Help Keep Heirs' Property in Family Hands


Back in the time of Jim Crow, Freeman Beach (www.savefreemanbeach.com) was known as “Bop City,” the only beach for African-Americans in North Carolina which was a destination with a wide variety of nightclubs, great seafood, and plenty of summertime fun. Today, developers are looking to force the sale of the entire property, some 200 acres which has been in the Freeman family for 150 years, through a flawed law that often permits outsiders to compel the sale of family land.
Heirs’ property is a term used for land owned by numerous family members who received it as an inheritance from an ancestor who has died without a will. Most common amongst African Americans living in the South, heirs’ property problems happen for a variety of reasons, including a lack of estate-planning resources, as well as a lack of sound legal advice for well-drafted wills.
When an ancestor dies without a will, all of the descendants who have a fractional interest in the property own the property undivided. On some occasions, one family member will sell their interest in the land to someone outside of the family, often times a developer. Regardless of how small an interest is held by the developer, they can then force the sale of the property by only proving potential financial damage through a physical division of the land. If land is sold at auction it often sells for far less than its market value, but for more than family members with limited means can afford.
In the South especially, land loss among African American families is a significant problem. According to the Land Loss Prevention Project, of the 15 million acres of land acquired by African Americans after Emancipation, only about 2 million acres remain owned by their descendants. Focusing on one state where this problem has been thoroughly researched, the number of black-operated farms in Alabama dropped from 46,032 in 1954 to 1,381 in 1992, a decrease far outstripping the decrease in white-operated farms during that time period. Much of such losses have been attributed to problems associated with heirs’ property.
During the recent legislative session, Representative Angela Bryant spearheaded efforts to make North Carolina partition laws more equitable. Specifically, her original legislation would have improved the process through which partitions take place, limited the possibility for self-dealing by attorneys involved in partitions, and guaranteed non-economic factors were considered before family land is auctioned. Unfortunately, strong special interests, most notably the Real Property section of the North Carolina Bar Association, fought these common-sense reforms, succeeding in having some of them stripped from the bill and leaving much work to be done. However, Rep. Bryant pushed forward against special interest opposition, resulting in the Governor signing a bill improving procedural fairness in partition sales, including but not limited to, increasing the time to respond to a petition for partition, assigning representatives to protect the interests of unknown or unlocatable heirs, and underlining the availability of mediation in partition actions. To support this work and encourage further reforms contact Rep. Bryant (www.ncleg.net/gascripts/members/viewMember.pl?sChamber=House&nUserID=574) to thank her for her tireless support of partition reform or contact the Southern Coalition with stories of how your family has been impacted by a partition sale.