Aug 03, 2003
The payout was anything but peanuts for Will Sylvester Warren.
Warren, a black peanut farmer from Southampton County, recently collected a record payment of more than $6.6 million for years of racial discrimination by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
But the end of Warren's landmark, 11-year legal battle has left a legacy that is far from settled at the agriculture department.
The dramatic saga of an elderly Virginia farmer who cannot read or write, yet who took on the government and won, sparked a continuing debate over what the agriculture department should pay for its discrimination.
Warren's case also raised questions about the lessons learned at the federal department, embroiled for years in allegations of discrimination against minority farmers.
Lou Gallegos is proud that he let stand the $6.6 million award when he was a senior USDA official. He said his decision was opposed at high levels and he "got the cold shoulder" afterward.
"I became nobody's hero," he told The Times-Dispatch in a recent phone interview.
"There are very good people at USDA," said Gallegos, 64, who retired June 30 as assistant secretary for administration and now lives in a suburb of Albuquerque, N.M.
Yet, he added, "They are sort of slaves to the past."
Vernon B. Parker has a much different message as USDA's first assistant secretary for civil rights, a job that absorbed Gallegos' old civil-rights responsibilities.
"The days of lip service are over," said Parker, an African-American and Republican lawyer from Arizona.
Parker, in an interview last week, vowed to root out the sources of discrimination at the mammoth agency. "We have treated the symptoms all too often as opposed to the disease," he said.
He said a summit meeting in October will examine issues that have affected minority and other "underserved" farmers. USDA also is developing plans to resolve a backlog of more than 2,000 equal employment opportunity complaints by employees.
But one of Parker's early duties was to close the book on the Warren case.
The department's Office of Civil Rights concluded in 1999 that Warren had suffered from racial discrimination by local USDA officials. The question was how to compensate him.
After years of stalled negotiations, an administrative law judge answered that question in December with a record award and a scathing 46-page opinion to justify it.
Judge Constance O'Bryant, who graduated from high school in Lunenburg County, said the agriculture department failed repeatedly in its duty to help Warren and then retaliated against him for alleging racial discrimination.
Despite his belief that racism was widespread in Southampton County, Warren "held onto his faith that the federal government would treat him fairly," she wrote on Dec. 19. "Regrettably, he found that this was not to be."
O'Bryant rejected the government's estimates of Warren's farm losses at about $300,000 and went on to award him more than $1.1 million for his losses, $5 million for emotional distress and $450,000 for damage to his reputation. The total cost was $4 million more than it had been in the judge's initial ruling, issued two days earlier but rescinded, a source said.
The award sent shock waves through USDA, which had privately offered Warren a settlement of $600,000 for his losses, the forgiveness of almost $200,000 in farm debts, and legal fees, a source said. Warren and his family, who had asked for $75 million, rejected that offer, the source said.
Warren and his family have declined repeated requests by The Times-Dispatch for comment on the case.
Gallegos said the department's Office of General Counsel pushed for him to order a detailed review of the decision - in effect, an appeal. He said the lawyers tried to offer evidence that had not been part of the court record.
"I thought that was unseemly," he said.
Gallegos decided in January to let the $6.6 million award stand. And he did it because he said the price needed to be high for the government to feel the pain of its failure to protect Warren from years of discrimination.
"There's nothing more demeaning to humanity than discrimination," he said last week, "especially when it's done by your own government."
Gallegos said that for USDA, the payout "was the cost of not acting when they should have acted in a meaningful way."
However, the final decisions on the Warren case fell to Parker, who took office April 1. Gallegos had deferred acting in January on O'Bryant's order of additional relief for Warren, including forgiving farm debts, giving him first shot at buying or leasing surplus farmland in Southampton, and helping him with future loans.
In late April, Gallegos said, he mistakenly issued a ruling on those unresolved issues. His order, which would have granted the Warrens the additional relief, was rescinded because he no longer had authority to make the decision.
In late June, Parker rejected the additional relief because he said the legal award had more than compensated Warren for his losses.
The assistant secretary also denied a last-minute request this past spring by Warren's family for additional money to compensate his 14 children, who had helped on the farm.
With the Warren case behind him, Parker said he is determined to do more than negotiate deals on civil-rights complaints. "We need to look seriously at what's causing these problems," he said.
Gallegos doubts that the new assistant secretary can succeed without additional money, authority and political commitment to addressing the department's problems.
"If civil rights is the priority that people express that it is, you have to have a degree of autonomy to pursue these things in a way that prevents discrimination, eliminates it, eradicates it from the face of the department," he said.
Some department officials privately question whether Gallegos did enough himself to get the civil-rights office the money and authority it needed to do its job.
Gallegos joined the Bush administration in May 2001. A Hispanic and Republican, he had served in senior posts in state and federal government and as top aide to a U.S. senator from New Mexico.
He said last week that he asked for additional money each year he was in office. Gallegos said he did not aggressively pursue greater authority for the civil-rights office because he knew the USDA might create a new position under civil rights - Parker's new post.
Parker acknowledged that his office does not have the funding to do its job effectively. But he said Agriculture Secretary Ann M. Veneman has asked congressional appropriators for the money the office needs.
He also expects new discussions between his office and the USDA general counsel to produce administrative changes that will "allow us more autonomy and flexibility."
Parker said the department no longer can stand by without acting to protect the people it serves from discrimination.
"We can't find discrimination where there is none," he said, "but when we find discrimination, we have to do the right thing."