Ed Rampell
According to your film, during the twentieth century, 90 percent of black landowners lost their land. Can you tell us about that?
RP
They were pushed out, and the laws voted were not in their favor. Or even when they were in their favor there were ways to manipulate those laws and make sure that blacks and minorities — I’m not even talking about the indigenous part of the population, the original inheritors — were deprived of everything. You can trace the source of today’s poverty, today’s economic down spiral, the fact that all of the community doesn’t have access to the minimum of education or wealth, cannot live in proper places where they feel protected. So, you can trace the whole history of this country through the same history of land, and land acquiring and land being stolen, and land being used for capitalistic profit.
ER
It’s astounding in your film that two members of the Reels family, Melvin Davis and Licurtis Reels, go to prison for trespassing on their own legacy land. What is “heirs’ property law,” which is mentioned in Silver Dollar Road?
RP
It’s a simple concept. Because most of the black population doesn’t trust the justice system, when they die, a lot of the time they don’t leave a will. Because for a will, you have to go to a notary; it’s a legal document. They prefer to let the land to all their inheritors, all their children and grandchildren, believing that because it’s the whole family, [the land] is all protected. But you fall into what’s called “heirs’ property” — that means it’s a property that each part of the family owns a little bit of, like a stakeholder. But there is no paperwork.
So, the heirs’ property makes the property, in fact, more fragile. People can find loopholes where they can go to one of those supposed heirs, whether that person lived on the property or not, and say, “I want my piece.” Usually, because it’s the whole family who is responsible — but as you know in everyday life, when you have one hundred or two hundred family members, it’s very hard to get a hold of everybody. That helped make the thing very complicated. And the property is sold at some auction, usually at the bargain price, and the family loses the whole property. They get some money for it, but there’s nothing they can do and they lose the very place where they live. Just because somebody from elsewhere pushes some sort of document that they were also owner. So that’s how those bad stories started, because the laws enable it.