Agriculture Department Accused of Racial Bias : Texas: USDA concedes the discrimination, but disavows what farmer calls a legal settlement. The prejudicial conduct included withholding technical advice and loans, he says.

The warning came early, Robert Williams Jr. says: He wouldn’t have an easy time as the only black farmer owning land in Nolan County.

‘You got this old farm, I helped you get in,’ ” Williams says he was told by a Farmers Home Administration official when he bought 349 acres in 1990. “ ‘Son, you standing up there smiling, but you’re going to have to fight like hell to keep it.’ ”

Williams’ cotton crops never flourished on the land he bought using funds from FmHA, the lending arm of the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

He contends the agency’s employees in nearby Sweetwater ridiculed him and denied him additional loans and technical guidance because of his race. After an investigation, the USDA conceded it discriminated against him.

“It wasn’t no secret,” Williams said. “They let me know up front that I wasn’t like the white man. When it came time for me to get money or do certain things, they just wouldn’t do things.”

After each planting season, Williams’ widely known financial woes deepened. Other farmers in his West Texas hometown of 1,500 taunted him, he said, and someone killed his dogs, glued shut the locks to his gate and draped the farm’s entrance with a racist banner.

Now, Williams and his attorneys say, the USDA is reneging on a settlement.

“The whole system is messed up,” said Williams’ wife, LaVerne. “They don’t care. For the government--I mean, all the way to Washington--to do someone like this, that was a hard pill to swallow.

“We thought maybe the nightmare was over,” she said. “In a sense, it’s just begun.”

What the Williams camp calls a settlement, the USDA describes as a proposal containing terms the agency has no authority to honor. Bob Nash, the agency’s undersecretary for small communities and rural development, said the official who signed it Aug. 27 was pressured.

But attorney James Myart denies pressuring Carlton Lewis, acting branch chief for the FmHA’s Equal Opportunity Division. Myart says he considered the document final.

“That’s his interpretation . . . and I’m not going to refute it one way or the other,” Lewis said, declining to comment further.

The document in dispute, labeled a “settlement memorandum,” resulted from a seven-hour meeting in San Antonio between Williams’ attorneys and USDA officials from Washington.

The document instructs the FmHA to pay Williams $1.08 million for farm liabilities and damages and $270,743.50 in attorneys’ fees.

“Mr. Lewis started the meeting out saying, ‘We are not here to say who was wrong, who was right, because we know already that you people have been done wrong,’ ” LaVerne Williams said.

“I thought, ‘Finally, somebody is listening to us,’ ” she said. “I got excited. He said, ‘We’re here to settle.’ ”

But a clause in the document required its submission to FmHA acting administrator Sharron Longino. One month later, Longino rejected the terms.

“There is no authority that would permit me to pay for such things as Mr. and Mrs. Williams’ other business debts, lost income, emotional suffering or attorneys’ fees,” she wrote to Myart.

Instead, she offered to take the farm to satisfy the operating loan debt, and to help work out agreements with other creditors. The FmHA was willing to lease the land back to Williams with a purchase option or help find another farm, Longino wrote.

“They’ve disavowed the agreement and are attempting to treat it as a proposal, which is preposterous,” said Myart, who accuses agriculture officials of using skewed legal reasoning to stall the settlement.

Nash, the undersecretary, said USDA lawyers are working with the Department of Justice and Williams’ representatives to find an acceptable solution.

He defended his department’s handling of discrimination complaints since Mike Espy, who is black, became agriculture secretary last year.

The USDA didn’t identify any discrimination cases in 1991, and just six in 1992, Nash said. But in 1993, the USDA found 26 instances of discrimination and is remedying them as quickly as possible, he said.

“It would be naive for me to say that because Mike Espy is secretary of agriculture that no further discrimination will occur at USDA,” Nash said. “But it is also very realistic for me to say that Mike Espy and his staff will root out and investigate every allegation.”

Nash confirmed that an investigation revealed discrimination against Williams, 49, but declined to describe what the Office of Advocacy and Enterprise found.

The complaint that Williams filed in November, 1992, was his second against the FmHA. The first was filed in August, 1991, and withdrawn six months later--under coercion, Williams said, and the promise of a $24,900 operating loan, which he received.

Myart, his attorney, titled his summation of the case, “The Williams Tragedy: Down in the Land of Cotton, Look Away! Look Away!”

The summation demanded $1.23 million for farm liabilities, lost income and damages including reputation injury, humiliation and severe anxiety.

No matter what happens, Williams said, the teasing in the local coffee shop, vandalism, debts and FmHA discrimination ruined his life.

“I was a good old boy,” he said, “until I got a farm of my own.”