The Loss in My Bones: Protecting African American Heirs' Property with the Public Use Doctrine

The Spanish moss swayed gently in the ancient live oaks, and the pungent smell of the salt marsh rolled in with the tide as Johnny Rivers sat on the steps of his home, reminiscing. "Never wanted to be anywhere else .... I thought I would die here," he says of the land he lived on for sixty-nine years. Patriarch of a family of twenty-seven children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, Johnny Rivers was born on this seventeen acre tract on Clouter Creek near the Cainhoy Peninsula of Charleston, South Carolina. His father, Hector Rivers, son of a former slave, acquired the land in 1888, and Rivers family members have been born, reared, and buried on it ever since. Unfortunately, despite never having missed a tax payment, on September 27, 2001, twenty-five members of the Rivers family were evicted in the largest eviction carried out by the Berkeley County Sheriffs Department in at least the last nine years. The court ordered the Rivers family to accept an offer of $910,000 from an investor who then put the land back on the market eight months later for three million dollars. Had the judge permitted the Rivers family to sell on the open market rather than convey their land to the only buyer who ever had the opportunity to make an offer, perhaps Hector Rivers's heirs could have reaped the full value of their land.