“You going to go there, take my dreams from me like that?” Licurtis asked on the stand. They’d been warned that they would go to jail if they didn’t comply with a court order to stay off the land, and they felt betrayed by the laws that had allowed it to be taken from them. The waterfront that borders the 65-acre tract.īy the time of Melvin and Licurtis’ hearing in 2011, they had spent decades fighting to keep the waterfront on Silver Dollar Road. Nathan Rosenberg, a lawyer and a researcher in the group, told me, “If you want to understand wealth and inequality in this country, you have to understand black land loss.” A group of economists and statisticians recently calculated that, since 1910, black families have been stripped of hundreds of billions of dollars because of lost land.
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Now, as reparations have become a subject of national debate, the issue of black land loss is receiving renewed attention. This problem is a major contributor to America’s racial wealth gap the median wealth among black families is about a tenth that of white families. Black families watch as their land is auctioned on courthouse steps or forced into a sale against their will.īetween 19, African Americans lost about 90% of their farmland. These landowners are vulnerable to laws and loopholes that allow speculators and developers to acquire their property. Department of Agriculture has recognized it as “the leading cause of Black involuntary land loss.” Heirs’ property is estimated to make up more than a third of Southern black-owned land - 3.5 million acres, worth more than $28 billion.
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David Dietrich, a former co-chair of the American Bar Association’s Property Preservation Task Force, has called heirs’ property “the worst problem you never heard of.” The U.S. Many assume that not having a will keeps land in the family. In the United States today, 76% of African Americans do not have a will, more than twice the percentage of white Americans. The practice began during Reconstruction, when many African Americans didn’t have access to the legal system, and it continued through the Jim Crow era, when black communities were suspicious of white Southern courts. Instead, he let the land become heirs’ property, a form of ownership in which descendants inherit an interest, like holding stock in a company. Mitchell didn’t trust the courts, so he didn’t leave a will. This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. Sign up to get ProPublica’s major investigations delivered to your inbox. “Whatever you do,” he told his family on the night that he passed away, “don’t let the white man have the land.” In 1970, when Mitchell died, he had one final wish. “It’s our own little black country club,” Melvin and Licurtis’ sister Mamie liked to say. During the later years of racial-segregation laws, the land was home to the only beach in the county that welcomed black families. Churches held tent revivals on the waterfront, and kids played in the river, a prime spot for catching red-tailed shrimp and crabs bigger than shoes. Melvin and Licurtis’ grandfather Mitchell Reels was a deacon he farmed watermelons, beets and peas, and raised chickens and hogs.
Some called it the bottom, or the end of the world. The property - 65 marshy acres that ran along Silver Dollar Road, from the woods to the river’s sandy shore - was racked by storms. Their great-grandfather had bought the land a hundred years earlier, when he was a generation removed from slavery. Licurtis, who was 53, had spent years building a house near the river’s edge, just steps from his mother’s. He’d established a career shrimping in the river that bordered the land, and his sense of self was tied to the water.
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Melvin, who was 64, with loose black curls combed into a ponytail, ran a club there and lived in an apartment above it. The brothers were among dozens of Reels family members who considered the land theirs, but Melvin and Licurtis had a particular stake in it. That March, Melvin and Licurtis stood in court and refused to leave the land that they had lived on all their lives, a portion of which had, without their knowledge or consent, been sold to developers years before. Some people said that the brothers were righteous others thought that they had lost their minds. In the spring of 2011, the brothers Melvin Davis and Licurtis Reels were the talk of Carteret County, on the central coast of North Carolina. Sign up for ProPublica’s Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox as soon as they are published. ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power.