The Family Land, Part 2

29m
This week, part two of the Reels family story – how two brothers went to jail in an attempt to save their family land, and were held there for eight years without being charged with a crime. “I’m not going to give up. I don’t think I’m wrong, and I’m willing to fight for it.”
For more on the Reels family’s story, you can read Lizzie Presser’s article, “Their Family Bought Land One Generation After Slavery. The Reels Brothers Spent Eight Years in Jail for Refusing to Leave It.”
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Runtime: 29m

Transcript

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Speaker 5 This episode picks up where last week's episode left off. If you haven't heard that one, you might want to go back and listen to them in order.

Speaker 5 How long have you lived on Silver Dollar Road?

Speaker 6 All my life.

Speaker 6 I never left here until they took me off this land and locked me up.

Speaker 5 In 2011, Melvin Davis and his brother, Lycurtis Reels, were sent to jail by a judge in Carteret County, North Carolina.

Speaker 5 They were being held in contempt of court because they'd refused to follow orders from a judge to leave their property on Silver Dollar Road.

Speaker 7 They pretty much said they weren't going down without a fight.

Speaker 5 Kim Duhan, Melvin and Lai Curtis' niece.

Speaker 7 And if it meant them being incarcerated, that was what they were going to do.

Speaker 5 The land Melvin and Lai Curtis lived on had been in the family for over 100 years. It was 65 acres.
Their grandfather owned it, but he died in 1970.

Speaker 5 Melvin and Lai Curtis' sister Mamie remembers what their grandfather said right before he died.

Speaker 8 He told my mother, whatever you do,

Speaker 8 don't let the white man have my land.

Speaker 5 But her grandfather didn't have a will, which meant the land became heirs' property.

Speaker 5 With heirs' property, when someone dies without a will, any land they own goes to their descendants, who then jointly own the land. But there are loopholes that make heirs' property easy to lose.

Speaker 5 Today, around a third of black-owned land in the south is theirs' property, and that includes the Reels family's land.

Speaker 5 In 1978, their grandfather's brother tried to claim 13 acres of their land right on the water. His name was Shedrick, and he eventually sold the 13 acres to a developer.

Speaker 5 Melvin and Ly Curtis's homes were on the 13 acres, and they were told they were trespassing by continuing to live there.

Speaker 5 The developer who bought the land, Adams Creek Associates, got a court order saying Melvin and Ly Curtis had to vacate their homes and land.

Speaker 5 They were also ordered to clear the land and to do the demolition work of tearing down their houses themselves.

Speaker 5 But they refused to. So in 2011, a judge ordered them to jail for civil contempt.

Speaker 5 What did you think when

Speaker 5 they said you're going to jail?

Speaker 5 Were you surprised?

Speaker 6 I would, Why didn't you think they could do it?

Speaker 5 Lie Curtis Reels.

Speaker 5 Here's Melvin.

Speaker 6 We wasn't charged with nothing. Ain't never been charged with nothing.

Speaker 5 I'm Phoebe Judge. This is criminal.

Speaker 2 Kim Duhon.

Speaker 5 Melvin and Ly Curtis's niece, says at least 20 family members were there at the Beaufort courthouse when they were handcuffed and sent to jail.

Speaker 5 Melvin had asked Kim to do whatever she could to help the family save their land. She knew she had to find a lawyer.

Speaker 7 I knew that I was going to have to put all both feet on the ground and start running to get some assistance because I knew that I was going to have to honor the promise that I gave my uncle Melvin and get out here and find an attorney that could accommodate us.

Speaker 5 Kim started reaching out to lawyers, but it was hard to get anyone to take their case.

Speaker 7 During that time, my husband had just been diagnosed with colon cancer.

Speaker 7 I was from Atlanta to North Carolina every other week trying to find attorneys that had already heard about our story and didn't want to get involved, but they were taking our monies for consult fees.

Speaker 7 listening to the story

Speaker 7 and pretty much charging us exuberant amounts of monies to just talk to us about something they knew they weren't going to do and help us or whatever.

Speaker 7 And it was almost like for me, I didn't know what I was going to do. How am I going to drive to these cancer treatment centers and still come back by Wednesday to see them in jail?

Speaker 7 And in my mind, I couldn't let them down.

