Thomas Merritt - On the theft of his family land (clip)

MCJC Staff: “So what happened to the land?”

Thomas Merritt: “Well, a lady came by and she had some papers and she tried to get my grandmother to sign them. So she forged her signature on them and she took the land. And I think she felt guilty. And my brother knew the whole story about what had happened, and how she had taken the land and had donated to the university. And so, I mean, it was painful even until the day my dad died, you know, he talked about that all the time. Because they, the people that gave them the land, thought he sold the land. And he tried to tell them ‘no’ he didn’t sell the land, but they didn’t want to hear that, they just knew he sold it. But he didn’t sell the land, didn’t sell it (). They were holding on because they knew the value they had and everything like that. But until he died, I mean, the tears. We’d get together at Christmas, he had pulled out a map. We’ve been looking for that map of the land and the story behind that. But when he died he was still angry about that. ‘We didn’t sell that land’. It was ingrained in his heart to lose something that big and things like that. So it was a pain to him, a pain to us, [chuckles] you know. You still have a lot of other people in this area that held on. But back then, thievery. You come down, you do whatever you can to steal land…take what we had.”

MCJC Staff: “Can you tell us more about that – back then there was a lot of thievery, that this was a common practice?”

Thomas Merritt: “From what I understand, yes. The key to that is knowing that Blacks were not educated to the point of understanding the laws and things of that nature. So, trickery and thievery through laws, a lot of it was taken that way. Some of it was just plain stolen. They’ll come and give you one hundred dollars; say they’ll just pay you for the land. There were some things you hear about from other people, the things they had gone through.”