Auburn and Tuskegee Universities are partnering to research heir property with the help of a grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Agriculture and Food Research Institute.
“This is a major national grant with a true partnership between colleagues at Tuskegee University and Auburn University,” said Conner Bailey, professor of agricultural economics and rural sociology.
Heir property is land passed down to several people after the original owner dies without a will, according to a press release. Bailey said this often happened with rural African-American families starting after the Civil War.
Bailey said a lack of education and mistrust of the government and lawyers led to people not writing wills.
“They couldn’t understand the legal language,” Bailey said. “So people would not write wills. And that became kind of almost a cultural tradition within families.”
Bailey said family members forcing sales of their portions of land often nets much less money than they thought. Bailey said outsiders will also force partition sales, or sales of part of a plot of land, because a family does not have the money to keep their land.
“To me, that’s the moral outrage,” Bailey said. “Of a legal system that has allowed lands that black families have been able to purchase, in the past, have maintained over generations, but then somebody through legal, unscrupulous means, to steal the land.”
Bailey said the collective ownership of the land prevents people building permanent structures or fixing up any homes on the property.
“You could drive around Auburn or Tuskegee or wherever and find houses that are dilapidated, and if you interviewed and find out who owned that house, you’d find out it’s heir property,” Bailey said.
Bailey also said banks won’t give loans on heir property, which amounts to large amounts of money.
It isn’t just the owners of heir property who suffer. Becky Barlow, associate professor in forestry and wildlife sciences and Extension specialist with the Alabama Cooperative Extension System said it also impacts the wildlife on the land.
“When it is bound by Heir Property issues it is very difficult to actively manage a piece of property — for forest management as an example,” Barlow said in an email. “If management cannot happen then timber and wildlife on the property suffer.”
Bailey said many people across the south have stories about heir property. He said he was discussing heir property research in a restaurant with colleagues when the owner overheard them.
“He sits down and starts telling us his stories,” Bailey said. “And this is very common Many African-Americans, either themselves or good friends of theirs, have got lands tied up in heir property.”
Bailey is co-directing the project with Robert Zabawa, research professor in the George Washington Carver Agricultural Experiment Station at Tuskegee. Bailey said Zabawa and Tuskegee are in the lead on the project, but both groups of researchers came up with the project.
There are two other nonprofits working on the project; Alabama Appleseed, a legal advocacy organization that works with landowners, and North Carolina’s Land Loss Preservation Project, according to Bailey.
Bailey said the study will examine four pairs of case studies across three different states. The pairs examine communities established by the federal government versus those not established by the government.
Bailey said there are legal and policy implications associated with the study, such as laws about heir property developed by the American Bar Association. He said the Extension program at the Universities help apply the research to benefit people across the state. He said they are trying to slow down partition sales to help families keep their land.
Bailey said the grant will help fund graduate students and help fund travel to national conferences, as well as help students from other schools work together.
Jamie Creamer, communications and marketing specialist with the College of Agriculture, said the project wouldn’t be possible without the grant because that kind of money isn’t available. Creamer said this project allows the “best and brightest minds on heir property” to work together.
Bailey said different levels of federal funding and different primary missions have prevented Auburn and Tuskegee from working together in the past. Bailey said this project is “in a true spirit of partnership.”
“What I want to try to encourage is more of this kind of collaboration between the two institutions,” Bailey said.
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