DAN RATHER (CBS Anchor): It is a long and shameful history, the way the U.S. Government treated black farmers in America. But this is not a case from the distant past. Even now, Black farmers are losing their farms at the times the rate of white farmers. CBS' Lee Cowan reports a new season in this harvest of shame in tonight's "Eye on America."
LEE COWAN (CBS Correspondent): Spend an afternoon on Eddie Cotton's 80-acre Mississippi farm and you'll learn one thing very quickly. He could have been much more.
EDDIE COTTON: "Everything I've had is ruined."
COWAN: Cotton fought in World War II and the Korean War, but it's his fight with the U.S. Department of Agriculture that's breaking him. Year after year, his farm loans were denied or held up until it was too late to plant. Meanwhile, his white neighbors, using USDA money, reaped their harvests.
COTTON: "I was going to, well, raise whatever, do farming, raise cows."
COWAN: After 25 years of trying to work his land, he's reduced now to keeping the weeds back and fighting foreclosure.
COWAN: Cotton thinks it's racism.
COTTON: "Yeah, that's all it is. I've been around too long for that. What else is it?"
COWAN: Cotton joined a historic class action suit against the USDA. The government admitted it had discriminated against black farmers for decades. And in a landmark 1999 settlement, promised compensation. EddieCotton is still waiting, and he's not alone.
COWAN: According to the National Black Farmer's Association, close to 90 percent of the farmers who applied for what was supposed to be an automatic piece of that settlement, didn't get a dime. Critics charge it's because the government first bungled the settlement, and now continues to fight it, tooth and nail.
JOHN BOYD (president of the National Black Farmer's Association): "The largest civil rights settlement in U.S. history turned out to be a national disgrace."
COWAN: Boyd staved off foreclosure, saved his 200-acre Virginia farm and is leading other farmers through a maze of government paperwork and legal maneuvers.
BOYD: "They are definitely dragging their feet."
COWAN: "And why would they do that?"
BOYD: "Because these are black farmers and who cares? We're just going to wait 'em out and eventually they'll die off."
COWAN: The black farmers now charge the USDA is obstructing justice.
VERNON PARKER: "How? I mean, (laughing) I just don't understand that argument."
COWAN: Parker, the USDA's Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights, says the settlement ties his hands while a third party accepts or rejects each farmer's case.
COWAN: Frustrated, the farmers have turned to Congress, asking it to alter the settlement and force the government to look at thousands of rejected cases. It's a strategy that's getting attention.
COWAN: Still, Parker won't criticize the settlement.
COWAN: "It is a bad settlement?"
PARKER: "Well, I, ya know what, I, I can't... "
COWAN: Yet, it's the USDA, not an independent observer, that's moved to dismiss Eddie Cotton's case -- on a technicality -- even though the USDA admits, in writing, that Cotton proved discrimination.
COWAN: "Do you ever think you're going to get your money, even a fraction of it?"
COTTON: "You asked a question there only the Good Lord can answer."
COTTON: The USDA promises it will put more African Americans in charge of farm loans. It's a promise that may have come too late for Eddie Cotton.