community-based solutions and changes to federal policies, would help create a prototype for continued activism centered around Black churches on behalf of Black farmers in the South. In 1987 the St. Peter Missionary Baptist Church in southwest Atlanta held an “Elmo Richey Day” celebration to save Richey's farm, coordinated by Harry Ross, who led Lorick's fundraising drive less than two years earlier.²⁹ Richey was a septuagenarian Black farmer who was facing foreclosure due to a staggering $104,000 in debt—owed in this case to the Farmers Home Administration.³⁰ Another civil rights headliner, Fulton County commissioner Martin Luther King III, also spoke at the Elmo Richey Day event, tying the fight against Black land loss explicitly to the civil rights movement, saying, “It is important to preserve the black farmer because we preserve what our forefathers fought for.”³¹ The day culminated in a “Gospel-Aid Appeal” that consciously borrowed from the well-publicized pattern of the then-two-year-old Farm Aid Concert fundraiser.³² As with Farm Aid, the community fundraising framework by the Black community signified a lack of faith in the commitment by the federal government to support farmers. Speaking of the event, Rep. John Lewis said that he “hope[d] this will send a message that we can not solely depend on the White House to help our farmers. We need help from the private sector, as well as individuals.”³³

If Lorick and veterans of the civil rights era had reason to distrust federal intentions, the activist margins of the new agrarian protests wrapped anti-federal sentiment in an all-encompassing conspiracist ideology to explain farmers' inability to successfully shift federal policy. The Georgia AAM leader Tommy Kersey arrived at his intense critique of the federal government not because he had, like Lorick, farmed for decades in a state of institutionalized disadvantage. Rather, Kersey's critique of federal power began when he realized that his concerns were less important to Washington than his relatively privileged background had led him to believe. Kersey was a well-off farmer from a prominent family in nearby Dooly County. Far from illiterate, Kersey had even attended college, although he left before completing his degree.³⁴ When low commodity prices coupled with high interest rates left American farmers reeling in 1977, Kersey rose to prominence as one of the most vocal farmers in Georgia calling for farmers to “strike” by refusing to plant and harvest the next year's crops.³⁵

In the coming years, publications would describe him as the Georgia leader of the AAM as he participated in tractorcades to Atlanta and to Jimmy Carter's home in Plains, Georgia. While he was not always listed as a sponsor, a long line of meetings and protests were scheduled in his hometown of Unadilla. During those years, Kersey would undergo an ideological transformation, from seeking change within the framework of existing modes of activism, education, and political institutions to adopting a revolutionary perspective calling for the destruction of modern banking systems and ultimately even of the federal government.

In his early years of activism, Kersey argued that farmers were at least partially responsible for the situation in which they found themselves, and he believed that the solution lay in lobbying state and federal officials for finite reforms to already existing agricultural policies. In 1979, as part of AAM's Washington Tractorcade, the American Agriculture News quoted Kersey asking, “Whose fault is the present farm situation?” and then replying to his own question, “Every time you look in the mirror to shave, you're lookin’ at him. You ought to just rear back and slap the hell out of yourself, you damn sure deserve it.”³⁶ The newspaper, the main vehicle for communication within the dispersed movement, described the rejoinder as delivered in “Tommy['s] inimitable style,” indicating the assumption that the newsletter's readers would already be familiar with Kersey and his growing reputation for blunt, folksy speech.³⁷

In Washington, Kersey had sought out the Federal Reserve as a locus for protest, but along very different ideological lines from the conspiracist exhortations that would appear on Lorick's barn a few years later. During the tractorcade, Kersey led a group of farmers toward the Federal Reserve's headquarters, calling on the Fed to lower interest rates for cash-strapped farmers. The Washington Post described the farmers as “mad about high interest rates, just as mad, in fact, as they were about low grain prices, which was pretty mad.”³⁸ While Federal Reserve representatives said that they would consider the plan, they later expressed reservations that Congress would balk at such a step. Kersey, in turn, was frustrated that the banking institution had not immediately responded to farmer pressure. “I thought we could come and just present the facts and they'd agree with us here,” he told the Washington Post. “Boy, was I naive. I've learned you can't play a basketball game in a football field. Next time, we'll just have to define our game better.”³⁹ For Kersey and others in the farm movement who were accustomed to the responsive politicians of yesteryear, the Federal Reserve's lack of consideration signaled that the two parties were operating on different planes, but not that there was an overarching conspiracy at play.

