By The Editors

It’s been more than six months since it seemed, at long last, Congress would approve legislation appropriating the more than $1 billion in class-action settlement funds due thousands of black farmers.

Congress has yet to approve the appropriation, and it doesn’t look like, with the mid-term election looming, they’re going to this year.

Native American farmers, due more than $3 billion for longstanding acts of discrimination by the Department of the Interior, are caught in the same predicament: waiting, waiting, waiting for the money due them as compensation for decades of unjust treatment by the government.

In historical terms, this disgraceful situation has an old feel to it. Black Americans have been on this road before. As have Native Americans. They were wronged, and they’ve done everything right within the system to right the wrong. Yet, the wrong, clad in new garb, still continues.

William Faulkner, the great Mississippian and novelist, once wrote: “The past in not dead; in fact, it’s not even past.”