Inherit the Land

At the turn of the 20th century, two wealthy antebellum white sisters in Marvin, N.C., wrote a will leaving their 800-acrehomeplace to Bob Ross, a Black man, and his daughter Mittie Bell Ross Houston who had grown up in their home. Maggie and Sallie Ross made the bequest while violence, voter suppression and newly erected Confederate monuments to white supremacy dominated race relations in the culture around them. When the will was revealed, more than 100 of their cousins challenged it, asserting that the bequest proved that Maggie Ross was mentally incompetent to make a will. Two white juries in Monroe, N.C., upheld the will in the 1920s. The Charlotte Observer wrote, "Perhaps not greater temptation was ever placed before a jury to break a will, but it made bold to establish justice for Negroes and write a triumph for the law." Their significant participation in the cotton economy empowered other Black families to become landowning farmers and led to generations of unbroken racial harmony in the rural community that endures today. Inherit the Land, based on the 2006 history Inherit the Land: Jim Crow Meets Miss Maggie's Will, tells the story from its 19th-century origins to the present.