The agrarian protesters, the AAM, and Kersey specifically attracted the attention of a number of fringe political groups, including one led by Lyndon LaRouche, a radical figure who offered increasingly conspiracist critiques of Washington policy—particularly the economic policies of the Carter and Reagan administrations—and saw the farm protesters as possible supporters. LaRouchite publications, including the Executive Intelligence Review, increasingly featured columns dedicated to the problems facing American agriculture, to the necessity of securing a stable food supply in the face of an impending Malthusian crisis, and occasionally to the demands made by the farm protesters themselves. In September 1980 the Review offered sympathetic coverage of an AAM candidates' night forum held the previous month in Montgomery, Alabama. Speaking at the forum alongside AAM president Marvin Meeks, Kersey had echoed his critiques from 1979, repeating a proposal calling for a three-year moratorium on payment of public loan debt by farmers. Kersey directly appealed to fellow Georgia farmer President Jimmy Carter to use executive authority to impose the moratorium, a demand that the Review described as “the cutting edge of an organized election-year effort to educate political candidates on urgent farm policy matters.”⁴⁰ Perhaps having learned a lesson from the tractorcade disappointment of the previous winter, Meeks called on farmers to “get involved in politics.”⁴¹

Getting involved in politics was not the only lesson activists gathered from the early experiences of 1977–80. In the years between 1980 and 1982, anti-federal rhetoric began to increasingly crop up in a number of agrarian publications. The rhetoric did not simply criticize or offer solutions to specific challenges like farmgate prices and parity, but rather offered a broader critique of the very existence and power of the federal government. Anti-federalism could be found alongside anti-Semitic conspiracy theories in the Primrose and Cattlemen's Gazette, and by 1983, the February 22 edition of American Agriculture News filled column space with a quote attributed to John Stuart Mill's Essays on Liberty, warning that

Such rhetoric increased and gained further militancy. The October 4, 1983, edition of American Agriculture News featured advertisements recruiting for radical anti-federal libertarian newsletters and a letter to the editor thanking the paper for “your wonderful stories on our battle with the Anti-Christ Federal Reserve Bank (one world government).”⁴³ The writer, Kansas farmer Ervin Steel, also published a statement on the same page declaring himself “a natural born Israelite in the God-given Republic of the United States of America” and arguing that he “do[es] now solemnly swear that I am a soldier in the King's Army and under Public Law 97-280 passed by the current United States Congress and signed by the President of the United States of America.”⁴⁴

Steel was like millions of other Americans who increasingly placed their political and economic sensibilities in a religious framework that found robust expression starting with the rise of Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority in the late 1970s and into the 1980s. In 1982 a bipartisan group of lawmakers passed Public Law 97-280, a joint resolution of Congress calling on the president to proclaim 1983 as the “Year of the Bible,” which President Ronald Reagan promptly did at the National Prayer Breakfast. While historians debate whether the proclamation was intended to mollify the rising Christian Right or as a recognition of their power, the message struck home among traditionalists who saw the act as enshrining the Bible as a fundamental text of American governance.⁴⁵ It was particularly important for adherents to the increasingly popular Christian Identity movement, which held that white Christians were the true “Chosen People” and that America was the “Promised Land” in need of redemption and restoration to its Christian heritage.⁴⁶ Christian Identity ministers, frequently aligned with hate groups like the Aryan Nation, courted the interest of disaffected farmers. Arizona-based Christian Identity pastor Sheldon Emry noted in his March 1983 newsletter that “farmers are being especially hard hit with both Banks and the FHmA refusing to renew their loans. . . . Many on our mail list are ordering our money cartoon packet, having one or more of the cartoons reprinted locally and passing them out at farm auctions.”⁴⁷ In the pages of American Agriculture News, Steel's use of capitalization and pseudo-legalistic frameworks indicates the inroads made by radical anti-federal ideology coupled with Christian Identity theology in the organized farm advocacy movements by the mid-1980s.

