Posted on 05/15/2021 6:04:45 AM PDT by snarkytart
New York (CNN Business)It's been nine years since Michael Robinson of Columbus, Ohio, nearly lost a major part of his family's legacy. He's still fighting to regain full control of it.
In 2012, the 57-year-old married father of four, who is Black, found out someone he'd never met named James E. Deshler II was suing his family members to force them to sell their portion of the 127 acres of Barlow Bend, Alabama, farmland that they'd inherited from Robinson's late grandfather, Joe Ely.
The local county auditor's website determined last year that the land is worth more than $212,000. The Deshler family and its Thomasville, Alabama, attorney J. Glen Padgett did not respond to a request for comment.
"I couldn't understand it," Robinson told CNN Business. "How can someone force us to sell land that's not for sale?''
The issue was one of heirs' property, a legal term for land owned by two or more people, typically after they inherit it from a relative who didn't have a will.
Robinson said his grandfather spent $2,500 to acquire his farmland in 1941 through a US Department of Agriculture program. Joe Ely didn't have a will when he died in 1959, so control of his land was automatically divided between his 15 children.
(Excerpt) Read more at cnn.com ...
"Joe Ely didn't have a will when he died in 1959, so control of his land was automatically divided between his 15 children."
This law is being applied equally to all residents regardless of color.
The problem is a dispute within the black family that has already mostly sold the land long ago.
A case of black family members cheating other black family members while the "System" performs in an unbiased manner.
My husband rants about how urban redevelopment basically stole his childhood house in 1960, Pittsburgh.
Maybe John Deere and the Feds should get the lands in Alabama and Mississippi returned to the Choctaws, Chickasaws and Creeks from whom it was taken in the 1830’s.
I am not sure that anything that CNN publishes is worth printing and wonder about why anyone even posts CNN articles on this forum. It only provides confusion and does not really serve a purpose, at all. IF it is to inform of us about how dishonest CNN is, we already know that.
While I generally have a low opinion of Southern, I’ve met a few Black lawyers from there who were decent. White law students from there are, however, someone whom I would never hire. They obviously weren’t able to get in anywhere else. (As I recall, the law school student body is between a quarter and a third white).
“But the Deshler family still owns 1/15 of Joe Ely’s land.”
I’ve seen this same situation in real life. Parents die and leave a home to 3 kids. Two kids want to sell, one doesn’t.
• The two kids are stuck in a business arrangement with the third child who is impossible to deal with.
• The house is used as rental property, but often sites empty due to the obstinance of the third child.
• The two kids’ dreams of investing their inheritance is thwarted by the third kid.
Summary:
Black grandfather had 15 heirs to some acreage. One of the heirs sold their share for a small amount and using a law designed to keep land from being split too many ways, tried to force the sale of it for a profit.
The lesson here is, take your cousins to a Notary and get them to sign over any claims to land.
Exactly. Drop the Drama. Ridiculous assertions about Racism when it’s all about inheritance laws.
My ancestor came in 1729 with a 10,000 acre land grant in the Shenandoah valley VA. Can I get that back?
Except that the land wasn’t properly deeded to the heirs in individual plots after the original owner passed away.
“to honor our grandfather’s legacy.” -— LOL. It is about $$$.”
Plus, they like livin’ there.
$1,600 per acre. For those who don’t know, Barlow Bend is in the middle of nowhere in South Alabama, about 60 miles north of Mobile in Clarke County on the Alabama River.
This is true. But what you appear to be comfortable with is the fact that THE STATE owns all property in America; individuals are mere tenants. This was and is a sick Communist dream.
Why would the white lawyers at Southern be inferior to the black lawyers, particularly in the age of Affirmative Action? This makes no sense to me.
Yep another CNN style story.
This was a significant factor in the long running issues with USDA. The scurrilous charge was made by the grifters that USDA was systematically discriminating against black farmers; this was never true, at least on a large and systemic scale, and the payoffs executed by the Clinton and Obama administrations on this count were pure political thievery. What was true, however, is that a black small farmer would come to a local USDA office -- today FSA, NRCS, RMA, Rural Housing Service, etc., though they've gone by other names over the years -- typically seeking a USDA loan for various purposes. One can probably find rare cases of outright racial discrimination, but what was very common was that clouded title meant that black small farmers couldn't use their land as collateral for loans. Cousin Ralph might have been working the land since Uncle Phil died, and so on back to the original sharecropper who scraped up enough to buy 50 acres and the old house ... but 57 cousins, uncles and aunts have a share of the title, and Cousin Ralph is hogtied in trying to get a loan. He can't expand. He can't modernize. He can't get a loan for erosion control or tiling or irrigation.
It's not an easy problem to solve. There's no way to tell great-grandpa, a semi-literate ex-sharecropper who died in 1937, that he should get a will. So what can be done? It's been awhile since I've visited the issue. USDA was doing some serious spadework on it back during the Bush 43 administration, but the Obama people were more interested in paying off the political pressure groups. I don't know where it stands now.
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