Speaker 5 Kim says it was especially hard for Melvin and Lai Curtis' mother, Gertrude.

Speaker 5 But still, Gertrude told the reporter that Melvin and Lai Curtis took care of her and said, and now they're still taking care of me by standing up for their rights.

Speaker 7 Everything about her demeanor changed.

Speaker 7 She was always been a very joyful person, a very energetic person. When my uncles were remanded to jail,

Speaker 7 She totally turned into this hermit. She sat by the phone.
She cried. She listened to her gospel music and old spirituals.
And she was just that

Speaker 7 she changed. I saw her age like dramatically with the worry and the concern of ever seeing them again.

Speaker 8 This was emotional, stressful

Speaker 8 for all of us.

Speaker 5 Mimi Reels, Melvin and Lai Curtis's sister.

Speaker 8 But

Speaker 8 no matter how stressful it was for me,

Speaker 8 my siblings,

Speaker 8 it was all about Gertrude.

Speaker 8 We just wanted to take care of her because we knew if anything happened to her,

Speaker 8 we are going to catch hell.

Speaker 8 And my mother

Speaker 8 got where she didn't want to go out the house. She didn't want to go nowhere.

Speaker 8 And if we was, and if I were carrying her out to town on the third or carrying her to pay her bills, if we met a sugar car,

Speaker 8 it didn't only have her paranoid, it had everybody. Because my mother grew up in the days

Speaker 8 of the Depression and the Jim Crow days. And she knew what could happen to black men.
You know, she just worried a lot about Melvin and La Curtis. And then she quit doing her gardening.

Speaker 8 So when she quit doing her gardening, that did get her.

Speaker 8 She didn't want to go out and do the garden no more because...

Speaker 8 Really, she didn't have the means because Melvin kept her garden, plowed, and tilled and everything.

Speaker 8 And she would go to church, she came right back home, and she set to that window and just stabbed every day. That was the hardest thing.

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Speaker 5 Did your family come and visit you in jail?

Speaker 9 Yeah,

Speaker 9 every week.

Speaker 5 Like Curtis Reels.

Speaker 6 It'd just be my sister and my niece and my other sister, they will come, and my brothers, they will come.

Speaker 6 I hated for them to leave because I couldn't go, you know what I'm saying? And that's the only thing that kept me going. It was them and my mother.

Speaker 6 And my mother, when I would call her on the phone, she'd be crying.

Speaker 9 You don't want to see mama cry.

Speaker 6 My daddy, he would come in, he'd cuss everybody out.

Speaker 6 But that's just the way it went.

Speaker 6 I didn't want mother and my daddy to come there because every time they come

Speaker 10 and go, they will cry.

Speaker 5 Here is Melvin.

Speaker 6 And I didn't want to see him hurt like that. Because I hurt enough when you would leave.

Speaker 8 Me and a lot of other family members, we went every Monday, Tuesday, and then they split them up. We were going Wednesday or we were going both days.
I went every day that they had visiting.

Speaker 7 When I would go to visit them in jail, I literally had to put my game face on because I felt like if they saw the stress or worry or fear that that was going going to

Speaker 7 hinder them with being able to stay focused with what their plot was to just hang in there. So

Speaker 7 I had to be in a headspace of, we got this.

Speaker 7 I'm ripping and running to make sure I find someone that can accommodate us and help you get out of jail.

Speaker 7 We're fine. We're doing well.
We're just hoping that you guys can hang in there. So, and when I would leave, I'd sit in my car and cry because it was like,

Speaker 7 this is so taxing. This is so emotionally draining.

Speaker 5 Kim says she had a bad feeling. She felt like each time she visited, something bad happened.

Speaker 7 I was having nails put in my tires and the emblems on my car were being removed.

Speaker 5 Kim says she was pulled over several times for no reason.

Speaker 7 I literally had someone stop me.

Speaker 7 And I was about 20 minutes away from meeting the visitation time.

Speaker 7 and this officer, which was a black officer, stopped me at the Carter County Community College, and he said, I bet you won't make that visitation today.

Speaker 5 Melvin and Lycurtis thought they were going to spend 90 days in jail, but 90 days came and went.

Speaker 5 Melvin asked a friend to help him write a letter. It said, I've spent 91 days on a 90-day sentence, and I don't understand why.
Please explain this to me.