Kersey traveled down a similar road. By November 1982 he was cited in the LaRouchite Executive Intelligence Review endorsing the Club of Life, an organization established in 1982 by Helga Zepp-LaRouche, wife of the perennial presidential candidate LaRouche. Zepp-LaRouche described the organization as “an anti-Malthusian mass movement” designed to counter “the Club of Rome and its co-thinkers,” aiming instead “to bring about a new worldwide humanist renaissance.”⁴⁸ Kersey did not reflect in his statement on the ideological aims of the movement, instead simply stating that “I, as a very concerned citizen and as a farmer support the efforts being made at this conference.”    The LaRouchite publication listed Kersey as the president of the Georgia State American Agriculture Movement. Four months later, Kersey, still billed as the state's AAM chief, addressed a Club of Life meeting in Atlanta. In March 1983 LaRouche's National Democratic Policy Committee referred to Kersey as “one of our members” in submitted testimony before the House Agriculture Committee. In November of that year, Kersey and LaRouche shared a stage at a farm rally in Unadilla as LaRouche revealed his agriculture platform in his candidacy for the presidency. In an effort to gain farmers' support that year, the fringe candidate adopted an explicit defense of “family farming” as part of his platform and selected Mississippi farmer Billy Davis as his running mate.⁴⁹ While he would later denounce his prior enthusiastic support for the conspiracist LaRouchite Party, Kersey echoed LaRouche's distrust of extant financial systems. He believed that “the Federal Reserve” and “money manipulators” had intentionally entrapped farmers. “There's no doubt in my mind,” Kersey would later say, “that in the '70s there was a conspiracy where farmers were led to borrow more money. . . . And the answer isn't going to Washington and lovin’ up those politicians—who ain't real people, anyhow. Washington is the problem,” added the farm activist who less than a decade earlier had told farmers that they themselves were to blame for their financial troubles and who had visited the unreal people at the Fed to convince them of his rectitude.⁵⁰ Instead, Kersey in the mid-1980s had despaired of effecting change within the existing system. “Wipe out the Federal Reserve,” was now Kersey's solution.⁵¹

Kersey and Lorick were far from the only actors with axes to grind against federal power and policy. At some point in Lorick's drama, Kersey allegedly contacted two very different organizations to come to Lorick's aid, working from very different political perspectives to achieve the same end: allowing Lorick to remain indefinitely on his farm. Kersey contacted the NAACP, which sent attorney Alvin McDougald and a field worker to the farm outside of Cochran. Kersey also contacted Lawrence Humphreys, the Oklahoma-based founder of the Heritage Library. Humphreys and Kersey mobilized upward of two dozen activists (some breathless accounts had the numbers closer to one hundred) who, armed with hunting rifles, shotguns, and semiautomatic weapons, formed a defensive perimeter around Lorick's property. When the local sheriff came to deliver the eviction order, the militants told him that he would “have to shoot us off the land.”⁵²

For Humphreys, who arrived at Lorick's property with a “riot shotgun,” the plight of farmers was not itself a problem to be solved, but rather a symptom of a much bigger problem: for nefarious reasons, the United States had ceased to be a Christian and constitutional republic. Like those of the better-known Posse Comitatus, Humphreys's primary complaints were about the nature of governance and global commerce and how the growing crisis of displacement across rural America had created a wide swath of discontented farmers seeking explanations for their economic insecurity. Humphreys, the millionaire son of a banking executive, had some answers. In 1982 Humphreys used his inheritance to establish a compound centered around his one-hundred-thousand-book Heritage Library at a price tag of some $1.3 million and adorned with flags and eagle statues.⁵³

For Humphreys the farm crisis was a sign of how far America had strayed from what he saw as its founding principles. Like other groups that would later be considered part of the sovereign citizen movement, Humphreys saw routine governmental interactions, such as purchasing a driver's license or paying for vehicle registration, as illegitimate and thus refused to do so.⁵⁴ In a November 1985 interview, Humphreys described his philosophy as “Christian patriotism,” arguing that federal banking laws effectively “enslaved” free citizens.⁵⁵ Claiming that income taxes violated biblical principles, Humphreys saw strict adherence to biblical economic principles as a solution to farmers'—and America's—troubles. Arguing that Old Testament concepts of sabbatical, namely debt forgiveness and a land sabbath, would save American agriculture, Humphreys grounded two ideas common in the mainstream farm movement—debt forgiveness and a farm strike to raise demand and thus commodity prices—in a theological and political framework of Christian Identity.⁵⁶ “You can't get away from the fact that the people who founded this nation were white Christians who set up a country on the basis of Christian law. The laws of God are its foundation and they're immutable,” Humphreys explained, adding that the Aryans were the true chosen people. “We're going to have to have a national repentance and a revival,” which would “kick off the land sabbath.”⁵⁷ Humphreys offered a toned-down version of his ideology while talking to reporters visiting Lorick's farm during the standoff. “We're dedicated to preserving our Christian heritage and constitutional republic,” Humphreys intoned, neglecting to emphasize the centrality of “Aryan” in his understanding of that heritage while on Black-owned land.⁵⁸

