The Legacy of a Black Land Owner Is Only As Good As His or Her Vision for the Land’s Future

A deed is just a piece of paper

Every time I receive an offer to sell my land at a pittance I cringe.

Throughout childhood, I overheard conversations between my grandmother and her siblings about the land in South Carolina. The land I would inherit from my maternal great grandfather. His will stipulated 99 ½ acres divided amongst his eight children — passed down three generations to his children’s, children’s, children before anyone in the family could sell.

Born in 1869 on a plantation, my great grandfather signed his will with an X. I guess he couldn’t read or write enough to be considered a learned man but had the moral sense to create an ironclad will outlining his wishes for our family.

Each child received 12 acres. My mother and her brother received six each. To this day after painstaking research, no one knows how the land was acquired. Through the county office, we’re told the towns circa 1800s ownership records locked in a spider-webbed, dank basement inside a forgotten county building no one would dare or care to enter.

The census verifies our family’s existence. Mom spent hours trying to piece the puzzle together through conversations with distant cousins, digging through microfilm/microfiche at the Mormon church’s genealogy department and Ancestory.com. Her findings in a binder now living on the top shelf of my bookcase.

Her grandfather died long before I was born. The only picture I’ve ever seen of him tells a common story. Alabaster skin stretched over a tall, lean stature with bone straight hair and piercing blue eyes — named Casper Grant. He and his sister who passed for white were products of the all too familiar forbidden relationship between master and slave.

I am the first generation that can sell my six and a half acres if I so choose.

When I was 12 years old, my grandmother decided it was time for me to see our land with my own eyes. My uncle would drive us from Philly to South Carolina. An argument ensued with my mother — a terrible experience tainted her perception of the south when she visited as a child. She didn’t want me to go and vowed to never return herself.

At 10, she refused to say thank you, ma’am, to a white grocery store owner who sold her a bag of penny candy. She said thank you but omitted, ma’am. Reprimanded for her disrespect and shoved through the door outside was traumatizing. Her father had told her before they left home in Philadelphia — she didn’t have to say, ma’am or sir.

By the time she and her cousins walked a country mile back to her grandparent’s home, a few white farmers had gathered on my great grandfather’s porch steps to issue a warning.

“Y’all better get your granddaughter out of here tonight if you know what’s best.”

After a family discussion, my grandmother packed their belongings and caught the midnight train back to the city of brotherly love like thieves in the night.

I’ll never forget that road trip in the thick of July heat. Twelve hours later we drove up to the lushest green land I had ever seen, with trees so tall they skimmed the sky. The road sign reads — Grant Estates — infusing instant pride into my small chest.

Family folklore says it was farmland until the government decided it was no longer because Black farmers were making a decent living, profiting off their own land in a country that couldn’t stomach their progress. Our family is lucky we could keep our land when Black families became victims of American thievery once again. First, our bodies — our children, culture, then the land beneath our feet stolen.

Illegal pressures applied through USDA loan programs created massive transfers of wealth from Black to white farmers in the period just after the 1950s. Half a million Black-owned farms across the country failed between 1950 and 1975. Black farmers lost about six million acres from 1950 to 1969. Black-owned cotton farms in the South almost completely disappeared, and in Mississippi from 1950 to 1964, Black farmers lost almost 800,000 acres of land, translating to a financial loss of more than $3.7 billion in today’s dollars, The Atlantic Reports.

While most of the Black land loss appears on its face to have been through legal mechanisms — the tax sale; the partition sale; and the foreclosure” — it mainly stemmed from illegal pressures, including discrimination in federal and state programs, swindles by lawyers and speculators, unlawful denials of private loans, and even outright acts of violence or intimidation.

Of all private U.S. agricultural land, White’s account for 96 percent of the owners, 97 percent of the value, and 98 percent of the acres.

Yes, we deserve reparations. The five billion Biden has included in his stimulus plan for Black farmer’s recovery through his Emergency Relief for Farmers of Color Act is a good start.

Today a few family members of which I only have a distant relationship have homes sprinkled miles apart but mostly it’s acres of underutilized land. It’s in a rural unincorporated county 3000 miles away from where I live, however, continues to pull on my heartstrings as I get older.

The irony of being a Black landowner living too far away to honor the gift pains me. No one is up for the challenge of managing ownership from across the country.

I’ve had several lofty dreams shot down by my mother and other family members of building a Bed and Breakfast, a rehabilitative wellness center or a Cannabis farm — of course, I’d have to wait for the laws to change. South Carolina is one of 14 states that doesn’t allow cannabis for medical use. The law may change next year.

I suppose I’ll be taking my ambition to the grave with me. They say I’m a dreamer — let it go. To me, brainstorming is the birth of a vision. But not when nobody’s listening.

I can still hear my mom inside my head saying, “go down there if you want to become strange fruit.” At what point is fear not a factor? Does old institutional racism still rule our lives, dictating our every thought, action, and inaction?

Heavy on my heart is my great grandfather’s foresight, wasted on limited thinking and circumstance. I realize his vision fit the times in which he lived. A place for his family to call home without relying on external sources long after he died — perhaps his circle of vision is completely based on the future he could see.

Not mine. I will of course leave my portion of land to my sons in hopes they’ll someday revisit my silly notion of building something on it in the future to extend their family legacy and hopefully create a livelihood that will last long after I’m gone.

While I don’t foresee any of us ever living in the south — making my ideas easy to dismiss as a pipe dream — I can still hope someone takes enough interest to at least visit the possibilities.

Keeping hope alive — waiting on the world to change.