"Silver Dollar Road": A family's fight

Before Raoul Peck began making “Silver Dollar Road,” members of the Reels family filmed evidence that they owned the 65 acres of marshland they and their ancestors farmed that ran from the nearby forests to the river. The family fished those waters, supporting themselves by catching shrimp and crab since their forebear Mitchell Reels purchased the property in 1944. When the South was segregated, their beach was a safe recreational haven for Black folks. A scene from one home movie shows Melvin Davis, who briefly ran a club on the land, walking the green woods and fields, proudly declaring he knew every inch of it.

Gertrude Reels, the family’s matriarch, who was 95 years old at the time Peck was filming, remembers that before her father Mitchell died in 1970, he made his final wish very clear. “Whatever you do,” he said, “don’t let the white man have my land.” However, as the extensively reported 2019 ProPublica story that inspired Peck’s film chronicled, Mitchell Reels didn't leave a will, which was common among the earliest Black landowners who were denied access to the legal system.

That subjected their land to heirs’ property law, which dictates that ownership passes to the heirs of the deceased landowner. The U.S. Department of Agriculture cites heirs’ property laws as the leading cause of Black involuntary land loss, “contributing to land loss from 16 million to 4.7 million acres over the last hundred years.”