Law enforcement officers, including the local sheriff, who quickly backed off from his encounter with these armed militants, interpreted Humphrey's presence on Lorick's farm as an effort to spur a violent confrontation, particularly with federal officials. “A lot of those people who came with him from Oklahoma and the Midwest were heavily armed,” Donald Sparry, director of the Coastal Georgia Police Academy in Brunswick, which offered courses on extremist groups, told a reporter shortly after the standoff.⁵⁹ “What they're looking for is a confrontation, primarily with federal law enforcement officials,” he added. Although Georgia had seen many Kersey-led farm protests, the unfolding incident in Cochran had caught the attention of state-level officials due to its potential for violence. Bill Padgett, head of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation's antiterrorist squad, later revealed that he and his office were advising Bleckley County sheriff Ed Coley as the standoff unfolded. “Any time you have a group of people . . . come in with the type of weapons they had, they're dangerous,” Padgett recounted a few days later. Padgett characterized Humphreys's group as “right-wing extremist,” highlighting their opposition to the Federal Reserve, private debts, and taxation rather than a specific interest in farm politics.⁶⁰ Although Humphreys would deny ties with militant white supremacist groups and in other interviews denounced violence, his actions at Lorick's farm belied his rhetoric; Humphreys and others threatened to use force if Lorick was evicted from his farm.⁶¹

If Humphreys's presence in Cochran signaled, as some farm activists and law enforcement experts believed, a troublesome merger between violent anti-federal militancy and farmers' advocacy, the ultimate resolution to Lorick's debt crisis emphasized a much more pedestrian and socially accepted form of anti-federal thought popular during the decade. The standoff did not end when the sheriff backed down or when the NAACP documented discrimination; rather, the court agreed to delay the eviction when the appearance of a surprise donor suggested the possibility that Lorick could repay his debts. Through corporate benevolence, religious beneficence, and private initiative, the deliverance of Oscar Lorick ultimately validated a capitalist-libertarian vision of society consistent with the moral vision of Reaganism. Lorick's case was not exceptional in this regard. It fit a pattern that emerged in the mid-1980s as charitable initiatives increasingly took the place of policy advocacy or even the development of a government policy that created economically sustainable farming opportunities for small farmers like Lorick. This apparent act of individual generosity and ensuing efforts at securing payments for Lorick's debts focused on the role of individual charity, corporate benevolence, and even “bootstraps” theory in positing a response to crisis entirely outside of governmental institutions.