Speaker 5 He was told that the developer who bought his land had requested 90 days, but that the court had ignored that and chose not to put a limit on their jail time.

Speaker 5 What was the explanation for,

Speaker 5 you know, why they were being held in jail so long?

Speaker 7 From my understanding, it was a personal vendetta. That's just my personal thought.

Speaker 7 The county, the court system said that my uncles were thumbing their nose up at the judicial system, not willing to abide by the court's order to tear down their homes and leave the property.

Speaker 7 And they were never going to do that because we knew that we owned the property.

Speaker 5 About three months after Melvin and Ly Curtis were sent to jail on July 4th, The family held a birthday party for Lai Curtis on Silver Dollar Road.

Speaker 5 Mamie took a video of all the family members gathered, wishing Lai Curtis a happy birthday and saying hello to Melvin.

Speaker 5 She showed her brothers the video the next time she visited.

Speaker 2 Happy birthday, bro.

Speaker 4 I didn't say so.

Speaker 2 Happy birthday, huh?

Speaker 5 Happy birthday. At Christmas, their mother Gertrude bought presents for like Curtis and Melvin and wrapped them.
But Christmas passed and the brothers were still in jail.

Speaker 5 Kim kept trying to find a new lawyer.

Speaker 7 We were told about an attorney that was a real estate attorney who told me at the time that it was going to cost us $45,000 to retain him

Speaker 7 just to really see if he could actually accommodate us.

Speaker 7 We actually took him up on that offer, brought him cashier's check for $45,000. And from 2011 until 2015,

Speaker 7 16 timeframe, we paid him roughly $90,000 and

Speaker 7 to no avail. He pretty much said he had taken us to the valley, but couldn't get us to the mountain.
He had gone as far as he could go.

Speaker 5 The partner at Adams Creek Associates, who bought the land from Shedrick, was named Billy Dean Brown.

Speaker 5 And he knew that the Reels family, no matter how much they tried, would have a hard time proving they owned the land because Shedrick had walked away with the land at the Torrens hearing.

Speaker 5 The Torrens Act, where all Shedrick had to do was prove he owned the land to a lawyer, has been controversial for decades.

Speaker 5 A landbroker told ProPublica reporter Lizzie Presser, It's a legal way to steal land.

Speaker 5 North Carolina is one of the few states where the Torrens Act still exists.

Speaker 5 Billy Dean Brown of Adams Creek Associates was called Little Caesar by his co-workers.

Speaker 5 He spoke with a Charlotte Observer about the land on Silver Dollar Road and said, I made up my mind, I will die and burn in hell before I walk away from this thing.

Speaker 5 Mamie says at one point, the plan was to build multiple waterfront homes on the land.

Speaker 5 In jail, Ly Curtis started getting sick and was taken to the hospital. He remembers being shackled to the bed the whole time.

Speaker 5 He says the doctor told him, you need to get out of jail, that it wasn't good for his health. Later, he was diagnosed with diabetes.

Speaker 5 Sometimes Melvin and Ly Curtis would be able to see each other and talk. Sometimes they were moved into different cells and didn't see each other for months.

Speaker 5 Ly Curtis told a reporter from jail, I'm not going to give up. I don't think I'm wrong, and I'm willing to fight for it.

Speaker 5 Were you depressed in jail?

Speaker 6 I was because, you know, it seemed like it was taking too long for them to

Speaker 6 clear it up.

Speaker 5 Did you ever say to anyone or did you like, how are you still keeping us here?

Speaker 6 Yeah, I say that.

Speaker 6 Why do you keep keeping us? Where if you wanted to get out, sign this piece of paper saying you won't go back to that land.

Speaker 5 So if you had signed the paper saying, I promise I won't go back to the land, you would have been let out of jail.

Speaker 6 D say,

Speaker 6 that's what they say.

Speaker 11 I don't believe that.

Speaker 8 They were saying if they sign a paper,

Speaker 8 they could

Speaker 6 be released.

Speaker 7 Something saying they won't go back onto the property and they will tear their homes down. and leave the property for good.
That wasn't going to happen.

Speaker 5 So you thought to yourself, I can't sign this because there's no way in the world if I'm out of jail that I'm not going to go back to that land. That's right.

Speaker 11 That's right.

