In 2019, I wrote a story for ProPublica, co-published with The New Yorker, about the dispossession of Black landowners in the South. The story looked at the legal obstacles that families face when they pass their land down without a will, a form of ownership known as heirs’ property. Laws and loopholes allow speculators and developers, among others, to acquire the property out from under families, often at below-market rates. Black Americans lost 90% of their farmland between 1910 and 1997, and the heirs’ property system is one of the primary causes.
I focused on the Reels family of North Carolina, chronicling how they had lost their land to developers but refused to leave it. This land was their home, their freedom, their livelihood, their history and their legacy. They believed so deeply in their moral claim to the land that they would not accept a ruling that it no longer belonged to them. Their story of losing heirs’ property is common in the South, but their determination to protest was unlike anything I had seen. Two of the brothers, Melvin Davis and Licurtis Reels, ended
— source propublica.org | Lizzie Presser | Sep 8, 2023