Oscar-nominated writer/director Raoul Peck’s latest documentary, Silver Dollar Road, focuses on Elijah Reels, a black American who — after the Civil War — purchased “65 marshy acres that ran along Silver Dollar Road, from the woods to the river’s sandy shore” in Carteret County, on the central coast of North Carolina. As Lizzie Presser detailed in her 2019 ProPublica article “Kicked Off the Land,” copublished by the New Yorker, the property soon became a refuge for the extended Reels family, and on his deathbed Elijah Reels, the family patriarch, exhorted his relatives: “Whatever you do, don’t let the white man take our land.”

Over the decades the Reels enjoyed their very own beach — at a time when black Americans were banned from most sands in the segregated South — and pursued livelihoods as commercial fishermen, shrimpers, and farmers. But in time, the waterfront property near the eponymous Silver Dollar Road became extremely valuable and coveted by white interests. Legal machinations were used to strip away the family’s property, and two brothers, Melvin Davis and Licurtis Reels, were arrested for trespassing on their legacy land, which had been in the family for generations. Remarkably, they ended up serving eight years behind bars, “becoming two of the longest-serving inmates for civil contempt in U.S. history,” as Presser noted.

But as Peck chronicles in his documentary Silver Dollar Road, the Reels family remained united and persisted in their support of their incarcerated kinfolk. They continued the struggle in the streets with civil rights demonstrations and in the courts of Beaufort, the Carteret County seat, fighting for their relatives’ liberty — and for their land.