Alabama returns farmland withheld from Black family nearly 40 years

Jet, June 24, 2002

A Black family in Sweet Water, AL, whose land was seized by the state under a 1964 court order was recently given their deceased father's farmland.

The Williams family lost the western Alabama land after the state claimed the property belonged to the government because of a 1906 federal designation as swampland.

State officials secured "quiet title" to the 40 acres Williams' father inherited, based on a 1963 U.S. Bureau of Land Management notice.

Then-Circuit Judge Emmett F. Hildreth wrote in a Dec. 13, 1965, letter stating to conservation officials that evidence showed the families had "been in possession of these lands about three generations."

Letters and internal memos on the case in files of the State Lands Division in Montgomery are peppered with references to the family's race. They show officials adamantly opposed allowing "the Negro defendants" to keep the land, even while acknowledging the fact the family could trace its ownership back to 1874.

Willie Williams, 51, said that up to his death in 1983, his father was still pleading for the family not to give up trying to reclaim ownership of the land, where they grew beans and cotton.

Gov. Don Siegelman transferred ownership of the land to the family, saying it had been taken "by a legal technicality." The family has said for nearly 40 years that the land was rightfully theirs.