A street sign on a dirt road leading up to a large plot of land in Nakina, North Carolina, lets you know you’re traveling down Roland Smith Lane. On that land sits a large white house — the only house standing on the 60-acre plot — that has become a vacation home for several generations of the Smith family to gather at.
The Smiths say they have done everything right to hold on to their land — and they have no intention of selling. Still, Evelyn S. Booker, who inherited the land from their mother, Esther Smith Morse, says she and her seven siblings receive letters and texts weekly from developers with offers to buy.
“We’ve established that if anyone wants to sell their property, they will do so to a sibling and not an outsider,” Booker said.
By 1910, Black Americans like Smith’s ancestors had acquired a cumulative 16 million acres of rural land, according to the American Economic Association. But over the century that followed, 90% of that land was lost because of threats, violent force or systematic rejection from programs offered to white landowners to help keep land through economic hardships like the Great Depression.
With distrust of local governments, which had been charged with regulating property ownership in Southern states hostile to Black equality, and legal systems that had shut out Black families, many took informal routes to pass down ownership. Attorneys and others who work to help landowners gain clear title to their land say that for decades, countless Black property owners simply passed their land on to heirs through word of mouth. But instead of guaranteeing generational wealth, the lack of clear ownership on paper has created headaches and, at worst, opened families up to losing their land in the end.
Those…
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