History of heirs' property

While heirs’ property can affect anyone, today it disproportionately impacts Black landowners, likely due to a combination of factors including a long history of government blocking Black landowner access to government services and programs, as well as legal theft of land that rightly caused suspicion of the legal system over generations (see the history of the Pigford cases).

Following the Civil War and the abolishment of slavery, formerly enslaved people gained the legal right to own land, and with it the opportunity to gain increased personal and economic freedom that white and free Black people already enjoyed. However, widespread racism remained, and decades of systemic discrimination manifested itself through things like exclusion from the legal system, the denying and delaying of loans, a reduction in loans given and failures to provide technical assistance. The result of all this was an enormous loss of African-American farms.

Black landholders have seen more than an 80% reduction in farmland owned according to the Center for Agriculture and Food Systems, going from 16 million acres owned in 1910 to under 3 million acres owned in 2007. With the loss of land comes the loss of income and wealth, estimated to be approximately $326 billion.