Report shows rightful landowners

For generations, black families passed down the tales in uneasy whispers: "They stole our land."\nThese were family secrets shared after the children fell asleep, old stories locked in fear and shame.\nSome of those whispered bits of oral history, it turns out, are true.\nIn an 18-month investigation, The Associated Press documented a pattern in which black Americans were cheated out of their land or driven from it through intimidation, violence and even murder.\nIn some cases, government officials approved the land takings; in others, they took part in them. The earliest occurred before the Civil War; others are being litigated today.\nSome of the land taken from black families has become a country club in Virginia, oil fields in Mississippi, a baseball spring training facility in Florida.\nThe United States has a long history of bitter land disputes, from range wars in the old West to broken treaties with American Indians. Poor white landowners, too, were sometimes treated unfairly, pressured to sell at rock-bottom prices by railroads and mining companies.\nThe fate of black landowners has been an overlooked part of this story.\nThe AP, in an investigation that included interviews with more than 1,000 people and the examination of tens of thousands of public records, documented 107 land takings in 13 Southern and border states.\nIn those cases alone, 406 black landowners lost more than 24,000 acres of farm and timber land plus 85 smaller properties, including stores and city lots. Today, virtually all of this property, valued at tens of millions of dollars, is owned by whites or corporations.\nProperties taken from blacks were often small, a 40-acre farm, a modest house. But the losses were devastating to families struggling to overcome the legacy of slavery.\n"When they steal your land, they steal your future," said Stephanie Hagans, 40, of Atlanta, who has been researching how her great-grandmother, Ablow Weddington Stewart, lost 35 acres in Matthews, N.C. A white lawyer foreclosed on Stewart in 1942 after he refused to allow her to finish paying off a $540 debt, witnesses told the AP.\nNo one knows how many black families have been unfairly stripped of their land, but there are indications of extensive loss.\nBesides the 107 cases the AP documented, reporters found evidence of dozens more that could not be fully verified because of gaps in the public record. Thousands of additional reports of land takings collected by land activists and educational institutions remain uninvestigated.\nAP's findings "are just the tip of one of the biggest crimes of this country's history," said Ray Winbush, director of Fisk University's Institute of Race Relations.\nExamples of land takings documented by the AP:\n•After midnight on Oct. 4, 1908, 50 hooded white men surrounded the home of a black farmer in Hickman, Ky., and ordered him to come out for a whipping. When David Walker refused and shot at them instead, the mob set fire to his house, according to contemporary newspaper accounts. Walker ran out, followed by four screaming children and his wife, carrying a baby in her arms. The mob shot them all, wounding three children and killing the others. Walker's oldest son never escaped the burning house. No one was ever charged with the killings, and the surviving children were deprived of the farm their father died defending. Land records show that Walker's 21/2-acre farm was simply folded into the property of a white neighbor. The neighbor soon sold it to another man, whose daughter owns the undeveloped land today.\n• In the 1950s and 1960s, a Chevrolet dealer in Holmes County, Miss., acquired hundreds of acres from black farmers by foreclosing on small loans for farm equipment and pickup trucks. Norman Weathersby, then the only dealer in the area, required the farmers to put up their land as security for the loans, county residents who dealt with him said. And the equipment he sold them, they said, often broke down shortly thereafter. Weathersby's friend, William E. Strider, ran the local Farmers Home Administration - the credit lifeline for many Southern farmers. Area residents, including Erma Russell, 81, said Strider, now dead, was often slow in releasing farm operating loans to blacks. When cash-poor farmers missed payments owed to Weathersby, he took their land. The AP documented eight cases in which Weathersby acquired black-owned farms this way. When he died in 1973, he left more than 700 acres of this land to his family, according to estate papers, deeds and court records.\n•In 1964, the state of Alabama sued Lemon Williams and Lawrence Hudson, claiming the cousins had no right to two 40-acre farms their family had worked in Sweet Water, Ala., for nearly a century. The land, officials contended, belonged to the state. Circuit Judge Emmett F. Hildreth urged the state to drop its suit, declaring it would result in "a severe injustice." But when the state refused, the judge ordered the family off the land.\nIn the same courthouse where the case was heard, the AP located deeds and tax records documenting that the family had owned the land since an ancestor bought the property on Jan. 3, 1874.\nAP reporters tracked the land cases by reviewing deeds, mortgages, tax records, estate papers, court proceedings, oil leases and Freedmen's Bureau archives. Additional documents including Farmers Home Administration records were obtained through the Freedom of Information Act.\nThe AP interviewed black families that lost land, as well as lawyers, title searchers, historians, land activists and public officials.\nThe AP also talked to current owners of the land, nearly all of whom acquired it years after the land takings occurred. Most said they knew little about the history of their land. When told about it, most expressed regret.\nAlabama Gov. Don Siegelman called the Sweet Water case "disturbing" and asked the state attorney general to review the matter.\n"What I have asked the attorney general to do," he said, "is look not only at the letter of the law but at what is fair and right."\nThe land takings are part of a larger picture, a 91-year decline in black landownership in America.