In the second of a special, two-part series, Marguerite Casey Foundation’s Equal Voice News talks with Black family farmers in Georgia to better understand life, work, the idea of community and U.S. history.
When Tim Robinson II retired from a 30-year Army career in 2013, he moved home to the family farm in Baconton, Georgia.
The land was defined as heirs’ property – an ambiguous and unprotected form of ownership that stems from land being passed down to family members in the absence of a will. Historically, land owned by Black families – many of them the descendants of freed slaves – often ended up as heirs’ property, a problem creating uncertainty for those who want to farm the land today.
When Robinson was a child, the community of Baconton largely sustained itself.
“You had everybody – certified brick masons, electricians, accountants, business folks, blacksmiths, welders, nurses,” he says, “That’s who took care of you. That’s who built your house, took care of your plumbing.”
Farmers grew community gardens so that everyone could have access to food, and Robinson’s grandfather – one of the only farmers with a well – laid waterlines for his neighbors.
“Everybody else was poor and couldn’t afford a well,” says Robinson. “So he ran lines from his well all the way down the road, with a spout at each house so they could come outside and have water. It was that type of community.”
Though Robinson grew up working on the family farm, the younger generation was unwilling to take the reins, and the operation ceased in the 1980s after his grandfather passed away.
Robinson’s great-grandfather purchased the first of the family’s acreage in 1914, approximately 50 years after the abolition of slavery and the U.S. government’s broken promise of “40 acres and a mule.”
In January 1865, General William T. Sherman ordered that land in the South be redistributed in 40-acre plots to freed slaves – the first attempt at government reparations for the unpaid labor and horrors of slavery.
But just months later, President Andrew Johnson 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 s