It’s amazing how some people leave an impact on you even after a single meeting. His name was Mr. Alvin Steppes, and he was 71 years old when I sat down with him to listen to his story. A story about something that happened in his life. Something painful enough for him to still wake up in tears many years later. Tears that seemed to be welling up in his eyes even as we spoke. Those eyes, with that familiar bluish ring around a dark brown iris. The same ring that many Black elders in the Deep South seemed to carry, sometimes gray, sometimes light blue and sometimes a deep blue, like my grandmother’s. I interviewed Mr. Steppes 9 years ago as part of my thesis documentary film school project exploring Black land loss and dispossession. There were many reasons for the land loss. One part of the equation and the part that I tackled most in the film was the discrimination Black farmers faced from the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA). Reflections of an Everyday Observer is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Mr. Steppes was the great-grandson of enslaved people and the heir to land his grandparents purchased from a white landowner who astonishingly sold his land only to Black people (or so went the story that was passed down to Mr. Steppes). What an amazing thing for a white man to do during that time; why would he do that, I thought to myself. So I asked. “Well, you have some good people of all nationalities,” Mr. Steppes responded. “He was just a good man; maybe a God-sent man that made sure he was doing something for other peoples,” he said. Mr. Steppes took over his family’s farm after his father died. While I was developing this project, one note or pushback I received on the idea that the staggering amount of Black farmers’ land loss was specific to their race was the fact that a lot of white farmers had also suffered enormous amounts of land loss as well, specifically during the 1980s farm crisis. In my answer to that notion, I turned to the phrase “when white America catches a cold, Black America catches pneumonia.” In other words, the illness is the same, but the body’s ability to fight it is not. Not because we are weaker, but because our immune system has been compromised by design over generations. Black farmers had been severely disadvantaged before the crisis hit; systematically stripped of wealth and land for decades through violence, legal manipulation, tax sales, heirs’ property vulnerabilities, and outright theft. Black farmers’ starting place was at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder. And that positioning matters when you talk about chances of survival during a disaster. A Microcosmic Example Take the Titanic disaster, for example. A few years back, my very young son had this impossibly cute obsession with the Titanic. I mean, he wanted Titanic coloring books and a toy replica of the ship to play with in the bathtub. We visited Titanic exhibits and watched countless hours of documentaries and random YouTube videos of people recreating the ship's crash and sinking in their backyard pools. It was very intense and hilariously strange; nevertheless, I now have had time to really dwell on the crash and see how it is a great microcosmic example of how survival during disasters works. The survival rate of first-class passengers was 61%. Second-class passengers were 42%, and the survival rate for 3rd class passengers was 24%, suffering the highest casualties. And do you want to know what one of the key advantages to the people who survived was? It was access. There were many system failures that brought the Titanic to its demise and caused so many to lose their lives, but one failure I find especially grotesque. There were not enough lifeboats for everyone on board. It really aggravates me when people act like you are supposed to survive and thrive through sheer willpower and force and not acknowledge the negative impact of larger systems at play, especially ones built entirely without your well-being in mind. As Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. once said, “I believe we ought to do all we can and seek to lift ourselves by our own bootstraps. But it is a cruel jest to say to a bootless man that he ought to lift himself up by his own bootstraps.” There were not enough lifeboats on the Titanic. What were the people supposed to do, build their own boats to escape this man-made disaster, one they themselves did not create, mind you? With what knowledge about boat building, with what tools and materials? And how could they do it in the 2 hours and 40 mins that it took for the ship to sink? Wealthier first-class passengers had the highest survival rates not only because they had access to lifeboats but also because they were closer to them, as the lifeboats were located on the upper decks near their cabins. They also had better access to information about what was happening. All while poorer third-class passengers were housed deep in the lower decks and were sometimes physically prevented from reaching the upper decks. The parallels between this and Mr. Steppes’ story are striking. Mr. Steppes’ Story It happened in 1986, arguably the worst year of the American Farm Crisis. To understand what happened, you have to know that farming runs on credit. Every late winter or early spring, farmers, rich or poor, would go to their local bank to borrow money for seeds, equipment, and fuel, money they wouldn’t pay back until after the harvest. But for Black farmers, local banks often wouldn’t lend to them. The Farmers Home Administration (FmHA) served low-income and disadvantaged farmers broadly, but because local banks so routinely turned Black farmers away, it became their primary available option, and often their only one. It was supposed to be the alternative, a federal lender of last resort that would give them the same fighting chance. Steppes mentioned that the white farmers in his area sorta turned their noses up at FmHA, called it welfare, and typically wouldn’t be seen in those offices. That year, Mr. Steppes and his fellow Black farmers applied for their loans as usual and were told by the offices that no funds were available. One day, Mr. Steppes went in to speak to a supervisor about what was going on and was told he would have to wait until the supervisor was out of a meeting. While waiting, Mr. Steppes overheard a district director telling all the county supervisors who to let have money. And wouldn’t you know it, all the people being named to receive funds were, as Mr. Steppes put it, “big time white farmers.” “The USDA cut us off and bailed out these white farmers,” he continued. The farm crisis was a full-fledged disaster, and the banks that the white farmers typically borrowed money from were now foreclosing on them. While I can’t speak to why those specific farmers were facing foreclosure, I can speak to the circumstances that led to the overall crisis and foreclosures of many farmers. During the 1970s, banks aggressively lent to farmers as the federal government encouraged agricultural expansion, farmland values rose, and credit was easy to obtain. Many farmers borrowed heavily to buy more land and equipment. The crisis came in the early 1980s when interest rates spiked, farmland values collapsed, and farm incomes fell as crop prices and export demand declined. Farmers who had borrowed heavily suddenly faced much higher loan payments while earning less income, making it difficult to repay their debts. By 1986, banks were pulling back, calling in loans, and foreclosing on farms. Credit that had once been easy to obtain became much harder or more expensive to access, worsening the farm crisis. The ship was sinking; FmHA was the last lifeline, and in Mr. Steppes' case, it was just like the passengers on the Titanic, a choice was made about who would be saved. It wasn’t random. It wasn’t an oversight. Someone decided which farmers got the lifeboat. A Painful Irony Mr. Steppes was a fighter and a person who firmly believed in getting in “good trouble,” as the late civil rights leader and U.S. Congressman John Lewis put it. Mr. Steppes immediately confronted his county supervisor after the meeting, telling him he knew he had been lying to him and the other Black farmers. He and the other farmers would go on to file a complaint against the USDA. Mr. Steppes said his mother told him that she was scared for him, scared that someone was going to kill him. He replied to her, “Mama, I will die for my rights, and I will die for other people’s rights. I’m no better than nobody else. If I see something wrong, I got to let them know about it. God put us here to look out for one another.” As I’m sure you can imagine, this fight was not an easy one. It was a true David-and-Goliath story that would span more than a decade. “It got rough, “ Mr. Steppes said of his experience. “I have cried. I have cried, I have prayed a many days baby. Many.” But there was something about his experience that I didn’t have much exposure to at the time I spoke to him, and it was another layer added to the “weakened immune system” that makes the Black community more vulnerable during a disaster. When a body is under prolonged stress and attack, it sometimes turns on itself. It’s been in fight mode for so long that it loses the ability to distinguish friend from foe. Inequality doesn’t just attack from outside; it burrows inside a community and creates internal fractures that make collective resistance harder. Generations of seeing fighters get crushed, get made examples of, lose everything, teach a community to keep its head down. Some people in Mr. Steppes’ community simply did not believe him, and they saw him as the enemy causing trouble. Some people were afraid and willing to accept what he was not, so he faced ridicule and attacks on his character. S
