“Silver Dollar Road” Tells the Story of a Family’s Battle to Keep Their Land
Filmmaker Raoul Peck recently released a documentary called “Silver Dollar Road,” inspired by a ProPublica article written by Lizzie Presser in 2019, which focuses on the Reels family’s struggle to hold on to the land that rightfully belongs to them amid discrepant laws and invading property developers.
In 2011 brothers Melvin Davis and Licurtis Reels were sent to jail when they refused to leave the land that they lived on, where they had grown up and spent their entire lives. They hadn’t actually been convicted of any crime, but had been informed by a court order that they would be arrested if they did not stay off the land. When their court-appointed hearing came, they had hoped to argue their case to the judge, but instead were sent to jail, where they spent the next eight years. Legal loopholes and land developers’ interest in their family’s waterfront property led to a portion of the land being sold, unknowingly to and without the consent of the Reels family members actively living there.
Members of the Reels family have lived on and owned their 65-acre property in North Carolina for generations. Melvin and Licurtis’ great-grandfather, Elijah Reels, took up official ownership of the land in 1911, and when he died without a will it became heirs’ property, with possession rights being distributed among a large group of descendants. One of those descendants, an elusive relative named Shedrick, acquired and sold the rights to a portion of the land equal to about 13 acres through a legal statute known as adverse possession. Both Melvin and Licurtis had homes on the portion of land that ended up being sold to developers, and were unaware that they no longer had legal rights to the property until they started receiving eviction notices.
Peck’s film pinpoints the specific struggle of the Reels family, but ultimately speaks to a larger systemic issue. Between 1910 and 1997, land ownership by Black farmers declined by an estimated 90 percent, largely as a result of the heirs’ property inheritance system and the encroachment of white land developers. These legal loopholes continue to be taken advantage of by developers, robbing Black farmers of the rightful ownership of their land. “Silver Dollar Road” seeks to highlight this ongoing injustice by calling attention to the discriminatory and unjustifiable circumstances that plague the Reels family.
Peck’s film is streaming on Prime Video, check it out if you can.