An apparent solution to Lorick's crisis emerged as news of the standoff spread through America's major newspapers. Within days, Melvin and Linda Dixon came forward claiming to be Lorick's distant cousins and said that they would be happy to pay off Lorick's debts. Although they told reporters that they were repaying Lorick's kindness to his family members, the two were actually experienced grifters and con artists. When they were uncovered, the Dixons quickly rescinded their offer to pay off Lorick's debt, leaving his fate uncertain.⁶² Again, Lorick's story drew a response from a would-be charitable benefactor, an Atlanta businessman who wore a ski mask to disguise his face and identified as “A.N. American.” Two weeks later, Lorick stood in the marble lobby of an Atlanta skyscraper, participating awkwardly in a press conference with the masked donor. American, who was quickly identified as Frank Argenbright, offered Lorick a way out tailor-made for the valorized capitalism of the era.⁶³ Reinforcing the idea that even charity should not be given without the beneficiary having to work for it—and that a work ethic was a patriotic virtue—Lorick would work to repay Argenbright's “loan” by selling American flags to Atlantans as they flocked to see their hometown team, the Falcons, play football. Argenbright, who owned an Atlanta-based security company, quickly enlisted additional assistance. The Falcons themselves jumped on board. Lorick was slated to appear in a tribute to farmers at halftime during a Falcons game, and a towplane was booked to fly overhead with the enjoinder “Help Oscar Lorick” and a phone number to call for donations.⁶⁴ Another anonymous donor contributed five thousand tickets to the Atlanta Hawks game to raise money for Lorick's fund. Asked about his motivations, Argenbright did not discuss the attempts at reforming Lorick's work ethic, instead arguing that “my intention in appearing as A.N. American all along has been to focus attention on the Loricks and the deep concern and sympathy the American public, has for our farmers.”⁶⁵ In Argenbright's vision, farmers were worthy of charity due to their symbolic value for American patriotism, an undercurrent that ran through the bailout from Argenbright's pseudonym to his choice of flags as the proffered sale item. At the same time, Argenbright's action and rhetoric emphasized a problem without an author and a solution that existed devoid of governmental institutions, highlighting the role of the individual American rather than policy in saving “our farmers.”

Argenbright further emphasized the need for community buy-in when he clarified that he would not provide Lorick with all the missing funds, but rather help him recruit more sponsors to bankroll his bailout. Lorick was launched on a series of speaking engagements in which he was expected to self-advocate his cause to potential donors, particularly networks of Black churches. Lorick's church campaign started in December 1985, when he traveled to Atlanta and gave a speech to the three thousand–member Beulah Baptist Church, discussing “his troubles as a farmer.” The church encouraged the congregation “to participate in a special offering to assist Lorick toward raising the $112,000.00 needed.”⁶⁶ Ultimately, 165 Black churches would donate through collections a total of $57,000.⁶⁷ While mainstream national media outlets rarely discussed the role of Black churches in saving Lorick's farm, Jet prominently featured them. In May 1986 the magazine's “National Report” section featured the headline “Black Churches Muster to Save Oscar Lorick's Farm” and emphasized that while “a White businessman, Frank Argenbright, got the fund-raising drive started with a $7000 donation, it was the Black church that donated the largest amount, $57,000, to get the 66-year-old farmer back to work.”⁶⁸ The theme of Lorick's work and initiative alongside private charity as a solution to the farmer's woes was as present in Jet as it was in Argenbright's patriotic pronouncements.

The search for financial assistance reinforced a key component of a broader anti-federal narrative that was central to the economic theories of the Reagan years: corporations, devoid of government regulation, would act in a benevolent manner toward society because it would ultimately help their own bottom line. This assertion was reinforced and reiterated as corporate donors clearly saw Lorick's predicament as an opportunity for low-effort public relations; with the gun-toting radicals out of the picture, Lorick was a sympathetic figure for a wide array of potential clients. Despite the efforts of Argenbright and the Black churches, it was the regionally prominent Kroger supermarkets that provided the final boost to repay his debts. “A week ago, when our backs were against the wall and we were short by $18,590 to save Oscar Lorick's land and pay the taxes . . . the Kroger Company came forth with $18,590,” Harry Ross of the Lorick Rescue Fund told the Atlanta Daily World.⁶⁹

Demonstrating Lorick's symbolic appeal for the Black community, Atlanta businessman N. H. Bronner of the Bronner Brothers hair products firm “gave Lorick a tractor as a gift from his firms.”⁷⁰ In a further emphasis of the need to redeem charity through work, Bronner presented Lorick with the new Ford tractor on the day he held a well-publicized picnic to celebrate the burning of his mortgage note.⁷¹ The coverage of Bronner's donation in Jet noted that Bronner “drove up to the mortgage fest with a tractor for Lorick, a gift from his firm, Soft Sheen Products, Luster Products, the American Health and Beauty Aids Institute, the M&M Products and the American Beauty Products.”⁷² The attention to listing all of Bronner's subsidiary firms indicated the degree to which associating specific brands with the largesse was central to the initiative.

