Editor’s note: The following article is an op-ed, and the views expressed are the author’s own. Read more opinions on theGrio.
The dispossession of Black land is a real and serious issue, and a new film tackles the issue head on by examining the struggles of a Black North Carolina family to reclaim their land.
The film, “Silver Dollar Road” hits theaters Friday and on Amazon Prime on Oct. 20. Coming to us from award-winning Haitian filmmaker Raoul Peck (“I Am Not Your Negro” and “Exterminate All the Brutes”), the movie is based on the 2019 ProPublica story of the Reels family siblings Mamie, Melvin and Licurtis. The film takes its name from the road that borders the Reels property.
Only a generation from enslavement, the Reels’ great-grandfather Elijah bought 65 acres of land in Carteret, N.C. The family would make a living farming and fishing, and create the only beach for Black people in the county.
In the 1970s, the Reels’ grandfather, Mitchell, died without a will, with the heirs each inheriting an interest in the property in what is known as heirs’ property. “Whatever you do,” Mitchell told his family the night he died, “don’t let the white man have the land.” Mamie, Melvin and Licurtis would learn that an estranged uncle took advantage of heirs’ property and sold the land — in secret and without consent — to a white developer. It is common among families who own communal land through heirs’ property for developers to entice relatives to sell their share, opening the door for developers to auction off all the land at a profit.
Melvin and Licurtis refused to leave the land and were sent to jail for eight years for trespassing.
Following the Civil War, Black people bought so much land that by 1910 they had owned 15 million acres or 23,000 square miles. Before the…
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