Black people in America have had a sordid relationship with land and property ownership due to historic and ongoing housing discrimination. A new study reveals yet another policy that authors say contributed to Black property and wealth erosion: heirs’ property policy.
“We are on a mission to help build Black wealth through real estate. But we realized when we’re building wealth, we’re telling people to buy land, we’re telling people to buy properties, telling people to become homeowners and invest in real estate.
At the same time of getting people to get into real estate, we need to also protect those that are already in it and look at how we’re losing wealth with real estate,” Dr. Courtney Johnson Rose, president of the National Association of Real Estate Brokers, Inc. (NAREB), which sponsored the study, said to The Final Call.
According to its website, NAREB was founded in 1947 as an equal opportunity and civil rights advocacy organization for Black real estate professionals, consumers, and communities in America.
“Heirs’ property is one of the number one reasons why we’re losing wealth in the Black community. Our effort in studying heirs’ property is to be able to understand the issue,” she added. “Our report also has suggestions on things that we can do to help assist and provide more assistance and resources to families that are having heirs’ property issues.”
The paper released Jan. 14 titled: “Heirs’ Property in the United States: Its Destabilizing Structure and Contribution to Black Property and Wealth Erosion,” written by James H. Carr and Michela Zonta, walks readers through the history of housing discrimination and criticizes heirs’ property policies that left Black families reeling from the loss of land.

It goes into the racial wealth gap, the skyrocketing of Black land ownership after the Emancipation Proclamation, successes in Black land ownership despite Jim Crow laws and other discriminatory practices, Black land and farmland loss and recommendations to eliminate further loss of land.
The research highlighted five “aspects of Black property ownership and wealth accumulation in the United States that are neither well-known nor fully acknowledged by federal legislators or the American public in general.”
Three of these aspects included:
• Blacks owned millions of acres more land a century ago than they hold today;
• The largest share of property owned by Blacks was farmland throughout the South, some of which is today among the most expensive property in the U.S.;
• The combination of a lack of access to legal advice and institutions, discriminatory actions by federal, state, and local governmental entities, and legally condoned violence and hate crimes by White supremacists against Blacks, has resulted in the exploitative and frequently illegal taking of 90 percent of land that was held by Blacks in 1910;
“We had accumulated so much wealth in terms of land post-emancipation. The majority of that has been lost. That was the thing that was just kind of most heartbreaking,” Dr. Johnson said.
The authors define heirs’ property as “a type of ownership where multiple generations inherit a family-owned property, typically without a clear legal arrangement proving ownership and defining each person’s share.”
When a landowner passes away without leaving a will or clear directives, their assets enter probate court. “The court values them, pays outstanding taxes, settles debts secured by the property, and designates heirs,” the paper says.
Most Black people, more than 70 percent, according to CNBC, do not have a will. As a result, more than half of Black-owned land in the country is classified as heirs’ property, the paper says.
This leaves the land vulnerable to fractured ownership, conflicts over the property, foreclosure or forced auction and locks the property out of refinance options and federal, state or local tax breaks.
If heirs are in conflict over whether or not to sell the property, courts can order the sale to happen, which often attracts “wealthy developers who prey on unaware heirs.”
Black heirs often did not have the resources to prevent their land from being sold off at public auction, usually at prices well below market value, leading to loss of wealth and property.”
“We see it happening every day, even in urban cities where grandmother dies, and nobody has the deed to the house. There’s no will, and that property goes into probate or tax sales or things of that nature. So, we’re seeing it just pop up all over our community,” Dr. Johnson said.
Black families could also end up spending a significant amount of money in legal fees to determine land ownership. The paper explains how limited access to the legal system impacted Black landowners’ ability to retain their land, as Black attorneys were in short supply, Black landowners could not afford legal representation, and during the Jim Crow era, Black communities did not trust White courts.
Today, Black families still struggle with land and property ownership.
“We struggle to get into homes due to historical racism and discrimination, and we struggle sometimes to maintain those homes and those properties because it was so difficult for us to get it,” Dr. Johnson said.
She mentioned how vulnerable Black families may feel when owning property, due to not having financial reserves to assist with taxes, maintenance and environmental issues.
The Honorable Elijah Muhammad, Eternal Leader of the Nation of Islam, encouraged Black land ownership and advised Black people to do for self or suffer the consequences. His National Representative, the Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan, has been urging Black people to go into agriculture.
“The Honorable Elijah Muhammad said, ‘As long as we are consumers and employees, our future is in the hand of somebody else.’ But if we are going to be producers, you cannot become a producer of what you need to extend your life without land,”
The Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan said in a message delivered on November 9, 2011, at Prairie View A&M University in Prairie View, Texas. “We have to own land. Elijah Muhammad said we need at least 100 million acres to make a start.”
For Melody Muhammad of Edith Family Farms, Black people need to want property. She recalled a situation where property was sold without alerting all the heirs.
Ms. Muhammad resides in the Philadelphia area but has seven acres of land in North Carolina she purchased several years ago. She is an urban agriculture consultant and attained a Certification in Urban Agriculture from Will Allen of Growing Power, and a master gardener certification from Penn State University.
“Some people who have heir property, they don’t have to fight over it because they already have money, like Caucasians. Some of them don’t have to fight over stuff because they got their cars, they got their houses, they got the basic things they already need, so they don’t have to fight over money,”
She said to The Final Call. “If we had heir property right now, some of us would be like, ‘Look, I want to sell it so I can go ahead and have some money to do what I want to do with it.’”
“After all this injustice and the things that our ancestors have lost as a result of us going into debt and sharecropping and all of those things, now we are at a time where some of us are striving to get and purchase the land.
And then some of us have gotten, I want to say, comfortable with this world’s life that we almost forget about the land and don’t even want to go back to the land,” she said. “We could say we have this, we have that, but if we don’t have the land to grow our own food, then how are we going to be healthy?”
Referencing the Honorable Elijah Muhammad on the importance of Black unity, Melody Muhammad wants to see more families getting together with land to live on.
“Moving forward, we start purchasing little spots here or there, and have communities,” she said. But to go into land ownership, Black people first have to work on their credit, budget and be willing to sacrifice, she added.
“We need to really focus on budgeting. And that’s where I think some of us fall short, is when you see these things going on, and you know it’s not in your budget. And you know that you want to get some land and you want to do some stuff, but you gotta make sacrifices. You gotta give up something to do it,” she said.
The National Association of Real Estate Brokers launched a “Building Black Wealth Tour” to help educate and provide resources. The organization has designated April 12, 2025, as their 2nd annual “Building Black Wealth Day,” where seminars and sessions will occur simultaneously in 100 cities on homeownership, property investment and other wealth-building topics.
One of the tour’s sessions will go into heirs’ property and “what to do with Big Momma’s house.”
Melody Muhammad believes as time goes on, more Black people will start uniting and owning land.
“When we realize the importance of what’s happening today, I believe we will educate some of the young people, and they can enjoy some of the space on the land,” she said. “We can start to get the children to want to be in those spaces, because they’ll be safe spaces.”
She placed focus on the family unit, first.
“Start buying property as a family, first,” she said. “More husbands and wives do things together then start working with other families and build communities.”
“I can see us going back to having generational wealth,” she concluded.