The anti-federalism that converged both physically and metaphorically on Lorick's farm characterized a synthesis of anti-federal thought across rural America. Kersey and the Heritage Library might have overestimated the appeal of their armed militancy, but their message resonated across America's struggling agricultural regions. In 1987 the Minneapolis Star and Tribune published an article revisiting the standoff in an examination of the emergent Far Right and noted that “of all the leaders of all the groups within ‘the movement’—a term used often by those who believe conspirators are destroying American institutions—Kersey is the only one who has picked up a gun, publicly defied the government and won.”⁷³ The article noted that the standoff had given Kersey “a new national following—a constituency of the desperate,” but in fact, in drawing crowds to his inflammatory, violent, and anti-federal tirades in the Midwest, Kersey also drew increasing condemnation from other farm activists and groups seeking to distance themselves from his conspiratorial claims. Kersey himself welcomed this divide in the farm advocacy movement, arguing that “you got to put together a coalition of like-thinking people and through a show of force say, ‘There ain't gonna be no (farm) sales.’ Not sing songs and all that stuff (in the style of Minnesota's Groundswell or Iowa's Prairiefire, he said) but whatever it takes.”⁷⁴

Organizations within the Farm Crisis movement were forced to invest time and occasionally even funds in disassociating this violent anti-federalism from their efforts to save farms and farmers. In July 1986 AAM national director David Senter “appeared disturbed that Kersey was still being referred to as a member of the AAM.” Senter emphasized that “we have no officer in Georgia and we have no relation with Kersey or the extremist groups he associates with,” adding that LaRouchite candidates would not be allowed to participate in AAM events: “We want to have nothing to do with that kind of extremism.”⁷⁵ For law enforcement as well as for farm activists, the increased radicalism of those activists who pursued violent anti-federal aims was a threat that required strategy and a response. “There's a new crop. Call them right-wing if you want; if they continue to borrow from the far left, it doesn't matter who's aligned with who,” Wayne Truax, a special operations agent for the North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation, told reporters.⁷⁶ While Kersey himself eventually retreated from the national spotlight and from his radical rhetoric, numerous groups—perhaps some of the “30–40 groups” whom Kersey said “after the Cochran thing . . . got in touch to ask what they could do”— almost exclusively redirected their animus toward anti-federal agitation and cast farmers' rights squarely within the framework of what would become known as the sovereign citizen and militia movements.⁷⁷

Contemporary accounts emphasize Lorick's role as a sort of passive victim of circumstances, capable of understanding neither his economic predicament nor the strident ideological commitment of his newfound allies. At the time, the embrace of Lorick by militant anti-federal racists was largely seen as a media-savvy maneuver, meant to downplay the white supremacy of Posse Comitatus–affiliated groups and instead to attract a larger following of anti-federal and banking-skeptic discontents. This narrative, however, implied that Lorick must necessarily be duped and not himself possessed of any animus toward federal authorities. Coley, the local sheriff who had been turned away from the Lorick farm, later told the New York Times that he “feared that Mr. Lorick . . . was being used by the mostly white group of protestors and that they did not have his best interests at heart.”⁷⁸ Lorick's emphasis on his own illiteracy facilitated this portrayal of the farmer as a sort of Gumpian figure, borne on the tides of history. In a 1987 Minneapolis Star and Tribune article examining radical anti-federalism among rural discontents, the reporter emphasized Lorick's illiteracy, race, and age, describing him initially as “Lorick, 67, an illiterate black man,” adding that he “said he didn't know what all happened,” although it appears from the quote that he intended his denial to encompass his financial situation and not his political one. “Don't know what I borrowed or what the bank did, either. I couldn't read the papers,” Lorick told the reporter. Lorick was less ambiguous about his interpretation of the radical takeover of his farm: “He's sure of one thing,” the journalist noted, turning to quote Lorick, “‘Tommy Kersey, he helped me a lot.’”⁷⁹

