Embattled Chicago IBEW Member Fights On Against Big Oil For Family Legacy

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'Shady down south stuff'



BY MARY MITCHELL, CHICAGO SUN-TIMES COLUMNIST, February 20, 2005

Jerry Rankin figured nothing less was at stake than his family's lost heritage when he flew to Jackson, Miss., that September day in 2003.

The Harrington Oil Company had taken over operations of an old oil well in Fayette Field, on land that Rankin family members in Mississippi had long been fighting to prove was theirs. Rankin and others in the Chicago branch of the family had learned only recently that they, too, might have a stake in the land in Fayette, Miss., and to a portion of oil royalties that could be in the millions of dollars.

So they scraped together $7,000 for plane tickets for Jerry Rankin, his sister Annie Rankin Marsh, her son Seneca Johnson, and the Rev. Larry Bullock, former head of the South Side branch of the NAACP.

It was a hefty sum, one they're still paying off a year and a half later. And everyone had doubts about their chances for success. But Jerry Rankin -- a business representative for an International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers local in Chicago who is also an associate minister at his church -- stood before the Mississippi State Oil and Gas Board and felt a rush of courage.

"One handful of dream-dust. Not for sale." -- Langston Hughes



"I was prepared to take on the uncertainty," he says. "To fight over what was given to us through our great-grandparents 100 years ago."

Though the board decided the matter of who properly holds title to the land should be decided by the courts, the oil company said it might agree to put aside some of its profits from the property until that happens. Then, when the Rankins went to see the property for themselves, they saw something that made them smile: The well wasn't pumping.

Says Rankin: "I felt we were successful in preventing them from drilling in the land that was in dispute."

No one in the family even knows how the land came to be purchased, free and clear, by former slaves Lucinda and James Rankin in 1903. One story is that she and her sisters inherited the plot of about 40 acres of good Mississippi farmland from a slave-master and that Lucinda bought out her sisters' shares.

But now this dream dust was within reach, Jerry Rankin thought. And there was no turning back.

A common problem

In Mississippi, disputes over land bought with the sweat of African Americans are so common, a Chicago law professor has coined a term for it.

"We call it 'shady down South stuff,' " says Ray Waters, who teaches at DePaul University and is the founder of the Reclamation of Southern Assets project, an organization that brings law students from the South to work with Chicago residents on asserting their interest in land back home.

Waters hasn't reviewed details of the Rankins' claim. But he says the mass migration of blacks from Mississippi to Chicago has resulted in many such disputes involving splits between would-be heirs here and those down South. "Migration," says Waters, "messed up land interest.

"You have people who have remained in the South who may have some interest in the land, and there are people who are up North who also have the same or similar interest in the land. People who remain in the South think they have a higher interest in the land than people up North. That is not the case."

Records show that, on Nov. 15, 1903, around the time John D. Rockefeller began donating large sums of his fortune to train black teachers for Southern schools, Lucinda Rankin paid $7 for the Mississippi acreage, described, in part, as "one corner being a large gum tree and one corner on the west being a willow tree."

Today, a lot of young black people don't see why they should own their own home before they buy an Escalade. But, just 38 years out of slavery, Lucinda and James Rankin knew the way to prosper in America was to own land. And they dared to believe that they could pass their property -- and their prosperity -- to a future generation.

They largely succeeded. Still, the Rankins had just one dream but 15 children to spread it among. Some of the couple's descendants have never even stepped foot on the land, despite long hearing from their parents that one day, if they ever wanted, a piece of it would be theirs.

"We always assumed that we could go home," says James Rankin, one of the Chicago descendants.

But, beyond the dispute with the oil companies, there are the strained relations between the Chicago and Mississippi branches of the family, between those who stayed put -- who paid the taxes, put up the fences, kept an eye out -- and those who left. Last summer, when two of the Chicago relatives showed up in Mississippi asking questions, one of their Mississippi cousins threatened to greet them with a shotgun.

James Rankin accuses his relatives down South of "jealously lusting after that land." He says they "didn't want us to know that we were rich in property."

He was especially surprised that, when family there went to court against the oil company, they didn't list his father, Jeff Rankin, among the children and heirs of Lucinda and James Rankin.

Today, the Chicago and Mississippi Rankins are struggling to trust each other. The family here didn't even lay eyes on the land until two years ago. Now, they've gone in together -- even taking out a loan -- to pay back real-estate taxes.

Still, they can't help but wonder: Is any of that "shady down South stuff" still going on?

Putting wings to a dream

Many of us assume everyone who migrated from the South was running from poverty. But, in the early 1900s, blacks in the South owned more than 15 million acres, according to a 2001 investigation by the Associated Press. "Today, blacks own only about 1.1 million acres," says Dolores Barclay, one of the reporters who worked on the series. "That's out of more than 1 billion arable acres of land in the U.S."

