Descendants of Slave Charge Swindle by Texas Whites : Long Quest Harvests a Tale of Lost Land

Growing up in rural east Texas in the 1930s, Jeanette Adkins often heard her father describe how unknown white men had swindled the family out of most of the huge swath of land that her great-grandfather, a former slave, had settled here after the Civil War.

It was a tale told with resignation. A black in Texas, one relative philosophized, was “like a man with a shotgun and no shells--he can’t shoot.”

Adkins eventually married and left Texas for the San Fernando Valley and then Gardena, where she ran beauty shops and raised three children. But she could never shake the ghost of her great-grandfather, Anderson Willis.

She was approaching middle age when she and her sister, Loraine Watson of Dallas, decided to try to nail down the legend once and for all.

“Not for money, but because this was our heritage,” Adkins explained.

But what began as a simple search of public records soon turned into a giant historical jigsaw puzzle. Adkins began flying back to Dallas three and four times a year, then driving 80 miles south to spend weeks at a time poring over thousands of deeds, liens and lawsuits in the Freestone County courthouse.

It took the better part of a decade before the sisters became convinced that the family stories were true--that Anderson Willis’ land had been stolen with a pencil, and that some of it had wound up in the hands of some of Freestone County’s more prominent white citizens.

Armed with boxes of photocopied documents, they persuaded a skeptical Dallas lawyer to file a federal civil rights suit against the county and two dozen property owners.

And this summer, 14 years after she started trying to unravel the mystery, Jeanette Adkins expects to fly once again to Texas, headed this time for U.S. District Court in Waco.

There she will watch her attorney argue that 2,986 acres of softly sloping, mostly vacant pastureland--including a family cemetery, now fenced and gated shut by the current owner--should be deeded back to the Willises.

The case has attracted support from the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, a national civil rights group that characterizes it as an example of how land was taken from blacks throughout the South by unscrupulous whites who controlled land records and courts in the days of segregation.

According to the Federation of Southern Cooperatives Land Assistance Fund, which offers legal assistance to rural black landowners, such fraud is one of the reasons why black ownership of farmland in the United States has fallen from 16 million acres in the 1930s to 4.5 million acres today.

Adkins, an energetic 63-year-old great-grandmother with a patient manner and a soft, articulate voice, has won praise for her doggedness.

A Strong Commitment

“I’ve never seen anyone more committed in a case like this,” said E. Randel T. Osburn, SCLC’s director of affiliate chapters.

“Jeanette and Loraine stayed with this when everybody else in the family had given up,” said Bill Willis, a cousin who lives in Dallas. “The whole family owes them a big debt.”

The lawsuit is a legal long shot. For one thing, it was filed long after Texas’ 25-year statute of limitations had expired. For another, the family has never been able to find deeds showing that Anderson Willis bought the land the Willises lived on. And, finally, the suit fails to accuse specific individuals of specific misdeeds. It merely states that “certain white citizens” defrauded Anderson Willis at a time when blacks in Texas were subjected to a “system of divestment and terrorism.”

Nevertheless, to the Willis family the suit is a cathartic explosion with as much symbolic power as “Roots,” the chronicle of African genealogy that Alex Haley began writing the same year that Adkins and Watson started their research.

“Win or lose, this will do something to right the injustice,” Adkins said recently as she walked across the weed-choked clearing where Anderson Willis once lived and near where she was born.

‘There Are Our Roots’

“These are our roots. Alex Haley was able to go back to Africa. We cannot go back that far. Our history stops at Anderson Willis. The least we should do for him is try to rectify a wrong he wasn’t able to do anything about.”

Defense attorneys contend that their clients, none of whom live on the property, have proof of purchase and are not responsible for previous transactions.

“Just as a lay person, I have no idea who was on the property I own 100 years ago, and I’d hate to lose my house because of it,” said Frank McCowan, an attorney representing the trust fund of a family that in 1910 bought 350 acres of the land claimed by the Willises.

The Willis suit relies heavily on east Texas’ history as a mean place for blacks. Arguing circumstantially, it contends that long after the Civil War, Freestone County’s government officials and businessmen institutionalized the roles of slave and master and never took the clamps off, so that a black man fortunate enough to buy land had no way of knowing if records were being altered or documents forged behind his back.

The county, bisected by the road between Dallas and Houston, saw its fine plantations wither after Texas’ slaves were freed in 1865, and the local whites were bitter, historians say.

Threats Against Blacks

A few months after emancipation, a large group of white Freestone County citizens passed a general resolution vowing to whip any black who tried to contract with whites for work--and any whites who hired blacks. In parts of Texas, newspaper editors branded the sale of land to blacks treasonable.

Willis family members tell how one of Anderson Willis’ grandsons was murdered on the family’s land in the 1920s by a white man over a disputed claim to a horse, and how the wife of another grandson died in the 1960s after sheriff’s deputies evicted her and her husband from the land.

Today about 20% of the county’s 14,000 residents are black. “People get along as long as everyone stays in their place,” said Joe Reavis, the young publisher of the Fairfield Recorder in the county seat a few miles west of Butler. “But people here still carry the Civil War around with them. . . . I’m one of the few people down here who don’t say ‘nigger.’ ”

The lawsuit has galvanized the Willis family. Three-hundred relatives now gather each June for a commemorative picnic. They meet regularly and contribute money for legal fees. And they continue to visit the oft-vandalized family cemetery that Anderson Willis established on a hilltop.

“Locking up our land,” a younger member of the family said angrily on a recent day as he used bolt-cutters to sever a wire lock on the gate to the graveyard. (Ironically, the graveyard property is now owned by another black family.)

