n overturned the order, displacing an estimated 40,000 former slaves from 400,000 acres.
The reversal of “40 acres and a mule” constituted a betrayal, exposing the continued exploitation and deception of Black Americans by the U.S. government.
Throughout the early 1900s, many Black families sharecropped, farming small plots of land as tenant farmers. In exchange for the use of land, sharecroppers paid a portion of the harvest to the (primarily white) landowners.
But the sharecropping system was often built on exploitative contracts, which forced Black farmers into debt. As such, land ownership was seen as the true path toward independence.
In an article for The Nation, journalist Leah Douglas writes that “by one estimate, 81 percent of these early Black landowners didn’t make wills, largely due to a lack of access to legal resources. Their descendants then inherited the land without a clear title, and it thereby became declared as heirs’ property.”
Douglas writes that thousands of acres of land defined as heirs’ property has been “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.”
Making matters worse, heirs’ property is ineligible for a host of resources, including mortgages, improvement loans, or U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) programs.
As property passes through the generations without a formal deed or will, “eventually, it goes from being owned by six or seven siblings to being owned by 60 or 70 grandchildren,” says Karen Lawrence, an agriculture specialist with the Southwest Georgia Project for Community Education, who lost part of her family’s land due to the lack of legal protections for heirs’ property.
Land becomes vulnerable with so many “co-owners,” many of whom no longer live in the community or have an emotional tie to the property.
Fellow Southwest Georgia Project agriculture specialist Deckton Hilton agrees that heirs’ property is one of the most threatening situations facing Black-owned land, and he estimates that 90 percent of the Black farmers he works with are affected.
In his job, Hilton has attended emotionally fraught meetings with extended family members who barely know one another but co-own land.
The goal of those gatherings is to designate a single executor to make decisions for the property. Without an executor, any of the dozens of co-owners could force a partition sale.
While the problem of heirs’ property needs to be addressed on a policy level, and by providing legal and mediation resources to families, Lawrence says solving the problem also involves a specific kind of relationship building.
“The future of farming in the South is to reconnect our young people with the land,” she says.
The younger generation grew up seeing their parents or grandparents struggle to overcome poverty and to access resources from white-controlled banks and agencies, says Lawrence.
“All they saw was struggle. So when their parents passed, the children said, ‘Hey, I’m not coming back down there, so let’s sell it.’”
But Robinson’s story is proof that sometimes the younger generation does return home. Today, he leases 10.5 acres of family-owned land – an uncle is the executor – and has begun farming produce, with plans to expand to poultry, laying hens, sheep and cattle. He also wants to restore an old pecan orchard.
In the past five years, with the support of the Southwest Georgia Project and various USDA programs, Robinson put in a well, a hoophouse and irrigation. He’s also working on various conservation efforts that are eligible for government reimbursement, including cover cropping and establishing a wildlife habitat.
Deckton Hilton works with Robinson and dozens of other farmers to provide technical assistance and business planning support. Originally from Jamaica, he says the organic farming methods he grew up with seem to resonate with the Georgia farmers.
“This is what their grandfathers and great-grandfathers were doing, but they’ve lost some of these skills,” he say