To the naked eye, Silver Dollar Road is a lush strip of pavement on a coastal flat, leading south to tidewater shoreline near Beaufort, North Carolina. The land teems with katydid choruses, the water with shrimp – enough for several members of the Reels family to make a living as fisherman, their boats dotting the sandy shore. There are creeks to either side of the Reelses’ 65 acres of land, some wooded and some open, purchased by Mitchell Reels just one generation removed from slavery.
To the Reels family, the land is indispensable, precious, indisputable. As captured in decades’ worth of home video and photos assembled in Silver Dollar Road, documentarian Raoul Peck’s riveting and infuriating new film, the land was a Black community haven – a rare beachfront away from white surveillance and suspicion, a safe social hub, a locus for prosperity and security. Several generations of Reelses and their extended families grew up there, or vacationed there, or were buried there.
The land along Silver Dollar Road fulfilled a promise of Reconstruction: that land ownership, and the generational wealth derived from it, would be open to Black Americans. The film, now streaming on Amazon Prime Video, opens with a title card quoting the Rev Garrison Frazier, speaking on behalf of 20 Black ministers to the Union general William Tecumseh Sherman: “The way we can best take care of ourselves is to have land, and turn it and till it by our own labor.” Land was wealth and legitimacy, finally permitted and then, over decades, taken away; as another title card points out, Black farmers lost 90% of their land during the 20th century.
By the early 2000s, the Reels family was fighting for theirs in court. Suspicious of financial institutions long prejudiced against Black people, Mitchell Reels died in the 1970s without leaving a will. His land became so-called heirs’ property – an obscure legal loophole that “most lawyers, most judges cannot explain,” said Peck — which passed it to relatives like an informal holding company. Unbeknownst to the rest of the family, a long absent brother of Mitchell’s secretly sold his deed to developers, who saw in Silver Dollar Road potential waterfront lots and dollar signs. Two of the Reels descendants, brothers Melvin and Licurtis, refused to leave the land on which they had lived for decades, and starting in 2011 spent eight years in jail – jail, not prison, because they were never convicted of a crime.
The film, based on Lizzie Presser’s 2019 investigation for ProPublica, is at once a celebration of the Reelses’ resilience and pride in their home, a lesson on the pernicious history of Black land dispossession, a portrait of one community’s fight to free the Reels brothers and a measured, scathing condemnation of their incarceration. “What is behind that story is basically the whole history of the United States,” said Peck, who has previously explored the history of racist colonialism in the docu-series Exterminate All the Brutes and the legacy of civil rights icon James Baldwin in I Am Not Your Negro.
From the introduction of private property as a concept to the use of enslaved people to extract value from the land, the US “excluded the very people who are the center of that wealth from benefitting from that wealth,” said Peck. “And it goes on and on – the civil war, reconstruction, 40 acres and a mule ... it was always about land. That’s the core story, that’s the DNA of what the United States of America is today. So that’s why this story, for me, is way bigger than the Reels family.”
Nevertheless, Silver Dollar Road is a deeply humanist film, largely embedded with the Reels family for the better part of three years. (Peck draws on some 90-plus hours of footage filmed by Mayeta Clark for the ProPublica story). There’s footage of matriarch Gertrude Reels, weathered and homebound by the incarceration of her sons, waiting for them to call. A Reels nephew who has taken over the shrimping business. Home video footage of land speculators scoping out Melvin’s property, and of Melvin’s boat mysteriously capsized. Of primary importance are Melvin and Licurtis’s sister Mamie Reels Ellison and her niece, Kim Duhon, who lead the charge navigating a legal labyrinth to keep the land and free the brothers.
There are protests and vigils, Christmas parties and old photos of Melvin’s beachfront nightclub. “I didn’t want to put the prison case as the dominant issue,” said Peck. “I really needed to start with the family as a family, and portray them as human beings, not as victims,” he said.
He was able to do so in part because of Presser’s research and the backing of ProPublica, which verified Peck’s recounting of an admittedly – and deliberately – arcane legal morass along with family and regional history. “I could assert my subjectivity while I was on solid ground. That was an incredible force for the film,” he said.
“I could be very subjective in my choices. I stay with the family. I don’t care about the other side,” he added. “All my life, I have listened to the other side. Every film is about the other side. I needed to stay with the family.” Talking heads occasionally provide context on heirs’ property or the court system in Carteret country, North Carolina; “it defies logic that any of that constitutes justice,” one lawyer says of the Reels brothers’ legal fight and jail time. But the bulk of the film goes the Reels family and community, processing their disbelief, frustration, weariness and determination in real time. “This film is a beginning for me, not an end,” said Peck. “The life of the family continues. Their fight will continue, the next generation will pick [it] up.”
The Reels brothers are back on Silver Dollar Road, but the murky threat of Black land dispossession continues. According to ProPublica, 76% of African Americans do not have a will, more than twice the percentage of white Americans, threatening more property into unstable heirs’ arrangements. And heirs’ property is estimated to compose more than a third of southern Black-owned land – 3.5 million acres, worth more than $28bn, liable for legally sanctioned theft.
Peck sees the film as, in part, a wake-up call and an education. “I hope it will push you to take a look, or talk to a few people, talk to your family or your friends, what can you do?” Peck said. “Know your history, know what’s the deal today, why are we in this situation today, and know that you’re part of it.”
Silver Dollar Road is now available on Amazon Prime Video