Speaker 6 So, why am I lie on myself sign a piece of paper that I'm going to never go back to this land and I'm not going to stay away from this land?

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Speaker 5 In 2015, a lawyer named James Harriston got a call from a friend who was a judge. She told him about a story she'd heard about two brothers serving time in jail for refusing to leave their land.

Speaker 10 And she says that, Jay, you have to help these guys.

Speaker 10 And at this time, it was close to five years. This was 2015.

Speaker 10 Latter part of 2015. Five years for civil contempt.
I'm just like, I never heard anything like that. That's crazy.
And my only, you know, contempt knowledge outside of,

Speaker 10 going through law school was, okay, you're going to lock a reporter up because they failed to give a source or something, but you stay in jail overnight, a week, you know.

Speaker 10 But you're not committed a crime.

Speaker 10 So I turn around.

Speaker 11 I'm in my office when I'm talking to her, and I'm, you know, do a little bit of research. And I'm like, oh, that's crazy.

Speaker 10 Nothing like this

Speaker 10 anywhere around. No case precedent, nothing.

Speaker 10 So I ended up eventually meeting Kim.

Speaker 10 I came down to the jail. I met Melvin and La Curtis, and I think I did that the latter part of 15 or the early part of 2016.

Speaker 5 Do you understand why Melvin and La Curtis were willing to go to jail for this?

Speaker 10 Of course.

Speaker 10 I mean, they tried the legal route.

Speaker 11 They kept trying the legal route.

Speaker 10 They went through numerous attorneys.

Speaker 11 protests at the bar, all types of stuff.

Speaker 5 James Hairston got to work on trying to get Melvin and Lai Curtis out of jail.

Speaker 5 He focused on the judge's order that the brothers tear down their own homes before vacating the land.

Speaker 10 But they can't, they've been in jail for by this time, five plus years. They had no income, you know, nothing.
So you can't keep somebody in jail if they can't purge themselves of the contempt.

Speaker 10 They're looking at an effective life sentence. They stay in jail for the rest of their lives.

Speaker 11 I mean, I don't think they even had a traffic ticket. Never committed a crime in their lives.
This was their life down on that water.

Speaker 5 James argued Melvin and Lai Curtis's case in front of the North Carolina Supreme Court.

Speaker 5 He remembers that a lawyer for Adams Creek Associates argued that even if Melvin and Lai Curtis couldn't clear their land from jail, they could sign something saying they acknowledged that Adams Creek Associates owned the land, that they wouldn't go back on the land, and that would get them out of jail.

Speaker 5 But James Harriston argued that wasn't reasonable.

Speaker 11 You can't, none of you have the power nor the authority to force somebody to say something that they're otherwise inclined not to say, to sign something that they're otherwise inclined not to do.

Speaker 11 I mean, that's the reason that they're in there right now.

Speaker 10 I mean, you can't take their convictions and, you know, make them do something that they don't want to do.

Speaker 11 Whether or not you agree with it or not. I mean, that's a rank and egregious violation of the First Amendment.

Speaker 5 After the Supreme Court heard their case, they sent it back down to the Carter County Court. This time, the judge ruled on the Reels family side.

Speaker 5 Melvin and Lycurtis would finally be able to return to Silver Dollar Road.

Speaker 5 They'd been in jail for seven years and 11 months.

Speaker 7 And I think at that point was where this judge said, I'm not going to get involved in this. I'm not holding these men here.
They should have been released a long time ago.

Speaker 7 I'm not going to be a part of the good old boy network. I'm going to do what's right and release these gentlemen.

Speaker 5 What was it like driving down Silver Dollar

Speaker 5 for the first time after eight years?

Speaker 6 Oh, boy, I'm going to tell you: when I drove and Mimi Con picked me up,

Speaker 6 I felt like a brand new person. You know what I'm saying? To be back home.

Speaker 6 Oh, man, that was amazing. I really had to shade a tear.

Speaker 6 It was a good, it was a great day.

Speaker 8 That was better than Christmas because

Speaker 8 my father, I was, helped take care of him and looked out for him. And every month he would say, Mammy, he called me Mammy.
He said, I don't know if I can hold on to them boys get out of jail.

Speaker 8 I said, Pop, you got to hold on.

Speaker 8 And

Speaker 8 he did.

