Land Title Struggles

Elaine Thomas has written several columns in this paper on financial fraud, and now I would like to make readers aware of another threat we may face, namely losing land ownership rights through others’ unscrupulous or even heinous means.

This is precipitated by the almost concurrent release of the Martin Scorsese film, “Killers of the Flower Moon,” and the November issue of Texas Monthly, including an article about how “heirs’ land” is acquired questionably through ostensibly legal court proceedings. The article, titled “The Dispossessed,” is written by Nate Blakeslee and Jason Heid.

First note that I have not seen the film by Scorsese (it’s about 3 ½ hours long, and with no intermission, I can’t inflict sitting that long on my feeble back!), but I have read the book, on which it is said to be closely based. The book (same name as movie), by David Grann, is one my Seguin book club read and discussed several years ago. It is a meticulously researched account of the systematic, brutal killings of many people in the Osage tribal group, by some greedy and totally unscrupulous whites who wanted control of the Osages’ Oklahoma land and oil wealth in the 1920’s and early 1930’s.

At the time, the Osage had become the wealthiest people in the world, often each receiving thousands of dollars in income yearly from their oil interests in tribal lands. Bribery of law enforcement and judicial authorities along with murders by poisoning, shooting, bombing, and throwing victims from trains were tactics used by their killers, few of whom were ever punished for the 24 murders that were identified and documented then. Tragically, the actual numbers of those murdered were far higher, with estimates now up to ten times as many as those documented ones.

(Grann’s book, dealing as it does with one type of race conflict, has now been banned from many school libraries in Oklahoma and elsewhere, since it might make some people “uncomfortable” to read it, a not uncommon occurrence these days when we seem to want to protect people from knowledge about the past.)

The Texas Monthly article, also apparently meticulously researched, though published without the footnotes Grann’s book has, relates the modern-day story of land acquisition by a largely successful real estate title researcher and his attorney (and perhaps business partner) as they “dispossess” Black heirs of their land because title rights are unclear from many decades back. Thus land that has been in a family for generations, and is now owned by heirship tradition, but with heirs’ names not currently associated with the property’s title, can become the property of someone else through court proceedings the heirs themselves never even learn about. ATexas law passed in 2017 to strengthen the rights of heirs who are not registered in title records has failed to matter to many, even when they learn of a lawsuit challenging their ownership, for it still requires heirs to have sufficient income/wealth to hire their own attorneys to defend their ownership against opponents who clearly have greater power and financial resources.

Fayette County is home to two “Freedom Colonies,” Cozy Corner on FM 155 between La Grange and Weimar and Armstrong Colony west of Flatonia. Both have strong similarities, it seems to me, with the area of Texas that is the subject of the Texas Monthly article, namely, the community around Millican in southern Brazos County. In addition, there are other areas in Fayette County with a long tradition of African-American residency and strong history of community and celebration and faith, built around rural churches, clubs and organizations, or kinship. In these cases too, I believe there are likely to be some heirs with no names on the title to the land in which they believe they have ownership. Of course, any of us can share ownership of undivided land tracts with relatives or non-relatives, and we need to stay in touch with one another to avoid situations that could put our ownership at risk.

I dearly hope that all of us in Fayette County guard against title-researching real estate-seekers whose land-acquisition skills are decimating some communities elsewhere in our state, that we support our neighbors who want to retain ownership of their family’s land, clear title or not, and that we treasure our diversity of ethnicity, race, and other differences, recognizing and (when appropriate) celebrating together our shared history, rather than retreat from one another into separate enclaves of seclusion and suspicion.

Enjoy one another’s company, dear readers, and support your neighbors, one and all, through thick and thin, for this is what makes our community a great place to live and raise our young people. And may our Good and Gracious God bless us, one and all.