In Georgia’s Hogg Hummock, a fight for a people, a culture, and the land

Down a single-lane, sand road where yellow county signs warn “dead end” and “no turnaround,” the standoff begins.

As a pickup truck driven by Gullah Geechee activist Reginald Hall backs up the rutted path, a work van comes the other way. Both vehicles stop. Then the van noses within inches of Mr. Hall’s rear bumper.

The van driver honks. Mr. Hall, whose bloodline stretches to when enslaved Black people first disembarked on Sapelo in the beginning of the 19th century, doesn’t budge. Two carpenters in overalls, both white, walk around the truck, stare, and wave their hands in disbelief. No words are spoken.

Eventually, Mr. Hall puts his truck in gear, makes a U-turn, and cuts through a private driveway to get around the van.

The confrontation, says Mr. Hall, shows “how high the tensions are running” as one of America’s last intact settlements of Gullah Geechee struggles to maintain its grip on lands first ceded to them at the end of the Civil War. Recent victories in court will help, but for Mr. Hall they are just one step in a long road ahead.

“We are in dogged pursuit of a place that has been preserved by us,” he says.

Along with racial injustices, the clashes here on Sapelo highlight the pitfalls of a “coastal capitalism” that marginalizes the descendants, with their vast experience living in a barrier island climate, in favor of expensive homes and infrastructure set squarely in the path of rising seas and increasingly inclement weather. That disregard for the environment, some descendants say, could be solved by returning the land to its rightful owners. 

“The displacement of communities goes hand in hand with environmental exploitation that [is] damaging to the very coastal ecologies that are attracting people to these places in the first place,” says Andrew Kahrl, author of “The Land Was Ours.” “Conversely, the modes of living with the land that native islanders ... developed over many generations were much more sustainable and in tune with the limits and liabilities of living in a highly fragile, very dynamic environment like a barrier island.”

A shrinking Black footprint

Once home to hundreds of enslaved Africans who tended rice, cotton, and sugar cane, Sapelo Island after the Civil War became a haven for the Gullah Geechee descendants, whose isolation birthed a distinct brogue heard to this day.

Descendants processed sugar cane, fished, oystered, and tended hogs. They ran cattle and grew vegetables – a vibrant makeshift economy scattered across a handful of villages with names like Hanging Bull and Timber Landing.

At its peak, Sapelo had over 500 Gullah Geechee residents. Today, Hogg Hummock is the only neighborhood that remains, with a small convenience store, a bar, two Baptist churches, and some short-term rentals. It is set not on the beach, but on a raised hummock on the marsh side of the island. 

About 30 descendants have persevered and still live here full time, fewer than the white, nondescendant population. (One descendant was Ahmaud Arbery, the Brunswick, Georgia, jogger whose murder by three white men in 2020 sparked nationwide protests.) 

The original, hand-hewn houses are small, sturdy, and easy to repair if a hurricane floods them. But they are ringed by larger, newly built houses – the bulk of which are summer homes for white Southerners, the construction of which largely ignores the environmental realities of life on a barrier island.

The shrinking of the Black footprint on Sapelo is part of a stubborn phenomenon nationwide. In 1910, Black people owned 14 million acres along the Southeast U.S. coast; today, they own a sliver of that, according to Mr. Kahrl. Hogg Hummock represents the last 400 or so acres of historically Black-owned land out of nearly 16,000 acres on Sapelo, the bulk of which was bought by the state from a North Carolina tobacco heir. 

“A big, fat bull’s-eye” 

Even though it is part of the 425-mile-long congressionally designated Gullah Geechee Cultural Heritage Corridor, Hogg Hummock remains under siege from largely legal yet corrosive land use practices that disproportionately impact poorer Americans. Issues include deceptive practices, poorly kept deeds, and a legacy of multilayered family ownership.

The loss of Black-owned land is baked into a coastal economy where the main industry is, in fact, “the real estate and the value coming from it,” says Mr. Kahrl, a historian at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. When you factor in ways in which race and poverty make people “more subject to discriminatory forms of taxation,” he says, ordinary real estate calculations wind up putting “a big, fat bull’s-eye on African American landowners.”

This is not unique to Sapelo. A 2020 report from the Federal Reserve Bank found that Black and Hispanic homeowners in the U.S. paid 10% to 13% more in property taxes than white people for homes with comparable public services. And 30 U.S. states, including Georgia, allow tax liens on properties to be sold, a practice that, in Sapelo, has enabled prospectors to pick up descendants’ homes cheaply and then convert them into expensive real estate. Hogg Hummock has seen properties sold for pennies on the dollar. White as well as Black bidders have then turned around and sold that land for profit.

Mr. Hall’s ultimate goal is to prove in the courts that much of the land on Sapelo Island was taken by “deceived means,” whether by exploiting complicated titles or forging signatures. 

