Stolen Ground: The Heartbreak of Heirs Property

In the Lowcountry of South Carolina and Georgia, generations of Gullah Geechee families have watched their ancestral land slip away through a legal trap known as heirs property. When land is passed down without a will, it becomes jointly owned by all descendants and any one heir can force a sale, opening the door to predatory developers and tax sales that have displaced thousands of families from land their ancestors worked for generations. Stolen Ground: The Heartbreak of Heirs Property tells the stories of real families who lost everything, explains the legal mechanisms that enable this dispossession, and offers a roadmap for protecting Gullah Geechee land for future generations. This essential guide covers heirs property law, partition sales, USDA loan access barriers, and the legislative reforms that are finally beginning to protect Black landowners across the South.