The AP stories documented that thousands of blacks were intimidated, threatened, beaten and even lynched in the early 1900s in an effort to block them from owning land in the South.

When I first sat down with members of the Chicago Rankin clan, I didn't know what to make of their story. My own grandparents, on both sides, were sharecroppers. I grew up hearing about how miserable it was to toil in the cotton fields. I found it hard to believe that these people, some of them my Maywood neighbors, could be oil-rich heirs.

But a story that made national headlines last year jarred me. On April 23, Roy Veal, a Seattle man, was found hanging in the woods from a tree in Woodville, a small Mississippi town a few hundred miles from the Rankin land. Veal had gone to Mississippi to help his mother fight a lawsuit brought by two white men who claimed title to land that had been in Veal's mother's family since 1926. Veal's family believed the whites who were trying to take the land thought they would find oil.

When the story broke, Seneca Johnson, a 22-year-old great-great-grandson of Lucinda and James Rankins, called me, nearly hysterical. "The same thing could happen to his family," Johnson insisted.

Mississippi authorities ultimately concluded that Veal's death was a suicide. Still, it wasn't his death that was so stunning. It was the notion that anyone could think it was over land.

By that time, Jerry Rankin, James Rankin and Seneca's mother, Annie Rankin Marsh, already had traveled to the Mississippi courthouse and searched through tattered volumes of deeds looking for proof that the oil companies cheated them. "Pages were torn out of books," Annie Rankin Marsh says. "It was unbelievable."

She says her family's quest isn't only about the chance to build a home in the South. The Rankins already have nice homes. It's about recovering lost wealth that Lucinda and James Rankins tried to leave all of their children. If the Rankins could prove that oil companies have been pumping oil off their Mississippi inheritance for 40 years and not paying the rightful owners of the land a dime, it would put wings on their ancestors' dream.

The patriarch

Jeff Rankin was just 15 when he left acres of paid-for land in Mississippi to come to Chicago. The year was 1934. A decade later, historian St. Clair Drake would describe the city as "a narrow tongue of land . . . where more than 300,000 Negroes are packed solidly."

Nearly one-fourth of urban blacks were on relief. Like many new arrivals in his day, Jeff Rankin worked in the steel mills. When the mill where he worked closed, he turned to construction. When he couldn't find construction jobs, he went to work as a gas-station attendant, raising 13 kids with his wife.

Before he could afford to buy his own home, he moved his family to apartments in South Chicago, Englewood and finally to the Robert Taylor Homes.

Meanwhile, his Mississippi relatives -- eight families in all -- built modern homes in Fayette, Miss., on the land passed down by Lucinda and James Rankin.

"I used to hear my dad and mom say that my grandfather had enough land for each of us to build a house," Annie Rankin Marsh says. "It didn't sink in. It went in one ear and out the other."

Her oldest brother, James, says: "My daddy Jeff told us repeatedly that any time any of us kids decided to build a house down there, we could go home. He told us his father had purchased land enough for us to come home and build a house at our discretion."

Jeff Rankin never went back to live in Mississippi.

Meeting the father

When I went to see Jeff Rankin at his South Side home, his son Jerry was upstairs helping his father get dressed. The son made several trips up and downstairs. One time he grabbed a white shirt still wrapped in cellophane. Another time, he snatched a pair of navy blue pants. Finally, he was satisfied with his dad's appearance.

Downstairs, Angela Rankin put on a pot of coffee and set out a plate of doughnuts. None of the Chicago siblings grew up in the South. But they spent summers with their mother's relatives in Natchez, and it was obvious they'd picked up good Southern manners.

I tried to get Jeff to talk about growing up in Mississippi. But, at 87, it's hard for him to remember. "Mississippi got to me," is all he would say as he settled in to a big armchair.

It's probably just as well that Jeff Rankin has forgotten. It allows him peace. But it's clear his children understand that fighting for the land isn't just about what happened in the past. It's about what will happen in the future.

His family is determined to sort through every dusty deed, survey, plat and oil lease in the Jefferson County, Miss., Courthouse to find anything that might help prove their case. The web of claims to the land is so convoluted, I'm not sure this puzzle will ever be solved. The Rankins aren't, either.

So why fight? If they could prove that several oil companies cheated their Southern relatives out of profits from oil wells on Rankin land, they figure it would be a victory not just for them, but also for every black person who couldn't fight such a battle.

"I couldn't believe what I was seeing when I saw the land," Annie Rankin Marsh says. "What really took me for a loop was to see a well. I'd seen pictures of them, and I'd seen them from the highway at a distance. But to be able to stand there and say this is supposed to be yours, I felt like crying."

I listened, and I knew: I'd have to see it for myself.

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