HELENA, Mont. (AP) – The president of the National Black Farmers Association says he’s being stiffed by the attorneys behind a $3.4 billion government settlement with Native American landowners who asked him to lobby Congress to fund the payout.
John Boyd, who spent years championing the discrimination claims of tens of thousands of black farmers, said he took on the task of pressing reluctant lawmakers to pass appropriations legislation in 2010 that included both the Indians’ settlement and the farmers’ own $1.15 billion deal.
He said he did so at the request of the attorneys representing hundreds of thousands Native Americans who said they were swindled out of the royalties owed to them for more than a century of development on land parcels they owned and the government held in trust. The lawsuit was filed in 1996 by Elouise Cobell of Browning, Montana, who died in 2011.
Boyd complained that the attorneys for the Native American plaintiffs received $99 million from the settlement, but he never saw a dime.
“Email after email they’re asking me to do this work,” Boyd told The Associated Press. “Who in their right mind is going to do all of this work for free? Nobody. This is America.”