Five black American workers are taking a Mississippi farmer to court because they allege he is favouring and paying white South African guest workers higher wages.

A Mississippi farmer who paid higher wages and favoured white South African guest workers has been taken to court by five black American workers alleging a pattern of racial and citizenship-based discrimination and "wage theft".

US citizens Michael Anthony Nash, Jimmy Shaw, Vinnie Cason, Grant Lewis and Charleston Taurvonta Harris with the support of the Mississippi Centre for Justice (MCJ) and the Southern Migrant Legal Services filed a federal lawsuit in Greenville, Mississippi, in May against Gregory Carr, farm owner and manager of Carr Farms, headquartered in Schlater, a small town in Leflore county and a producer of rice and soybeans.

The MCJ statement and legal papers can be read here.

The MCJ has so far filed seven court actions on behalf of black farmworkers in Mississippi, a state deeply rooted in a history of human enslavement on cotton farms, which then followed years of sharecropping and tenant farming, locking many black families into a cycle of poverty.

The region is internationally known for its troubled racial history, with the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) forming the "White Knights" in 1962 to resist desegregation and violently attack black Americans. In the 1950s/60s, the state was the epicentre...