Essential The Official ADOS Discussion Thread

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Helping Black Families Fight Involuntary Land Loss

Land was everything for Henry Robbins, Gwendolyn Robbins-Pratt, Florine Robbins-Stewart and their 17 siblings, who were born and grew up on their family’s property in Winston County east central Mississippi. Despite the sheer volume of mouths to feed, Robbins-Pratt says the children all got three square meals a day because food never ran out on a farm.

“I had friends that were sharecroppers and that taught me the importance of having your own because they were working for someone else’s land and not owning any land,” her sister, Robbins-Stewart, said during a video presented at a World Wildlife Fund virtual press conference on Oct. 14, 2021.

Their father, Henry Clay Robbins, even donated land for St. James Presbyterian Church, where Robbins-Stewart would get married. Robbins-Pratt also married on the family’s land.

After their parents died, the 14 remaining siblings became third-generation owners of 350 acres of land that their grandfather and father bought and worked. The siblings jointly own the land in what is known as heirs’ property, which is land passed down informally from generation to generation, mostly because landowners died without a will.

The USDA has funds available for landowners who want to rehabilitate their farms. The Robbins’ land produced timber, which the siblings wanted to sell, but they ran into a problem. A man who claims to be an heir has placed his name on an acre of the Robbins’ land. Heirship has not been established, and the siblings said they do not know him, Mississippi Center for Justice confirmed.

That claim on one acre means that the Robbins descendants cannot claim their family’s land.

“We found out that there was one acre that this young man had put his name on as an heir to the property. I don’t understand how someone can come in and go to the tax assessor’s office and put their name on somebody’s property. It has caused problems for families such as ours,” Robbins-Stewart said.

Heirs’ property can leave owners susceptible to developers and timber harvesters, tax sales and forced partition sales. Owners then must either give up their land or go through the costly legal process of resolving title issues. It is a common problem for Black families.

The siblings have no plans to sell their family land. They have grandchildren they want to inherit the property, and the stranger’s claim threatens their plans to build generational wealth for their grandchildren, they say.

“If you got land, you had it made. You could make everything else, but you couldn’t make any more land. You can go out and buy a car, tear it up. They can make another car,” Henry Robbins remarked in the video. “But if you got land, you hold onto it. You don’t get rid of it because that’s something they can’t make no more.”

‘Property Matters’
Underserved groups, mostly Black families, have involuntarily lost hundreds and thousands of acres of land in Mississippi due to discriminatory legal and extra-legal policies over the years, Mississippi Center for Justice CEO and President Vangela Wade said during a virtual press conference on Oct. 14.

In 2005, Center for Heirs’ Property Preservation CEO Jennie Stephens started the nonprofit, which provides families with legal services and education about heirs’ property in South Carolina. Families across the country have asked the nonprofit for assistance, but they could not help them because their homes were not located in South Carolina.

“We felt we must figure out a way to help these families, so our idea was to replicate our successful service delivery model by partnering with trusted community-based organizations in other states that could provide direct legal services in addition to education and outreach,” Stephens explained at the press conference.

This led to The Center for Heirs’ Property Preservation and the Mississippi Center for Justice collaborating to establish the Mobile Basin Heirs’ Property, a two-year program that helps historically underserved families in Mississippi protect and keep their land, build generational wealth and promote sustainable forests.

The Mississippi Probate Attorney website defines heir property as “land that is jointly owned by descendants of a deceased person whose estate was never handled in probate.” The heirs have a right to use the property, but don’t have a clear title to the land since estate issues remain unsolved.

This is where the Center for Heirs Property Preservation can step in and help.

“The center’s service-delivery model consists of preventing the loss in growth of heirs’ property, resolving title issues to the land and helping families begin forestry enterprises from which they can build generational wealth while benefiting the environment,” Stephens said.

Without a court proceeding, buyers or lenders don’t know who is entitled to the property, which means heirs cannot sell, mortgage or deal with the real estate.

“This is an unstable and risky way to own land. Heirs’ property is cited as one of the major reasons African Americans have lost land,” Stephens explained.

Owners of unresolved heirs’ property cannot obtain a mortgage; have limited access to USDA cost-share programs for conservation practices on their land; have limited access to state and federal housing rehabilitation funds; and have difficulty accessing FEMA funds after natural disasters. Landowners often will see heirs’ property as a liability rather than an asset, Stephens explained.

“Property matters to people. It’s far more than just a parcel of land. It can be a window to the past that tells the story of a family, a community or a way of life. The loss of heirs’ property has an impact on the community, not just one family,” Stephens said.