Speaker 8 When they got out of jail, He told me, he says, Mammy, he said, I'm ready to go now. I'm ready to go.
My boys is out of jail. He says, and I'm ready to go.
I'm tired. I'm sick.
I'm ready to go.

Speaker 8 And he did. But that was a happy time because my mother was beginning to get herself together.
My dad had lived to see them get out.

Speaker 5 What's next? I mean, where is the process now?

Speaker 8 Right now,

Speaker 8 I really,

Speaker 8 we really don't know

Speaker 8 because

Speaker 8 we've been told so much, hoped for so much.

Speaker 5 Adams Creek Associates eventually sold the land to another developer. If the developer builds on the land, Mamie is worried about property taxes going up.

Speaker 5 Are you worried about the rest of the land, about losing it all?

Speaker 8 Yes,

Speaker 8 because

Speaker 8 you have family.

Speaker 6 who

Speaker 8 can't afford the rent nowadays and they wanting to move back home, but it's nowhere for them to come.

Speaker 5 Mamie also worries about what happens when her mother, Gertrude, dies. She's 97 now.

Speaker 5 She's one of two of Mitchell's children, still alive. As her siblings have died, their stake in the property transfers to all of their children.

Speaker 5 expanding the number of people who own stakes of the land, potentially making the land even more vulnerable.

Speaker 5 With heirs' property, a single stakeholder could choose to sell and trigger the sale of the entire land.

Speaker 5 As reporter Lizzie Presser puts it, if one heir decides to sell, quote, the whole property would likely go to auction at a price that none of them could pay.

Speaker 5 Mamie says she doesn't know if the next generations will continue fighting for Silver Dollar Road,

Speaker 5 but she hopes they will.

Speaker 5 Her niece Kim still brings her grandchildren to the land.

Speaker 7 Now, my grandchildren who don't live in the area, their father's military,

Speaker 7 but when they come here, it's like we rip and run. They walk, we walk to the water, but we don't let them go on.
We kind of stay on the sandy beach area where the road kind of connects.

Speaker 5 They don't go on the beach because they don't own the waterfront anymore, but they still own the rest of the land.

Speaker 7 But they're in awe when they say, we own this, we own this so much. It's,

Speaker 7 I don't know, it's our lineage, it's our heritage,

Speaker 7 it's our everything.

Speaker 5 What do you hope for the future of this land? What do you hope happens here?

Speaker 6 Did I be able to go back to my house and Mel go back to the club?

Speaker 5 Do you have a favorite part of this land?

Speaker 6 Yeah, right there with my house at.

Speaker 5 So your house is right there.

Speaker 11 Yeah, that's my house over there.

Speaker 5 Can you go in it?

Speaker 6 Well, my lawyer told me don't go in it right now until we get this clear. And then you can go on back over there.

Speaker 5 So you can look at your house right now. We can see your house, but you can't go in it.

Speaker 6 No, he told me don't go in it.

Speaker 2 Not right now.

Speaker 5 That must be hard.

Speaker 6 I mean, you know, I come by there some days and I sit out there through the driveway

Speaker 6 and I cry.

Speaker 4 Do you plan to die on this land?

Speaker 6 Yes.

Speaker 6 I'll be buried on this land.

Speaker 11 Yeah,

Speaker 6 we've got three cemeteries.

Speaker 6 I can pick out what one I want to go to, and they'll put me there.

Speaker 5 Criminal is created by Lauren Spohr and me. Nadia Wilson is our senior producer.
Katie Bishop is our supervising producer.

Speaker 5 Our producers are Susannah Robertson, Jackie Segico, Lily Clark, Lena Sillison, and Megan Kinnane. Our show is mixed and engineered by Veronica Simonetti.
Special thanks to Ruth Robertson.

Speaker 5 Julian Alexander makes original illustrations for each episode of Criminal. You can see them at thisiscriminal.com.

Speaker 5 For more on the Reels family story, you can read Lizzie Presser's article, Their Family Bought Land One Generation After Slavery. The Reels brothers spent eight years in jail for refusing to leave it.

Speaker 5 We'll have a link in the show notes. And you can sign up for a newsletter at thisiscriminal.com slash newsletter.

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Speaker 5 Once you're signed up, you can listen to criminal episodes without any ads, and you'll get bonus episodes with me and criminal co-creator Lauren Spohr too.

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I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal.

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