\nIn 1910, black Americans owned at least 15 million acres of farmland, nearly all of it in the South, according to the U.S. Agricultural Census. Today, blacks own only 1.1 million acres of farmland and are part owners of another 1.07 million acres.\nThe number of white farmers has declined, too, as economic trends have concentrated land in fewer hands. However, black ownership has declined 21/2 times faster than white ownership according to a 1982 federal report, the last comprehensive government study on the trend.\nThe decline in black landownership had a number of causes including the migration of blacks from the rural South. However, the land takings also contributed.\nIn the decades between Reconstruction and the civil rights struggle, blacks were powerless to prevent them, said Stuart E. Tolnay, a University of Washington sociologist. In an era when black men were lynched for whistling at white women, few blacks dared to challenge whites. Those who did could rarely find lawyers to take their cases.\nIn recent years, a handful of black families sued to regain ancestral lands, but the cases were dismissed on grounds that statutes of limitations had expired. Some legal experts say redress for many land takings may not be possible unless laws are changed.\nThe Espy family in Vero Beach, Fla., lost its heritage in 1942, when the U.S. government seized its land through eminent domain to build an airfield. Government agencies frequently take land this way under rules that require fair compensation for the owners.\nIn Vero Beach, however, the Navy appraised the Espys' 147 acres, which included a 30-acre fruit grove and 40 house lots, at $8,000. The Espys sued, and an all-white jury awarded them $13,000. That amounted to one-sixth of the price per acre that the Navy paid white neighbors for similar land, records show.\nAfter World War II, the Navy gave the airfield to the city of Vero Beach. Ignoring the Espys' plea to buy back their land, the city sold part of it, at $1,500 an acre, to the Los Angeles Dodgers in 1965 as a spring training facility. The team sold its property to Indian River County for $10 million in August, according to the Dodgers.\nThe true extent of land takings from black families will never be known because of gaps in public records. The AP found crumbling tax records, deed books with pages torn from them and records that had been crudely altered.\nThe AP also found that about a third of the county courthouses in Southern and border states have burned, some more than once, since the Civil War. Some of the fires were deliberately set.\nOn the night of Sept. 10, 1932, for example, 15 whites torched the courthouse in Paulding, Miss., where property records for the eastern half of Jasper County, then predominantly black, were stored.\nSuddenly, it was unclear who owned a big piece of eastern Jasper County.\nEven before the fire, landownership in Jasper County was contentious. The Ku Klux Klan had been attacking black-owned farms and chasing the owners away.\nA few years after the fire, the Masonite Corp., a wood products company, went to court to clear title to its land in the area. Masonite believed it owned 9,581 acres and said it had been unable to locate anyone with a rival claim.\nIn 1938, the court ruled the company had clear title to the land, which has since yielded millions of dollars in natural gas, timber and oil, according to state records.\nFrom the few property records that survived the fire, the AP was able to document that at least 204.5 of those acres had been acquired by Masonite after black owners were driven off by the Klan. At least 850,000 barrels of oil have been pumped from this property, according to state records.\nToday, the land is owned by International Paper Corp., which acquired Masonite in 1988.\n"This is probably part of a much larger, public debate about whether there should be restitution for people who have been harmed in the past," a company spokesman said. "We should be part of that discussion."\nEven when Southern courthouses remained standing, fear of white authority long kept blacks away from record rooms. Today, however, interest in genealogy among black families is surging, and some are unearthing the documents behind those whispered stories.\nBryan Logan, a 55-year-old sports writer from Washington, D.C., was researching his heritage when he uncovered a connection to 264 acres of riverfront property in Richmond, Va. \nToday, the land is Willow Oaks, an almost exclusively white country club with an assessed value of $2.94 million. But in the 1850s, it was a corn-and-wheat plantation worked by the Howlett slaves -- Logan's ancestors.\nTheir owner, Thomas Howlett, directed in his will that his 15 slaves be freed, that his plantation be sold and that the slaves receive the proceeds. When he died in 1856, his white relatives challenged the will, but two courts upheld it.\nYet the freed slaves never got a penny.\nBenjamin Hatcher, the executor of the estate, simply took over the plantation, court records show. He cleared the timber and mined the stone, providing granite for the Navy and War Department buildings in Washington and the capitol in Richmond, according to records in the National Archives. \nWhen the Civil War ended in 1865, the former slaves complained to the occupying Union Army, which ordered Virginia courts to investigate. \nHatcher testified that he had sold the plantation in 1862, apparently to his son Thomas, but had not given the proceeds to the former slaves. Instead, court papers show, the proceeds were invested on their behalf in Confederate War Bonds. There is nothing in the public record to suggest the former slaves wanted their money used to support the Southern war effort. \nThe blacks insisted they were never given even that, but in 1871, Virginia's highest court ruled that Hatcher was innocent of wrongdoing and that the former slaves were owed nothing.\n"I don't hold anything against Willow Oaks," Logan said. "But how Virginia's courts acted, how they allowed the land to be stolen, it goes against everything America stands for"