When Jennie Stephens approached the Mississippi Center for Justice about a collaboration, Wade said she was interested given the potential benefits for Black and low-income landowners in Mississippi.

The center’s role in this project is to help dismantle barriers that historically underserved groups and socially disadvantaged farmers face when trying to acquire resources for their land.

“The project aims to increase public understanding by Mississippi landowners in the Mobile Basin about what heirs’ property is, how to prevent it and how to resolve title issues once heirs’ property is in place. Direct legal assistance in resolving title issues will be provided to qualifying families,” the center told the Mississippi Free Press.

Mississippi Center for Justice will provide legal assistance to resolve title issues for families whose income does not exceed three times the federal poverty level and who cannot afford private legal assistance. The help is limited to families who agree on how the property will be divided, the center said.

“By implementing the Center for Heirs’ Property Preservation’s tried and tested model to address these heirs’ property issues in the Mobile Bay Basin area, encompassing about 49 counties, MCJ will increase our capacity to assist socially disadvantaged and underrepresented low-income families to protect their land and general legacies,” Wade vowed.

Mississippi Center for Justice will not only offer legal advice to landowners, but they will also educate communities in this area to explain the heirs’ property phenomenon and the possible problems if property isn’t passed down through the correct measures, Wade said.

The center has worked in the area of heirs’ property since 2006, including with families following Hurricane Katrina, she said. “Mississippi landowners had to establish ownership of their land, even the homes they’d lived in for 20 or 30 years in order to gain access to the resources needed. MCJ stepped in to provide that service, that legal service,” she said.

In doing this work, Wade said, the organization realized they were filling a void in the state for low-income families who were not able to protect their ownership of their land. Following Katrina, MCJ has continued to advise families on options regarding their heirs’ property, she added.

“MCJ’s goal is simple: We want to help heirs’ property owners keep, protect and utilize their land for generations to come,” she said.

23 Million Acres At Risk
Three years ago, the World Wildlife Fund started researching how it can help keep forests standing in the Mobile Bay Basin, one of the most biodiverse wood-producing regions in the country that spans Mississippi, Alabama and Georgia.

The organization learned that the region is projected to lose around 23 million acres of forests by 2060 due to rapid and unsustainable development. “In that research, it became clear that the long-term resilience of local forests and communities could not be separated from the legacy of heirs’ property,” WWF Senior Vice President for Forests Kerry Cesareo said at the virtual event.

These circumstances have led the World Wildlife Fund to partner with the company Kimberly-Clark to offer support to the Center for Heirs’ Property Preservation and the Mississippi Center for Justice for the Mobile Basin initiative.

“By supporting this issue, we hope to draw awareness to the prevalence and long history of heirs’-property ownership and its impact on the environment and human wellbeing,” Cesareo said.

The World Wildlife Fund needs to work toward ending the exploitation of families and their land as it works to prevent forest fragmentation and mitigate climate change, its vice president said.

“Forests are an important source of health and wealth, but the burdens and benefits of caring for forests have not been shared fairly, and heirs’ property owners are more likely to bear the brunt of nature loss and climate impacts,” Cesareo said.

Kimberly-Clark, which produces paper-based consumer products, has operations in Mobile, Ala., and in Corinth, Miss. Vice President of Safety, Sustainability and Occupational Health Lisa Morden said the company relies on forests that unsustainable development is destroying at a high rate, and heirs’ properties can be vulnerable to that development.

The unsustainable development can compromise the region’s freshwater habitats and drinking water supply as well.

“So helping these property owners secure clear titles to their ancestral land enables them to protect, care for and benefit from that land while also enabling the responsible forest management in climate goals of those who may source from them,” Morden said at the virtual press conference.


‘No Intention of Selling’
Jennie Stephens of the Center for Heirs’ Property said forestry is a way to stem land loss and increase individual and community wealth because many tracks of heirs’ property contain forested acreage.

“Resolving title issues, creating succession or estate plans, and educating owners on the benefits associated with sustainable forestry and cost-share programs can turn what once was a liability into a valuable resource,” Stephens said.

The U.S. Endowment for Forestry and Communities created the Sustainable Forestry African American Land Retention Network to help landowners use sustainable forestry as the tool to maintain ownership of their land while generating income from it.

“One of the reports commissioned by the endowment proved that there was a difference of almost $1,000 between the value of land and timber without clear title for a pine plantation forest land versus value of land and timber with clear title,” Stephens said.

The Robbins family met and spoke with Vangela Wade with the Mississippi Center for Justice about resolving their case to get the one acre of heirs’ property, Gwendolyn Robbins-Pratt explained.

