TANNER, Ala. — “There are easier ways to make a living than farming,” Greg Bridgeforth said as he drove a combine through fields he farms in northern Alabama. “But this is what I truly love to do — till the soil and grow things, just like my father, grandfather and great-grandfather did. You know, when problems get you down, you go out in the field and have time to think it through.”

The farm was started in the 1870s by George Bridgeforth, Greg’s great-grandfather, who had been born into slavery. The family has survived droughts, tornadoes and the boll weevil during the century and a half that successive generations have been farming.

The Bridgeforths of Limestone County held on as a vast majority of the nation’s black farmers lost their land and livelihood , mostly because of systematic racism. Federal loans were denied or delayed, and black farmers were often shortchanged or shunned by local banks and businesses as white farmers angled to take over the fields. Those forces, along with the racial terror spread by the Ku Klux Klan, helped drive the Great Migration.