While coverage of Lorick's role emphasized the coincidental or even paradoxical nature of the apparent alliance between anti-federal militants with connections to the white supremacist Christian Identity Movement and the Black farmer, the 1987 article wasn't the only indication that Lorick may have shared more ideology than simply seeking to save his farm. A Chicago Tribune article written a year after the standoff emphasized in its title that “Old Hatreds Get a New Image for This Video Age.” The article asserted that the anti-federal embrace of Lorick was an intentional effort to conceal the Heritage Library's racism without dwelling at all on the question of Lorick's own thoughts.⁸⁰ Describing the standoff as a “bizarre example,” the article highlighted the dissonance evident in the fact that while ten of the “gunmen came from Humphreys' organization . . . the rest came from such better-known white fringe groups as the Georgia Klan.”⁸¹ This article also did not bother to ask whether or not Lorick, a clear victim of discriminatory federal policy, shared the gunmen's critiques. Instead, it somewhat dubiously quoted Lorick at the end of the standoff, thanking “his supporters as they packed up their weapons,” telling the aforementioned white supremacists “I want to thank all of you for helping me. . . . And the ones from Oklahoma, I want to doubly thank.” Although the article notes this as reported speech (the reporter was likely not present) the emphasis on “the ones from Oklahoma” seems an indication that Lorick was at least nominally supportive of Humphreys's ideological bent. One picture, however, offers a window into Lorick's sensibilities at the time. In it, the overall-clad farmer stands scowling in front of a grain storage bin, bolt-action rifle in hand, flanked on both sides by two younger Black men—most likely his sons. One young man is dressed in 1980s radical-chic. He wears a camouflaged kepi, sunglasses, a bandanna, and a camouflaged shirt, shoulder holsters shining behind the rifle he balances on his knee. The second holds a lever-action rifle with a scope in his right hand, but appears less dressed for the part in a work shirt with a name tag. Behind the three a white-painted motto on the grain bin proclaims “live free or die.”⁸² A painted inscription to the left displays a prohibition sign over the words “FED RES SYS” (fig. 1). While Lorick might not have been able to read the inscription, the young men next to him likely could have, and the positioning of the photograph seems unlikely to be a coincidence.

As important, however, was the overlap among these radical and run-of-the-mill anti-federal critiques. In cohabiting the same spaces, economic anti-federalism—a rejection of the utility or morality of federal assistance—and violent anti-federalism, such as that advocated by Kersey and Humphreys, were able to create an environment in which the government was seen as an at least occasionally malicious actor in farmers' plights. A script from a church service sponsored by Women Involved in Farm Economics—an activist but politically mainstream Farm Crisis organization—included a statement that “governments always make us fearful, Lord. We are afraid of their power over us and our land,” even as it also acknowledged that many of the worshippers “are receiving benefits from Governmental aid.”⁸³ The prevalence of “bootstraps” rhetoric and self-support on the one hand and a small but virulent strain of anti-federal conspiracy theory on the other converged during the Farm Crisis to create narratives in which the government was at best unnecessary and at worst malicious. For farmers like Lorick, anti-federal critiques were not merely the stuff of conspiracist paranoia. Lorick himself was almost certainly a victim of federal policies that led to the disappearance of hundreds of thousands of Black farmers over the past centuries. Even farmers who had not experienced the long legacies of institutional racism in the USDA could point to more recent federal programs—like the highly unpopular Payment-in-Kind program of Reagan's first term—as evidence that the government was not working in their best interests.

Oscar Lorick would require additional assistance, especially after drought plagued beleaguered southern farmers toward the end of the decade. With the assistance of community members, Lorick was able to remain on his farm until his death at the age of ninety-five. While only one of a number of incidents among the waves of anti-federal sentiment that continue to shake rural America almost four decades later, the curious case of Oscar Lorick shows how these sentiments could converge to normalize discourses still very much a part of the political scene today. In some ways itself a turning point, the standoff at Lorick's Cochran, Georgia, farm would continue to resonate in its internalized lessons: that militancy could win the day, that private enterprise rather than federal policy could keep farmers on their land, and that anti-federalism in all of its myriad aspects could posit—and sometimes even deliver—tangible results. Less than two months after the standoff at Lorick's farm, Congress would pass the omnibus 1985 Farm Bill, a masterwork of negotiation, lobbying, activism, and inside baseball that would redouble federal efforts to stanch the flow of farmers from America's countryside. While the crisis itself would seemingly abate in the following years, it left a track of federal distrust and discontent in its path. The convergence of moderate and militant anti-federal rhetoric on Lorick's farm was not coincidental or even exceptional beyond its unexpected alliances. Rather it foreshadowed broader discourses grounded in a sense that whether or not it was the root cause of farmers' problems, federal intervention was certainly not a viable, trustworthy, or even desirable solution.

Notes

Works Cited