MCJ now is partnering with the Winston County Self-Help Cooperative, which helps individuals work through the heirs’ property issues, to assist the Robbins family. Frank Taylor, who works for the cooperative, said his uncle lost 100 acres of land to heirs’ property in 1974.

“When you own land, you have a placeholder here in the United States of America. Ownership means something. Ownership creates value, ownership creates great community and ownership creates stability,” Taylor said in the video package.

“We never had no intention of selling the land,” Henry Robbins said.

“Because it has value, and it will have value for my future generations,” Florine Robbins-Stewart added. “They can also harvest the timber off the land and then replant it for their next generation. So no, you don’t sell your land, you hold onto your land.”

 

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Harlem chef Russell Jackson on race, restaurants and pandemic recovery

Only six months before the pandemic began, chef Russell Jackson came out of retirement to open his latest restaurant in Harlem, New York.

Reverence, an 18-seat restaurant he describes as a “jewel box,” stands at street level on Frederick Douglass Boulevard and offers passersby a glimpse inside through floor-to-ceiling windows.

Inside, diners sit around a U-shaped wooden bar for a communal chef’s table-style prix fixe dinner, the eight-or-so courses carefully curated by the chef nightly.

The restaurant survived the pandemic but not without hardship. “We watched our restaurant implode overnight,” Jackson says.

In addition to getting funding from the Paycheck Protection Program, he says he turned to his wife, who had been laid off, and said, “Okay, you’re going to hunt every single grant, application, loan give-away, scratch-it – whatever we can do to keep the fuel going.”

Among the grants he received were “small different tranches of money” that included funding from the Hello Alice grant program, a Discover Card grant, the Apollo grant and others.

Still, while he says every dollar helped, he adds that “it didn’t make us whole by any means.” To keep the restaurant alive, he says he “dug a massive six-figure hole.”

Jackson also expresses frustration over the Restaurant Revitalization Fund, a government grant program that distributed $28.6 billion to 105,000 restaurants, leaving more than double that with no funding at all.

“The RRF needs to be refilled,” he says. “Congress needs to get their act together and they need to do it today. Because the restaurant industry is decimated.”

He says people are fooled when they see restaurants open and full.

“Do you know how many people are still on the verge of closing?” he says. “There isn’t a day that doesn’t go by that I don’t hear about a restaurant that was very strong — that was a great restaurant that’s been around for years — because they didn’t get the money that they were qualified to get.”

Jackson is equally frustrated with what transpired after the fund’s initial decision to give priority to restaurants run by chefs of color, women, veterans and LGBTQ people. Faced with lawsuits by white restaurant owners who said the decision violated their rights, the RFF backed down and told many who’d expected the money that their payments would be halted.

“[Marginalized restaurant owners] are always at the end of the line,” he says. “Other restaurants, especially large groups, have resources and access to money. Those guys can call the bank and get a loan tomorrow. We can’t!”

He says the solution is simple: “Put another $80 billion into the [RFF] system immediately to make sure that all those people that are in line are made whole.”

In terms of his own restaurant, Jackson says he’s grateful to have survived and now witness what Reverence is capable of.

Part of that, he says, is bringing a fine dining restaurant to a neighborhood that has not traditionally had one, and putting his investment into Harlem, a community he believes in and where he’s raising his family.

The pandemic was also a time of introspection for Jackson, who wrote a moving essay on Medium about coming to terms with the injustices he’s experienced as a Black man and restaurant owner.

Though Jackson was afforded an extraordinary life, raised in Pacific Palisades, California, he says there were still moments of racism including going to a beach club with his friends and being told to leave, or trying to date a white girl whose father wouldn’t allow it. The aggressions continued through adulthood as he became an increasingly successful chef.

“All of the fine dining houses I worked in, I was the only African American cook in that restaurant,” he says. “I was always the outlier.”

That meant he had to work “faster, harder, better,” he notes. He says he was also turned away from some jobs because of his race.

In one demoralizing instance, Jackson was hired unseen because of his reputation, only to be rejected on the first day on the job. “I was told I was fired on the spot. ‘No I don’t need you, go out!’ ” he recalls.

That interaction, he says, was overheard by the chef’s partner who pulled the chef behind closed doors — though Jackson says he could still hear what was being said.

Jackson was re-offered the position after the partner told the chef he could be sued over the action, Jackson says.

“But for me, that was a turning point in my career,” he says. “That was: ‘I’m never working for somebody else ever again.’ ”

Black chefs are put into stereotypical boxes, often expected to cook “soul food,” he says.. “I’m a chef, but I’m a California chef” who is trained in techniques of French, Italian, Hispanic and Korean cooking, he adds.

