‘Silver Dollar Road’ Highlights The Injustice Of Land Loss In America

“It’s a long story, and sometimes it’s hard to see exactly where it began,” admitted acclaimed documentarian Raoul Peck as he discussed his latest film, Silver Dollar Road.

It tells the story of the Reels family and their fight to retain and reclaim coastal land their family owned in the titular area of North Carolina. Their family, led by matriarchal Mamie, lived on and worked the 65-acre parcel acquired by their great-grandfather during the zenith of Black land ownership in America during the Reconstruction era. At the time, 15 million acres of land in the South were owned by African Americans.

While Silver Dollar Road focuses on their plight to regain ownership of a section of the land that a family member sold to developers via a loophole, their story is the same as countless other African American and other minority families in the US. While this is a contemporary problem, contention over land rights goes back to the Founding Fathers.

“The Founding Fathers were real estate men,” Peck said. “Once you decide that land could become a commodity, it means you can buy and exchange it, and vote laws that regulate it, and at the same time make sure that one part of the population does not have access to it.”

Problems started for the Reels’ in the 1970s when Mamie’s grandfather died without having left a will. However, his last wish was for his children to keep the land within their family. However, a family member laid claim and sold some of it, and that’s where the legal problems started.

Peck said so many fall foul of the system not due to a lack of understanding or education about how it works but rather because of cracks in the system itself.

“The Black community, through their own history, don’t trust the legal system. They know how it is through their experience,” the documentarian explained. “When they decide, ‘If I keep the property for the whole family, we are better off,’ but what they did not realize, or realized too late, is that when you have a second or third generation, it only means it fractalizes the property. There are actual laws that come into play and loopholes that can be exploited.”

There continue to be attempts to amend Heir laws to prevent what happened to the Reels and others from happening again. However, Peck lamented that there remains “not much on a federal level.”

Silver Dollar Road, streaming on Amazon’s
AMZN
Prime Video service from Friday, October 202, 2023, was inspired by a 2019 ProPublica article.

“Lizzie Presser met with scholars and activists and wrote in the article that in Farm Bills, money has been allocated for educating part of the population to the necessity of dealing with heir’s property,” Peck said. “It’s hoped that the money will be renewed and expanded in the 2023 Farm Bill.”

The article gave Peck a firm foundation for his documentary. ProPublica also had 90 hours of footage, including a bounty of content with the Reels family, that had been shot to support the article. The filmmaker built his own connection with the family, keeping the humanity in the legal-heavy story in the foreground.

“I get the balance right between the two because I refuse the usual balance, which is to try to get a false objectivity,” Peck explained. “That’s a common problem with documentaries. They try to reduce it to the concept of a good guy and a bad guy. I’m not interested in the bad guy because when you do that, there is one individual who is the cause of the problem. It’s a structural problem.”

From the get-go, he knew he wanted to stick with the family unit as the focus. Presser was a big part of helping the family trust Peck.

“Lizzie had done her homework, and she had earned the trust of the family, and that’s one of the aspects that touched me a lot,” he recalled. “This young, white journalist was like the daughter of the house, so when she brought me in, most of the work was already done. I just had to do my normal job: to listen to them and not try to project anything from me onto their situation.”

The filmmaker also wanted to ensure the Reels weren’t seen as victims “because they are not.”

“They are normal people who became involved in a traumatic event,” Peck revealed. “I wanted the audience to get to know them as human beings and have empathy for them. So once you have that human connection, unless you are a pathological, problematic person, you know, you should feel something. Also, this way, when the drama comes, it hits you much harder than if I had kept that family at a distance.”

Aside from losing the land, a significant part of the family’s trauma is the (ultimately successful) fight to get Mamie’s brothers, Melvin and Licurtis, out of jail after they were jailed for living on the land that was sold from underneath them. It led to them being wrongfully convicted of civil contempt, and they spent eight years behind bars. Both men feature in Silver Dollar Road, but how they process that injustice differs.

“I don’t think Melvin is more forgiving; he’s just more pragmatic, Peck mused. “Melvin is a guy who started working very young and was making a lot of money on fishing. He helped the family the best way he could and was a provider with a certain attitude to life.”

“Licurtis was almost the baby of the family. Mamie is the closest to him; he’s a brick mason and has another life, and he’s hurt the most. I wanted to show that not only is he traumatized, but he is aware of his trauma and is fighting it. When he says, “I just sit there and try not to hate,” that’s a profound and strong statement. It’s like he’s saying, “I need to get a hold of this.” Some people would go to a therapist, but it’s not what they do. I wanted to show that life continues. There is no happy ending; there is no bad ending; there is reality. That is important for me.”

Even though the Reels’ legal battle continues, don’t expect Peck to return the story with a follow-up documentary. Instead, he would prefer audiences see Silver Dollar Road as the third part of a trilogy that started with the Oscar-nominated I Am Not Your Negro and follows Exterminate All the Brutes.

“They complete each other,” he concluded. “They clarify, with different stories, the same narrative, which is the original sin of this country. The dream that has been sold for centuries is not a dream for most people. It’s a nightmare. When you connect it to the ideology of Make America Great Again, in a nutshell, you have the current situation with the whole backstory.”