Black Land, Memory, and Dispossession

Heirs Property: Legal Instruments of Dispossession

To understand heirs property as merely a legal anomaly is to miss its deeper significance within the afterlives of slavery. Christina Sharpe’s concept of the wake urges us to consider how slavery continues to structure Black life through atmospheric, juridical, and spatial forms.¹ Heirs property, as it functions in Gullah Geechee communities, is one such formation: a legal structure born in the aftermath of emancipation, shaped by oral inheritance and collective landholding, yet persistently undermined by systems that refuse to recognize Black relational geographies. It is not simply a technical vulnerability—it is a racialized mechanism of erasure.

Defined as land passed without a will and held by multiple heirs as tenants-in-common, heirs property reflects intergenerational practices of mutual care and communal responsibility. But under American property law, it is treated as “clouded title”—undocumented, unprotected, and vulnerable to forced partition. Any co-owner may petition a court to sell the entire parcel, a loophole long exploited by developers, speculators, and distant heirs. Legal scholars Zuri Bailey, Ryan Thomson, and Benjamin Green, writing from a Critical Race Theory perspective, describe heirs property as a “legal technology” that facilitates Black dispossession under the guise of formal neutrality.²

On the South Carolina coast, this process plays out not only as displacement but as disappearance. As Ariel Butkus documents, many heirs property parcels are excluded from official GIS systems, rendering them invisible to planners, assessors, and preservation agencies.³ This omission has tangible consequences: families with longstanding ties to land are disqualified from restoration grants, disaster aid, or historic recognition. “It’s not just that heirs property isn’t protected,” Butkus writes. “It’s that it’s not even seen.”⁴

That invisibility is lived. During a field visit to Daufuskie, Ms. Sallie Ann Robinson—a sixth-generation Gullah resident, chef, and cultural historian—shared how her family lost access to ancestral land after a distant heir sold their share. What had once been her grandmother’s vegetable garden was redeveloped into a gated community.⁵

The U.S. Forest Service has attempted to quantify the scope of the issue. Its 2019 report, Heirs’ Property and Land Fractionation, maps heirs property clusters across South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi, and links them to long histories of racial exclusion and underinvestment.⁶ The report frames heirs property not merely as a land tenure issue, but as a racial justice issue: a structural record of how U.S. law has failed to account for non-Western forms of ownership grounded in kinship and tradition.

If Sharpe helps us understand land loss as an atmospheric inheritance—part of the wake—Katherine McKittrick sharpens our view of its spatial logics. Her concept of plantation futures reveals how the legacy of the plantation continues to animate contemporary systems of Black land theft, speculative development, and enforced erasure.⁷ On Daufuskie and across the Lowcountry, the transformation of formerly Black-owned land into private resorts, gated enclaves, or vacant tracts is not coincidental. It reflects the persistent arithmetic of race and property. Heirs property loss is not an anomaly—it is structural.

The consequences extend far beyond title. Praise houses, family cemeteries, oyster middens, and settlement-era dwellings sit on land that cannot qualify for preservation funding or public investment. Meanwhile, heritage tourism initiatives celebrate Gullah identity on land from which Gullah people have been displaced.

Federal reforms—such as the 2018 Farm Bill’s provision granting heirs property owners access to USDA programs—offer limited relief. Implementation remains uneven, and many families lack the legal support required to clear title or defend claims.⁸ Scholars such as Butkus have proposed treating heirs property as a form of cultural commons—a “public trust” that protects collective heritage in the way wetlands or historic shorelines are preserved.⁹ But to date, such frameworks remain largely aspirational.

To treat heirs property as a bureaucratic oversight is to obscure its role in a much larger architecture of racialized extraction. On Daufuskie, as in many Gullah Geechee communities, heirs property is not just land—it is infrastructure. It is memory. It is sacred ground. To lose it is not simply to forfeit an asset; it is to sever kinship, erase spatial knowledge, and foreclose cultural continuity. In Sharpe’s terms, this is wake work: the labor of tending to what slavery leaves behind—not only grief, but geography. And in McKittrick’s terms, it is a refusal of plantation futures—those recursive geographies where Black space is continuously rendered disposable. Preservation, then, is not merely a legal strategy. It is an ethical obligation, a political demand, and a refusal to surrender Black futures to plantation pasts.