A multi-generational Black family embraces on the porch of a painted wood house. They smile and hold each other.
Image Credit: SeventyFour on iStock

Note: This article was updated on July 22, 2026.

In March 2025, 14 women stood on the porch of a new home in Selma, AL. Their names were entered into a raffle that selects from a specific group of unhoused families who are in need. Unlike random selection methods, these 14 women were chosen from a mix of families experiencing homelessness, housing instability, or extreme economic hardship—seen by the system as deserving access to land.

“You can’t repair without repaying as well. He who controls the land controls the wealth. God isn’t giving us any more land. It’s all we have.”

Desiree McGuire, who was experiencing homelessness, was among those selected and offered a life-changing opportunity supported by the Black Belt Community Foundation (BBCF). The BBCF organized and sponsored the construction of homes built in a Selma community that had been destroyed during a tornado in 2023. Then the BBCF, the Selma Housing Authority, and NACA, the Neighborhood Assistance Corporation of America, worked together to change the financial situation and offer homes for people who never had one.

“The check that was written to us 250 years ago bounced,” Christopher Spencer, president and CEO of BBCF, said of the US government’s promise of equality and independence and what that promise has meant for the Black communities he serves.

He speaks not as a protestor, but as a pastor, as a CEO, and as a son of Sumter County. For 22 years as a community volunteer, he has seen the gap between promise and payment grow. He believes wholeheartedly that providing housing security works best to close that gap. He has driven the 146 miles needed to do the work for his community—one house, one grant, and one listening session at a time.

“You can’t repair without repaying as well,” he said. “It’s more than just a check. He who controls the land controls the wealth. God isn’t giving us any more land. It’s all we have.”

“The individuals who lived through these experiences, when their land was stolen through racially motivated means, they are the proof. They are sometimes the only proof left.”

Affordable Homeownership in the Black Belt

There is a model that is helping BBCF and other organizations to create affordable homeownership in the Black Belt: community land trusts. This model has roots in a civil rights initiative from 1969, not a policy paper or foundation board room. It came from Lee County, GA, when civil rights advocates posed a question that deserves answering in this day and age: how can people be truly free if they cannot control the land that they hold citizenship to?

Shirley Sherrod, cofounder of New Communities Inc., described the logic plainly in a 2024 interview with Enterprise Community Partners: “As we were helping people to exercise their rights, they would get kicked off the land owned by White people. Our goal was to try to acquire land so that we would never lose it. And that’s why we chose the community land trust model so that we would all own it together. No one person could mortgage anything so that we could lose it.”

New Communities became the first community land trust in the United States and was once the largest Black-owned landholding. That is, until 1985, when New Communities lost their 5,735 acres to foreclosure because the US Department of Agriculture denied subsequent requests for emergency loans after years of drought. New Communities decided to fight back and received $12.8 million as the largest award to a single claimant in the federal Black farmers discrimination settlement process. This settlement affirmed the land was taken through alternative means.

Kavon Ward, the founder of Where Is My Land, has spent years after the Bruce’s Beach victory that returned lost land to Black heirs in California, trying to understand land return for the hundreds of families, primarily from the rural South, that have contacted her. What she found was not land lost to eminent domain like Bruce Beach; it was something older and more difficult to define.

“In the beginning of the 20th century, Black people owned about 15 million acres of land,” Ward said in an interview with NPQ. “By the end of the 20th century, 90 percent of that land was gone.”

Heirs’ property laws and predatory partition sales forced out co-owners of the land. Violence completed that process. And when families tried to prove what was taken, the record of that was gone too.

“The individuals who lived through these experiences, when their land was stolen through racially motivated means, they are the proof,” Ward said. “They are sometimes the only proof left.”

She means that literally since, often, oral histories are the only record that survives. Deeds were burned. Communities were burned. Sometimes the absence of evidence is itself evidence of what was done.

“If you took the land,” Ward said, “the repair was returning it. It was just that simple.”

That journey from simplicity to genuine return is neither direct nor accelerated. SB 796 of California created Bruce’s Beach return framework. The larger SB 1050, which Ward helped draft to further those protections beyond the boundaries of the Bruce’s Beach framework, was passed in both chambers of California’s legislature but was vetoed by Governor Newsom in September 2024.

“If you go to the negotiation table with what is legally possible in mind, I think you fail,” she said. “But if you go with faith and the understanding that you are appealing to morality, then I think that gives you more to negotiate with.”

Faith and Fundraising

Spencer restates a similar argument from the Black Belt to illustrate a strategy that assumes the dominant legal framework is not the most that can be achieved.

One such structural example is the BBCF’s Community Associates network. These local leaders are found in each of the 12 counties BBCF provides services to. They help raise funds that BBCF matches and serve on grant committees to decide where those funds go. BBCF’s 2025 Annual Report lists 141 grants awarded to 126 organizations for a total of $344,447. More than half the funding came from the community, and the community decides where each allocation goes.

“We operate on faith each and every day,” Spencer said.

That belief is not something questionable. BBCF does not have a big enough endowment to run at a surplus and cover core operations, but it requires a yearly organizational act of faith that when the work is done, payoff will follow, eventually.

BBCF also showed the best of its works in the 2025 Annual Report. A federal government shutdown in November of 2025 caused disruptions and triggered the need for a food stamp replacement. BBCF responded within days. Wilcox County partners provided 255 bags of food and 276 meat packs. The church’s role was essential and supportive. Pastors were the ones driving the forklifts, and church warehouses served as distribution nodes.

There is no metaphor for hope in logistics in the Black Belt.

Spencer is currently also working with the Southern Federation of Cooperatives on heirs’ property cases as families are still losing land to the same legal loopholes that New Communities had to deal with.

“I feel like other people are 250 years ahead of us,” he said. “Which means we have to run faster to catch up.”

The 250th anniversary is loud, but the repair is quiet, specific, and ongoing.

The community land trust model provides security for land as a shared resource, removing possible speculation by predatory lenders and hoarding by government officials. For example, a government official may offer an emergency loan to a family in crisis or may not, depending on their evaluation of the family and the assumed worthiness of the family to receive the loan. With the community land trust model, the loss of security of land is prevented and ensures that access to land is not inequitable.

The selection of McGuire as a home recipient in Selma was the product of the community land trust model, after 22 years of the combined efforts of the BBCF, allied institutions, and community members. Unlike random selection methods, 14 women were chosen from a target group of families that enrolled their children in Head Start program. The success of the model was the answer developed by those who continued to work beyond the civil rights movement, to the question of how to guarantee the defense of rights without losing one’s land.

New Communities, the BBCF, the heirs’ property cases initiated by the Federation of Southern Cooperatives, families served by Ward, and every grant a Community Associate in Wilcox County votes to fund, are examples of self-determination.

“We need a certified check,” Spencer said. “Reparations are needed, but we need a lot more than just a payment in the Black Belt. We need a commitment along with it.”

The 250th anniversary is loud, but the repair is quiet, specific, and ongoing.

The check that was written in 1776 bounced, but the one being written now, county by county, family by family, porch by porch, is being written by people who have learned not to trust a promise without a structure behind it.

They are building that structure.