For Eddie Wise, owning a hog farm was a lifelong dream. In middle age, he and his wife, Dorothy, finally got a farm of their own. But they say that over the next twenty-five years, the U.S. government discriminated against them because of their race, and finally drove them off the land. Their story, by John Biewen, was produced in collaboration with Reveal.
Photo: U.S. Marshals presenting eviction papers to Eddie Wise. Nash County, North Carolina, January 2016. Photograph by John Biewen.
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Link to Five Farms, a 2009 Center for Documentary Studies documentary project featuring Eddie and Dorothy Wise and four other American farm families.
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6 comments on “Episode 43: Losing Ground”
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Thank you for sharing this story.
Very powerful and very appreciated. If only this information could be more broadly disseminated.
This story is heartbreaking. How can anyone withstand the ridiculous bureaucratic hoops that Eddie and Dorothy were put through to save their farm? It is a nightmare.
This whole series has made me really look at my whiteness. I am more aware than ever how much I have, because of my whiteness.
This series of programs has changed my life. I cannot ever go back to being blind to my position in society.I wish everyone could listen and know.
Thank you.
This was interesting, thank you. I need to say however that the point of view wasn’t balanced.
This couple takes out a $300,000.00 loan 25 years ago. Makes less than $9,000.00 in payments on that loan over a twenty year period (less than $38 a month), then stops making any payments at all for another five years and only then FmHA forecloses on them.
If this is an example of discrimination, where can I signup?
Sadly I believe all that I have heard; What baffles me is that anyone white or black or yellow or green would intentionally stand in the way of anyone white or black or yellow or green being able to improve their life. It is simply un-Christian and this all happened in a region which claims to be deeply religious. In a sense I go back in history a long way to the days that the Constitution was written and the 4/5 th’s segment that was included by the Slave holding states. For John Roberts to declare that racism is history is ludicrous.
Heartbreaking and sickening . No words…