Paige, Ralph McDaniel

Impact on the world

Personally filed the Freedom of Information Act request that obtained thousands of internal USDA documents, including letters in which the agency itself admitted discriminating against Black farmers, evidence that became the foundational legal basis for attorneys building Pigford v. Glickman, already profiled in this collection, and that Paige used directly to help identify and prepare the case's eventual plaintiffs; as executive director of the Federation of Southern Cooperatives/Land Assistance Fund for 30 years, he grew the organization from 22 to 75 cooperatives, built 18 community development credit unions, developed over 200 units of low-income housing, and personally helped organize a second wave of claimants after recognizing that delaying tactics had left more than 70,000 farmers excluded from the original Pigford settlement, advocacy that directly contributed to Congress authorizing the additional $1.2 billion Pigford II settlement in 2010.

Life & background

Born in LaGrange, Georgia in 1943, one of either ten or fourteen children of a laborer father and homemaker mother, depending on the source, Paige earned his bachelor's degree in education from Fort Valley State College in 1967 and briefly worked as a high school physical education teacher and football coach before joining the Federation of Southern Cooperatives in 1969 as a field organizer in his own home region of West Georgia; colleagues later said he was drawn to the work specifically because it was his hometown and his people, and that his defining quality was a deep, sustained care for those who were disadvantaged, overlooked, or struggling. He helped build the West Georgia Farmers Cooperative, enabling Black farmers to collectively market vegetables, firewood, and other goods, and later helped establish the East Georgia Farmers Co-op's small meat processing operation, before directing the Federation's Business Development Office in the late 1970s and leading its first VISTA project, which organized 110 volunteers across 60 cooperative and credit union sites between 1977 and 1981. Named the Federation's executive director in 1985, he orchestrated a strategic merger with the Emergency Land Fund that broadened the organization's mission specifically to help Black farm families retain their land through education on wills, estate planning, and deeds, and he established the Federation's Rural Training and Research Center in Epes, Alabama, which added an agroforestry component to its programming; from the mid-1990s onward, he spearheaded the Federation's effort to formally challenge USDA discrimination in court, personally obtaining the FOIA evidence attorneys needed to build their case. After the original 1999 Pigford settlement closed its claims period, leaving thousands of legitimate claimants unheard, Paige wrote pointedly in a 2010 Atlanta Journal-Constitution opinion piece that it was a tragic injustice that thousands of Black farmers remained denied relief for their own government's discriminatory behavior, helping drive the political pressure that led to the supplemental settlement that same year; he retired in 2015 after 46 years with the organization, was inducted into the Cooperative Hall of Fame in 2004, and died in 2018 at age 74, survived by his wife of 51 years, Bernice, and their two children.

Sources

1. Grassroots Economic Organizing; Boston Globe obituary; Mary Reynolds Babcock Foundation; CDF Remembers Ralph Paige; Farm Aid (Honoring Ralph Paige); LaGrange Daily News; Everything Co-op podcast