Lee Perry has made it his life’s mission to educate Texans about their mineral rights. Black Americans once owned more than 15 million acres of land and mineral rights, and now only own one million acres. Those landowners do not know the value of the land they possess.
You may have a million dollars sitting on the table that’s yours right now. You don’t even know.
Lee Perry
Perry began his career in the oil and gas industry, which changed the course of his life. In 1978, he became an independent joint venture auditor, shifting his work from helping companies to helping people understand their mineral rights.
Mineral rights are the ownership rights to “own and exploit” resources beneath one’s land, such as fossil fuels, metals and ores, and mineable rocks like limestone and salt. They differ from surface rights, which give owners the right to use their land for residential, agricultural and other purposes. Mineral rights can be privately owned, which means homeowners can sell their rights to private corporations and receive royalty payments in return.
Mineral mining is quite prevalent in states with large oil and gas reserves, such as Texas, North Dakota, Alaska, California, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Colorado, Utah and Louisiana.
Helping Black people across the country access untapped financial potential through mineral rights, Perry was accompanied by Deborah Wilkerson, work partner and friend of more than two decades. Wilkerson assisted Perry in several mineral rights cases and used family records to help Black Texans claim what they were owed from their mineral rights.
“He’s [Perry] the oil, the gas industry’s best kept secret. Being an African American person, he has been in the field for all these many years and working for most of the major oil and gas companies,” said Wilkerson. “People in these companies are actually intentionally depriving people of their own funds…Mr. Perry knows how to dig deeper to get to the bottom of stuff. You can’t hide nothing from him.”
Oftentimes, Perry said, people are deceived.
“See, all [oil] companies always try to pretend ‘we don’t know who to pay the money to.’ I’m the one who proves to them that it says, ‘you,’” Perry said. “I go back, and I find out that the original owner was your great-great-grandfather. He did not sell them mineral rights.”
A native Houstonian who attended Phyllis Wheatley High School and graduated from the University of Houston with a degree in Biology, Perry is the author of the National Oil & Gas Museum commissioned book The Good Ole Boys in Oil & Gas.
According to Perry, no other ethnicity or race in the U.S. has lost more land to the oil and gas industry than Black people. In the 1900s, when people left their properties due to poverty and in search of better job opportunities in big cities during the Depression, Black residents left their legacies behind. Those who owned assets are now long gone, taking with them any chance of laying claim to what they once owned. He calls it a “historical fallacy” that they were poor sharecroppers.
Perry admits that those with business acumen kept all or part of their mineral rights, passing them on to the next generation.
“It is a fact that they worked very hard to leave a legacy, and we, the remaining family members, have decided to be passive and just let it go,” he wrote in an article.
To help the next generation, Perry conducts seminars to help Black families locate wealth and research both their parents’ ancestry to see if they are among the families that are millionaires.
Advising the families, Perry suggests starting with a simple question: Where did my great-greats live? They may be surprised to find eight wells on the land on which they lived. With each making a projected $1 million a month and $8 million in total, the owners could split the royalty payments.
In Texas, the state government administers the unclaimed funds from royalty payments for those owners they cannot find or whose ownership is under dispute. These funds are considered Unclaimed Property and are entered into state records. After three years, these unclaimed properties are transferred from these companies to the state.
“Our lack of knowledge about minerals that are under the house is our biggest problem,” he said. “If there’s a commercial amount of oil and gas under there,…the one that owned the minerals gets paid.”
According to Perry, senior citizens are more vulnerable to these scams. Moreover, real estate agents can estimate the value of land and houses but not of the minerals underneath.
During the 52 years he worked in the field, he observed that people do not know about these rights—it’s what lies under the land. He also noticed that in some cases, economically disadvantaged families are offered a lower amount than what the minerals are worth, while others don’t get paid at all.
“If they drill an oil and gas well somewhere close by you and they start pumping the minerals from under your house, you won’t get paid,” he said.
Despite his experience, Perry was vulnerable to the scam
Perry, too, was approached by “scammers” who tried to buy his mineral rights with a fraudulent check and a deed. While on paper, it said he would receive money each month for his rights, his bank told him the checks were worth “not one penny.”
Warning Black Houstonians of the increase in these incidents, Perry expressed concern that the true value of the mineral rights is unknown and subject to what the company pays them.
