Black farmers in Mound Bayou, Mississippi, are being quietly replaced by white South Africans thanks to a government farming program, the Jacksonville Free Press reports.

The story centers on the H-2A guest worker program, which employers can use when they say local labor is unavailable.

In Mound Bayou, however, workers and legal advocates say the program is being used in ways that harm its Black residents, who say they have been passed over for farm jobs and paid less than white foreign workers doing the same work.

“I see it around here. I see these guys when I go to Walmart. They are usually wearing short pants and they speak in Afrikaans to each other. It doesn't make sense to me economically,” said Herman Johnson Jr., director of the Mound Bayou Museum of African American Culture and History, to The Clarion-Ledger.

The shift is more than a labor change; advocates and locals observe that it reflects a long history of racial exclusion in Black farming communities across the Delta. A federal lawsuit filed by five Black Mississippi farmworkers alleged discrimination and unpaid wages, and the Mississippi Center for Justice says such cases are part of a broader pattern.

“If you bring people in from another country to work on your farm and you're paying them more, that means you have more going out from your pocket to them. A lot of things in a racial perspective that white supremacy does doesn't make economic sense,” says Johnson.

Mound Bayou is a historic Black town founded in 1887 and long seen as a symbol of Black self-determination. That legacy makes the current controversy especially painful for residents, who say the local economy depends on jobs that are now disappearing.

​Critics also point to the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown, which they say helped shift labor recruiting away from Mexican farmworkers and toward white South Africans.

Agricultural employers say they are responding to labor shortages, but locals and advocates reject that explanation as incomplete.

“The intentional underpayment and misclassification of Black farmworkers in favor of white foreign labor not only violates federal law but has become increasingly common in the Mississippi Delta, holding our communities back for generations and perpetuating the historical exploitation faced by Black agricultural workers in our community,” said Kimberly Jones Merchant, President and CEO of the Mississippi Center for Justice.

The issue is not just who can work the land, but who gets access to those jobs, wages, and opportunities in a town built around Black economic survival.