It does not look like theft. There is no eviction notice at first, no confrontation. It starts with a death in the family and a piece of land with no will attached.
When a landowner dies without a will, state law typically divides ownership among all legal heirs — children, then grandchildren, then cousins — each holding a fractional, undivided interest in the whole property. This is called heirs’ property, and it is estimated to account for more than a third of Southern Black-owned land: roughly 3.5 million acres worth more than $28 billion. Researchers caution these are estimates — data on heirs’ property remain limited. The U.S. Department of Agriculture has identified heirs’ property as the leading cause of involuntary land loss among Black Americans.
The mechanism is simple and devastating. Because title is fractured among many heirs, no single family member can get a clear deed. Without clear title, families often cannot qualify for mortgages, most USDA farm programs, disaster relief, or home-repair assistance. Worse, any single heir — or a speculator who buys out any single heir’s fractional share — can petition a court to force the sale of the entire property. These partition sales frequently move land out of families at below-market prices.
The roots of the problem trace to the decades after Reconstruction, when, as ProPublica, the Equal Justice Initiative, and legal scholars have documented, Black families across the South were systematically denied meaningful access to lawyers, courts, and the formal estate-planning system — and faced violence when they did assert property rights.
The scale of loss is staggering. Black farmers owned about 16 million acres in 1910; by 1997, more than 90 percent of that farmland was gone, a loss one study cited by the ABA values at roughly $326 billion. That dispossession is one engine of today’s racial wealth gap: as of the Federal Reserve’s 2022 Survey of Consumer Finances, median white household wealth stood at $284,310, compared with $44,100 for Black households — more than six times as much.
The case of brothers Melvin Davis and Licurtis Reels of Carteret County, North Carolina, shows what the mechanism does to real families. Their great-grandfather bought waterfront land in 1911; decades later, after a partition maneuver traced to 1978, a portion was sold to developers without the wider family’s knowledge or consent. The brothers spent eight years in jail for refusing to leave the land, a case documented in court records and the subject of the 2023 documentary Silver Dollar Road.
Remedies exist, though they are uneven. The Uniform Partition of Heirs Property Act — which gives co-owning families the right of first refusal, requires appraisals, and favors open-market sales over courthouse auctions — has now been enacted in 24 states plus the District of Columbia and the U.S. Virgin Islands, including California (2021), Georgia (2020), and Mississippi (effective July 2020). But the Center for Public Integrity has reported the law helps families ‘only if they can afford it’ — many attorneys and judges do not know how to apply it. The USDA’s Heirs’ Property Relending Program, created in the 2018 Farm Bill, offers loans of up to $600,000 through approved lenders to help families resolve title, with more than $100 million made available as of 2022. In Mississippi, a philanthropic two-year pilot — the Mobile Basin Heirs’ Property Support Initiative, launched in 2021 by the Center for Heirs’ Property Preservation and the Mississippi Center for Justice — targeted the problem directly.
And sometimes land comes back. In July 2022, Los Angeles County returned Bruce’s Beach in Manhattan Beach — seized from Charles and Willa Bruce by eminent domain a century earlier — to the couple’s closest living legal heirs, after state legislation permitted the transfer. Six months later, the family sold the property back to the county for $20 million — converting land stolen from their great-great-grandparents into liquid generational wealth, on their own terms. It is the rare case where the paperwork worked in a Black family’s favor. For millions of acres across the South, it still doesn’t.
Drafted by News Observed Editorial AI, human reviewed and published.
Based on reporting by Bakersfield News Observer.
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