The Film ‘Silver Dollar Road’ Highlights the Theft of Black Land

The dispossession of Black land is a real and serious issue, and a new film tackles the issue head on by examining the struggles of a Black North Carolina family to reclaim their land.

The film, “Silver Dollar Road” hit theaters Friday and on Amazon Prime on Oct. 20. Coming to us from award-winning Haitian filmmaker Raoul Peck (“I Am Not Your Negro” and “Exterminate All the Brutes”), the movie is based on the 2019 ProPublica story of the Reels family siblings Mamie, Melvin and Licurtis. The film takes its name from the road that borders the Reels property.

Only a generation from enslavement, the Reels’ great-grandfather Elijah bought 65 acres of land in Carteret, N.C. The family would make a living farming and fishing, and create the only beach for Black people in the county.

In the 1970s, the Reels’ grandfather, Mitchell, died without a will, with the heirs each inheriting an interest in the property in what is known as heirs’ property. “Whatever you do,” Mitchell told his family the night he died, “don’t let the white man have the land.” Mamie, Melvin and Licurtis would learn that an estranged uncle took advantage of heirs’ property and sold the land — in secret and without consent — to a white developer. It is common among families who own communal land through heirs’ property for developers to entice relatives to sell their share, opening the door for developers to auction off all the land at a profit.

Melvin and Licurtis refused to leave the land and were sent to jail for eight years for trespassing.

Following the Civil War, Black people bought so much land that by 1910 they had owned 15 million acres or 23,000 square miles. Before the start of the 21st century, that number had dwindled to around 2.3 million acres due to Ku Klux Klan’s domestic terrorism and lynching, intimidation, deceptive practices and government action. Although heirs’ property is associated with land loss for Black families, it is also an issue for Latinx, Indigenous and low-income Appalachian white people.

In recent years, the issue of Black land theft has received greater attention. For example, in 2021, California Gov. Gavin Newsom restored Bruce’s Beach, Southern California beachfront land, to a Black family forced off the property a century ago. Back then, the Manhattan Beach City Council seized the land by eminent domain and condemned the neighborhood after Klan harassment and attempted arson from white neighbors.

Recently, on Indigenous People’s Day, I had the chance to speak with director, writer and producer Raoul Peck about “Silver Dollar Road” and the film’s larger significance. The story has been edited for clarity and brevity.

David A Love: First, I think it’s appropriate that we’re speaking on Indigenous People’s Day, considering the importance of land. And I’m curious to know how you decided to take on this project.

Raoul Peck: Well, the project was brought to me by Amazon, Juvee Productions and ProPublica, of course. They were already on it for at least two or three years, and they asked me to become the producer of the project. And after reading, seeing the material, I thought it was an extraordinary story — and that goes beyond the usual documentary on family drama or Black victimization.

I saw the potentiality of the story to become much more than that and also triggered the kind of anger that you felt, but also the willingness to go further than that, because the problem is national and it touches the core of what this country is.

That’s good that you mentioned the — you know, I don’t know if we should call it a celebration of this day today. My precedent film, “Exterminate All the Brutes,” it’s exactly the core story that we see the Reels family is going through is that we are in a country that started in two major original sins, which is stealing the land of people, by the way, who never said they owned that land. They always said they are the purveyor of that land, they are the ones taking care of that land, but … the concept of private property did not exist. It’s a European concept that came with the invaders.

And then … once you have land as commodity, so you can have humans as well as commodity, and they use those human beings to farm the land, to work on the land, to produce riches, to produce wealth and economic growth. And the same people who were instrumental in that did not profit at all off that wealth. In fact, they were even discriminated willingly. Because if you take all the laws that have been created since — you know, let’s forget before slavery, but after slavery, Homestead Acts, all of them — they deprive minorities to have access of that land, although they all knew without access to land, you cannot survive. You don’t have the means to sustain yourself, let alone build some sort of stable situation, economic situation.

So, all this is structural, and it was structural from the beginning. And that’s what I hope people will get from that particular story.