Most of the Willises have moved away from Butler, although two families have remained on the land, one by repurchasing some of it and the other by claiming title through “adverse possession,” in which a resident claims continuous use of another’s land.

A while back, one family member pastured a horse on part of the property. The parcel’s current owner persuaded Freestone County to file a trespassing charge. In court, prosecutor Bob Gage took pains to weaken the image of the Willises as a defenseless group of victimized blacks.

“I’d rather be in a pit with 20 rattlesnakes than tangle with the Anderson Willis group,” Gage told the judge.

Of Anderson Willis himself, little is known.

According to stories handed down through the Willis family, he was born in Virginia to parents brought from Africa and sold to an owner in Alabama as a young man. After the Civil War, in his mid-50s, he made his way to Texas, bringing with him an unusual amount of money--”a chest of gold” is the way Adkins remembers hearing it.

He began buying land in Freestone County in 1869, according to one of the documents Adkins found, in an era in which only one in 100 blacks owned property in Texas and even the most prosperous blacks owned no more than a few hundred acres.

Adkins had been told that her great-grandfather purchased enough land to create large home sites for 12 children and himself. But in her research, she found that Freestone County records showed him paying taxes on only 412 acres.

Certainly, she thought, remembering her childhood on the expansive land, marked by red-clay roads and elm, willow and pine trees, he owned more than that.

She and her sister visited the state General Land Office in Austin and began checking other records and saw the Willis name appearing more frequently.

Still, “the records just didn’t match up with what we knew,” she said. “We know he had more land than that.”

A formal survey of the traditional boundaries of the Willis land, as remembered by 82-year-old Chavous Willis, a great-grandson who still lives on the land, measured the property at 2,986 acres, as claimed in the suit. The most the sisters could find associated with Anderson Willis was 732 acres.

Defense attorneys say that’s because Anderson Willis probably squatted on most of the land rather than purchasing it. The Willises say it’s because Freestone County government officials probably refused to record most of the purchases or altered documents to let whites claim it.

With that hypothesis in mind, the sisters began looking for inconsistencies.

Deeds to Children

They found one in a series of transfers in 1899 in which Willis deeded more than 400 acres of his property to five of his children in exchange for promissory notes. The sisters found records saying that the notes were subsequently sold by Willis to Fairfield businessmen in exchange for feed and grain. These notes were traded on several other occasions until one businessman--contending Willis still owed him money--foreclosed on the property in 1904.

But no one in the family had ever talked about Anderson Willis deeding property to his children, or borrowing money against the land. The notes had to be phony, the sisters decided, forged in order to steal land.

They found another inconsistency in a document that featured the flowing hand-written signature of Willis. By all accounts, Willis could not read or write. All other documents bearing his name were signed with an “X,” the sisters said.

For Adkins, searching the records was often a numbing, draining experience. In an effort to track Anderson Willis’ parents, she went through county records in Alabama, but came up empty. “That has really made me cry sometimes,” she said.

She had several unpleasant encounters with the county assessor, Patsy Stroud, during her records search, and when Stroud dropped a heavy records book on her hand a few months after the family’s lawsuit was filed, Adkins sued her for assault, but lost a jury trial.

Recorded in Her Sleep

Adkins’ mind became a dictionary of Freestone County at the turn of the century. (“I don’t need to look at the documents anymore. You can wake me up at midnight to ask me a question and I can tell what page to look on.”) The men she suspected of exploiting her great-grandfather’s ignorance seemed lifelike. (“I could almost reach out and choke them.”)

The sisters’ attorney, Donald Hicks, said their research uncovered a public record so contradictory that there is no reason to believe any of it.

“Title to this land is clouded by fraud and civil rights violations,” he said.

“It’s very difficult for white people to understand that this could have happened,” said Hicks, 36, a black Texas native. “You have to live where your mother tells you you can’t talk back to that white man if he wants to take your car.”

Throughout the South, said SCLC official Osburn, blacks have been plagued by a tradition of county officials “notifying whites when their property taxes were due but not notifying blacks and then selling the property owned by blacks for the taxes. So you get 100 acres of land for $23. Naturally, anyone who has that information on the inside is not going to let it happen on its own. (White officials) have members of their families buy it.”

‘Owner Unknown’

Some of the Willis land fell into the hands of Freestone County officials and their families. Robert Compton, the county clerk in the 1880s and founder of a local abstract company that compiled documents on every piece of land, successfully petitioned for ownership of some Willis property that was classified as “owner unknown.” H.B. Steward, who bought part-interest in Compton’s abstract company and was later a Texas state legislator and oil company lobbyist, held a note against other Willis family acreage. The land was later bought by another member of the Steward family.

W.A. Kiels, an attorney representing the Compton estate and the Steward descendants, declined to discuss the case.

After Anderson Willis died in 1917 at the age of 105, some whites began filing legal claims on the property. But, according to the family, no effort was made to evict any of the Willises, who knew nothing of the transactions the whites claimed gave them title.

In the following decade, several of the new property owners filed documents that returned the land to the Willises but assigned subsurface rights for minerals, oil and gas to others, Adkins said.

“We found out about that when we did the research,” she said. “The family never knew anything about the land being taken away or returned or about the mineral rights. As a result, they stayed on the property.”

Voluntarily, the various Willis families began moving off the land in the 1940s--most of them to Dallas--without ever learning of the manipulation of records, Adkins contends.

It is a thought that still angers her and that helped motivate her when she felt like giving up, she said.

“Sometimes Loraine and I would be coming back from the archives in Austin; Loraine would be driving and I’d be reading the tidbits we’d collected, and sometimes we’d be almost back to Dallas when I’d find something, and we’d turn the car around and drive back to Austin, spend the night there and go to the archives the next morning.”