![]() ![]() Melvin Davis and Licurtis Reels continued to live on the land, building a house and a club and running a shrimping business, but in 2004, the owner obtained a court order prohibiting the brothers from going on the property. In 1986, a partner at a real-estate investment company bought the waterfront plot sight unseen to divide and sell. The new owner sold the land to developers. The Reels family did not know they had lost the rights to their land, and they missed the one-year deadline to appeal. “It’s a legal way to steal land,” Theodore Barnes, a land broker there, told ProPublica. One lawyer told ProPublica that people saw it as a scheme “whereby rich men could seize the lands of the poor.” The law is still on the books in North Carolina. The Torrens Act has long had a bad reputation, especially in Carteret County, where it has long been used by big business to acquire land for development. ![]() The Reels family provided evidence against this claim, but the lawyer granted it anyway. Under a law called the Torrens Act, he only had to persuade a lawyer, appointed by the court and paid by him, to grant his claim. In 1978, one of those descendants tried to take the most valuable parcel of land through a legal doctrine called adverse possession, which required him to prove that he or his tenant had occupied the land continuously and publicly for years against the owner’s wishes. When he died in 1970 without a will, the land became heirs’ property: each of his descendants got an interest or share in the property. ![]() He farmed watermelons, beets, and peas churches held tent revivals on the waterfront and it was the county’s only beach for Black families during the Jim Crow era. Mitchell Reels purchased 65 marshy acres along Silver Dollar Road in 1911, when he was a generation removed from slavery. As ProPublica reports, their story illustrates how Reconstruction-era laws and practices continue to dispossess African American families of their land. Brothers Melvin Davis and Licurtis Reels were jailed for eight years after refusing to leave the land their great-grandfather bought a hundred years ago in Carteret County, on the central coast of North Carolina. ![]()
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