Raoul Peck (‘Silver Dollar Road’ documentary) tells how the Reels family ended up in their property mess [Exclusive Video Interview]
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The land troubles for the Reels family, which are chronicled in Raoul Peck’s new documentary “Silver Dollar Road,” all started when Elijah Reels passed away without a will. This left everyone in the family as a stakeholder in the property. “Because everybody is a stakeholder of the property, whether you live on it or move to New Jersey or Texas, you somehow have a piece of the property and one particular brother pretended that he owned that little 13 acres on the water,” Peck tells Gold Derby during our recent web chat (watch the exclusive video interview above). This has allowed the property to be sold to Adam’s Creek Associates, despite the Reels family having lived on that property for more than a century. “The justice itself has not played a good role in that story because they allowed the exploitations of loopholes and that the family was not properly informed of the situation.”
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“Silver Dollar Road,” which will be available to stream on Amazon Prime Video starting October 20, chronicles the ongoing legal battles that the Reels family have been caught up in in their attempts to keep their land in Carteret County, North Carolina. Among the indignities that are shown in the film are two members of the family, Licurtis Reels and Melvin Davis, being jailed for refusing to leave their property in 2011. They would stay locked up for eight years for civil contempt. Peck is a previous Oscar nominee in the Best Documentary Feature category for “I am Not Your Negro” back in 2016.
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Unfortunately, the problems that the Reels family is dealing with is not uncommon for a lot of marginalized communities in the country as it’s a systematic one. “If you know the history of this land, it was always about land from the first day. Stealing the land of the indigenous people, killing them and pretending that you have a right to own property, which is a totally European concept. At the time, private property did not exist.” This hits even harder for African-Americans as their ancestors worked the land and created the wealth of the country, but wouldn’t be recognized as citizens until the passage of the 14th Amendment. “Basically, you take out all the possibility for them to build their own livelihood and you just slap them with the idea of why don’t you take yourself by your own bootstraps, which is an absurdity.”
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