In 2011, after a 26-year career in the U.S. Army, Lloyd Byrd heard his ancestors calling.
He bought some goats and chickens and planted a vegetable garden. Amid pines where cicadas chirp and red-tailed hawks hunt, Byrd took up a life that would have been familiar to his great-grandfather, one of the first Black farmers to inherit land in Liberty County over a century ago.
Yet his dream of restoring his family farm quickly turned into an administrative and legal quagmire far too common for Georgia’s Black families. While his family held long memories of work and life at the Riceboro homestead, neither the county nor state government had a recorded title to those lands.
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