Legal loophole forcing descendants of slaves to sell their land to developers

... Through Reconstruction and the Jim Crow era, black landowners tended to stay away from the courts and rarely put their wills through the legal system; without those official filings, title dispersed over time among all of an original owner's descendants. Fractured ownership isn't generally a problem unless the land becomes valuable—at which point someone typically discovers a provision in the law allowing any heir to file suit for his cut at any time. An auction is a common result, and developers, knowing that auctions mean deals, have been known to recruit an heir to file suit against his family, or to buy the heir's share outright and file suit themselves. They appear at auction, as one observer puts it, "rubbing their hands and licking their lips."

It has happened with particular frequency in Charleston County [South Carolina], where the coast is lined with old plantations and as many as 2,000 parcels of heirs' property. ...