That, he says, means people don’t know how to classify him. The combination of factors created what he calls an immense amount of self-loathing, and attempts to white wash his own pain. And during the George Floyd murder trial, someone threw excrement at his restaurant windows — a “soul-crushing” incident, he says.

“I wanted to just close the doors and be done with this,” he remembers.

But the support and love of his staff got Jackson through the incident and also reinforced the importance of this restaurant in this place.

“We are the only fine dining African American chef-owned restaurant in Manhattan and, possibly from what I’m starting to understand, in the state,” he says. “I wanted to do something good in this community.”

 

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I didn't even know they were protesting. I know they protested a year or two ago about the conditions there. Is this a new one?

 

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That Antonia Edwards with the Freedman's Bureau gem was

 

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I only quote some of this news article but all of it a really good read they are getting hit with the from damn near every angle you can think of.

The Baldwin Hills Crenshaw Plaza has long roots in the historically Black community of South Los Angeles. Paul Yelder and his family moved to the area in 1963, when Paul was 4, and the plaza was the only shopping center for miles. It remained a community gathering spot for decades. The plaza was one of the first regional shopping centers in the U.S. when it opened just after World War II, and it retained its iconic Streamline Moderne anchor buildings even as the 42-acre property expanded to include an indoor mall and a multiplex over the decades. When the property went up for sale three years ago, Yelder and hundreds of community members sprung into action to take control, redevelop and reinvigorate it as a community hub.“All of us said we have to get this or otherwise a developer will come in doing something we don’t need and doesn’t fit, and annihilate this crossroads, our downtown, if done incorrectly,” Yelder told Capital & Main.

Yelder’s fears may come to pass, however, now that a large developer known for building high end housing developments in L.A. has bought the property, leaving Yelder and a community coalition that competed to purchase the complex fearing unwanted gentrification. They’re saying racism played a role in why their higher bid was rejected, and they plan to file lawsuits to stop the project from going forward.Like many malls around the country, the plaza has been in a slump for years. In 2006 Chicago private equity group Capri Capital Investments bought the property for $136 million and spent $35 million on upgrades over the years. After the improvements failed to boost foot traffic — the last blow was the loss of Sears in 2019 — Capri turned to Deutsche Bank subsidiary DWS to liquidate the property and award the development contract. Yelder’s local consortium, Downtown Crenshaw, hoped to develop the property and create worker owned co-ops, small businesses and green space. The group also vowed that 80% of the housing would be priced below market rate. The group has $60 million in the bank and the support, both moral and financial, of community groups and local clergy.

In July, Downtown Crenshaw submitted its own offer — $115 million and a business plan — to buy the property. But last month a lower bid of $111 million by the Harridge Development Group, a Los Angeles-based developer of “urban infill” projects, was accepted by the deal’s broker, DWS. In a separate deal, Harridge also bought a Macy’s department store next door for $30 million. That gives Harridge control of a 42-acre site straddling Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard and Crenshaw Boulevard. The entire project is estimated to cost $1 billion, Harridge CEO David Schwartman told the Los Angeles Times, and will take seven years to complete. In contrast to Downtown Crenshaw’s plans for community co-ops and lower income housing, Schwartzman said Harridge’s redevelopment plans include office space, retail and restaurants and 961 housing units — a mix of condos and apartments, with 10% of condos to be sold at below-market rates and 10% of apartments to be rented below market to low income or very low income tenants.

Niki Okuk, the board chair of Downtown Crenshaw, said that in addition to having the higher bid, her group offered more cash upfront for closing, a shorter closing period and was completely financed. “A lot of developers would make an offer, be awarded a sales contract, and then raise the money,” she said. “We did the reverse. We raised all of the money, and secured all of the financing before making our offer, which in my mind makes us quite credible.”

In an email a spokesman for DWS said the winning bidder “was selected based upon a number of factors which include both purchase price and proof of adequate financing, as well as development expertise.”

Downtown Crenshaw members dispute that DWS chose the group with more experience, saying their team, including SmithGroup, which was one of the firms that designed the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C., has more collective experience than Schwartzman in building similar projects, although this team has not previously worked together on a large project.

“Bottom line you have a corrupt bank that took a lower offer from a failed developer,” Damien Goodmon, a Downtown Crenshaw board member, whose activism also includes the Crenshaw Subway Coalition, told Capital & Main. “Schwartzman doesn’t build things. He entitles things to be built, and then sells it off in pieces or whole. He has never been involved in building a project like this.”