were sold in a partition sale pursued by distant relatives. Hyman turned to the Internet for help and found
an article about Hishaw. “As I looked into it, I realised that there were a lot more families this was
happening to,” she says.
Hishaw, who connected with Hyman more than a year ago, said the case resembled her own family’s story.
Hishaw’s grandparents owned a farm in Oklahoma for which they paid a local attorney to make yearly tax
payments, but she says the payments were never sent and the attorney pocketed the money. “We lost our
farm in a tax lien sale because they said we hadn’t paid taxes,” she remembers. She wanted to make sure the
same didn’t happen to the Freeman family. “It was one of the worst stories that I’d heard.”
In over 20 states, when landowners die without a will, their assets, including land, are given to their heirs (a
spouse or children), Hishaw says. Over time, 10 heirs can become 100, and any one of them can force a
“partition sale” of their acreage or the whole property, according to Virginia state law. “If one of those heirs
sells to a developer, then that developer becomes a partial heir to the land,” Hishaw adds. And a developer
can force a sale by appealing to the court and saying, “We need to clean up this deed so I can use the land.”
Melinda Hyman points out where her great-
great-grandfather had a farm in Nathalie,
VirginiaLack of estate planning is not unique to black families, says Thomas Mitchell, professor of law at Texas
A&M University and an expert on discrimination in real estate and estate planning law, but it is more
prevalent. A study by the US National Libraries of Medicine found that 24 per cent of older black
Americans have some form of estate planning, compared to 44 per cent of older white Americans. The
problem is especially acute for black farmers because access and opportunity have historically been so hard
to come by.
“After the Civil War, black people had basically no access to attorneys that would represent them,” Mitchell
says. They also weren’t given tools to understand real estate law or create wills. “They didn’t have access to
lawyers, business planning, education ... Estate planning is correlated with education levels.”
“Welcome to Belle Terry Farm,” Tashi Terry says as she swings a rusted metal gate open for her father,
Aubrey Terry, to drive his pickup truck through. The cattle farmer has lived in Halifax since 1963, when he
bought a 170-acre plot with his siblings. Belle Terry Farm raises cattle to be sold locally and grows greens
and squash with plans to open a pumpkin patch this fall. The land is a postcard of sturdy walnut trees poking
out of hills like needles in a pin cushion, swathes of Technicolor flowers and the Dan River, which swells
and spills into a nearby meadow after heavy rain.
Terry and his siblings have homes on this property and had children who made the grounds and farming
equipment their playgrounds. Halifax’s population is a little over 1,300, and the area has seen a spike in