“So already hampered because have heirs’ property,” explains Jennie L. They aren’t eligible to apply for state or federal housing aid (such as funds provided by the Federal Emergency Management Agency) or for nearly any of the programs administered by the Department of Agriculture, including the crucial loans and conservation funding that keep many rural landowners afloat. They can’t get mortgages or do extensive repairs on their homes as a consequence, some live in trailers. Without a clear title, heirs’-property owners are limited in what they can do with their land. Over time, it’s been sold and traded and stolen.”-Gullah native Alex Brown. “The property that we owned was prime property. The Center for Heirs’ Property Preservation, based in Charleston County, South Carolina, estimates that there are 105,000 acres of heirs’ property in its 15-county service area alone. In the South, according to one estimate, more than 50 percent of heirs’-property owners are African-American, many of them the descendants of slaves and sharecroppers. Although heirs’ property exists in many regions of the country, it’s most prevalent in low-income communities. Their descendants then inherited the land without a clear title, and it thereby became designated as heirs’ property. 8īy one estimate, 81 percent of these early black landowners didn’t make wills, largely due to a lack of access to legal resources. But the lesser-known issue of heirs’ property also played a role, allowing untold thousands of acres to be forcibly bought out from under black rural families-often second-, third-, or fourth-generation landowners whose ancestors were enslaved-by real-estate developers and speculators. Many factors contributed to the loss of black-owned land during the 20th century, including systemic discrimination in lending by the US Department of Agriculture, the industrialization that lured workers into factories, and the Great Migration. Today, African Americans compose less than 2 percent of the nation’s farmers and 1 percent of its rural landowners. Implicit in the decline of black farming was the loss of the land those farmers once tilled. “It was almost as if the earth was opening up and swallowing black farmers,” writes scholar Pete Daniel in his book Dispossession: Discrimination Against African American Farmers in the Age of Civil Rights. By 1975, just 45,000 black-owned farms remained. Millions of farmers of all races were pushed off their land in the early part of the century, including around 600,000 black farmers. Over the course of the 20th century, however, that number dropped precipitously. By 1920, there were 925,000 black-owned farms, representing about 14 percent of all farms in the United States. The hard-won property was generally used for farming, the primary occupation of most Southern blacks in the early 20th century. Land ownership meant stability and opportunity for black families, a shot at upward mobility and economic security for future generations. In the 45 years following the Civil War, freed slaves and their descendants accumulated roughly 15 million acres of land across the United States, most of it in the South. As the Allens attempt to overcome a stacked legal system-exacerbated by corrupt lawyers and predatory developers-they are at the center of a decades-long fight to retain black-owned land across the South.
#Acquire the archive of fates untold full#
As such, the land is classified as “heirs’ property,” a designation that makes it vulnerable to being sold without the family’s full consent. Because of ambiguities surrounding the land’s title, there is no primary owner of the property all of the heirs of the original owners-and there are more than 100 known heirs-are legally co-owners.
4īut as the land enters its 120th year in the family, the Allens are struggling to hold on to it. Today, the Allen family owns the largest undeveloped lot on Hilton Head. The son of slaves, Dennis Allen bought his first parcel of nearly 20 acres in 1897, at a time when African Americans were purchasing land across the country. It was Dennis Allen, Matthew’s great-grandfather, who purchased the land on Hilton Head.
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