This summer saw progress in that pursuit.

Righting past wrongs

In 2015 descendants sued both the state of Georgia and McIntosh County on 14th Amendment equal protection grounds. Five years later, the state agreed to make improvements, including upgrading the ferry and bringing it and its related infrastructure into compliance with the Americans With Disabilities Act. The agreement also guaranteed Hogg Hummock residents a voice in decision-making concerning the island, and required the state to pay $750,000 for the plaintiffs’ damages, legal fees, and civil action costs. 

Then, this summer, a U.S. district court judge oversaw a settlement agreement against McIntosh County, which confirmed that “dramatically rising property tax assessments against Sapelo Island properties in recent years have threatened the viability and survival of [the Hogg Hummock] community,” according to a Georgia Public Broadcasting report. Better emergency fire and medical services, as well as road maintenance, must now be provided. Taxes will be stabilized for three years, and the county must pay $2 million to cover the plaintiffs’ damage claims and legal fees in what the plaintiffs’ lawyer called the first-ever federal lawsuit challenging the government’s treatment of the Gullah Geechee people.

This latest settlement came the same summer as other restorative actions involving Black Americans, suggesting to some a shift in attitudes about the government’s role in the way land is obtained, transferred, and transformed.

In Manhattan Beach, California, a parcel of land named Bruce’s Beach was returned to descendants of Charles and Willa Bruce, the Black couple who purchased the land and built a resort there in 1912. The city illegally seized it in 1924, claiming eminent domain. Nearly a century later, the vote by the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors to return the property was unanimous. 

Closer to Sapelo, off St. Helena Island, South Carolina, a barrier island named Bay Point Island that had been slated for a global ecotourism resort will remain untouched. Following an outcry led in part by a local Gullah Geechee community, a judge upheld a zoning board’s earlier ruling against the development. The decision on behalf of the Gullah Geechee was in support of the land as well.

The Bay Point decision suggested that “the native communities ... are more in touch with the natural cycle of the system, and they don’t try to change it or manipulate it,” says Jessie White, the south coast director of the Coastal Conservation League, in Beaufort, South Carolina. “They meet it where it is.”

Marquetta Goodwine, a Gullah Geechee activist and spokesperson, argues that her people know not only how to live in sync with the coastal climate but also how to restore it. Known as Queen Quet, Ms. Goodwine sees Gullah Geechee reclamation of the land and the land’s survival as one in the same. 

Her argument for environmental and wildlife restoration through reclamation finds precedent in the return of Montana’s bison range to the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes in 2020. Other Native American tribes across the Great Plains are also stewarding bison herds and the land they roam. 

For the Gullah Geechee, the focus is on water and fish, not land and bison. “Let’s let the people who have been here for hundreds of years stay and let them live and build the way the ancestors did,” Ms. Goodwine told the Savannah Morning News. “And let’s see if this coast doesn’t restore itself.”

A debate over the town’s name

While descendants are largely unified around lawsuits seeking equity, agreement on how to move forward can be hard to find. Some believe residents should work with the state to maintain Hogg Hummock instead of continuing to sue for what Mr. Hall calls “recovery.” If Sapelo were to be restored to those it was deeded to after the Civil War, the saltwater Gullah Geechee would own land worth billions.

Mr. Hall says ownership would also encourage more Gullah Geechee families to come back to Sapelo, noting that several of his cousins have already returned. Attempts to rebuild the island’s economy include efforts to restart a sugar cane refinery. Tourism, including kayaking and fishing, could be expanded as well.

To many nondescendants, on the other hand, Mr. Hall represents a fundamental problem, with his resistance to the rhythms of island life where, as one white resident says, “a lot of things go under the radar – and that’s how the island folk like it.”

The Gullah Geechee lawsuits are “making us not want to be loving,” says Tony Thaw, a white resident.

A former county commissioner in nearby Glynn County, Mr. Thaw says he “grew up on the river” and has lived on Sapelo Island for years. When a family of descendants decided to sell and move to the mainland, they approached Mr. Thaw, who says he bought their land at a fair price.

But Mr. Thaw isn’t as welcome in Hogg Hummock as he’d like to be. He has requested a burial plot at Behavior Cemetery, the local Black burial ground, but descendants have said no. Mr. Thaw says he may have to request a special dispensation from the state in order to find a final resting place on Sapelo.

To Mr. Hall, that kind of request exemplifies a system of white power where a handshake allows connected newcomers to circumvent laws. Among the laws often sidestepped is the 1,400-square-foot limit to the size of houses, which in turn drives up values and taxes – and litters the land with houses not suited to a barrier island climate. Owners of these oversized homes include a former football coach, a friend of the state’s governor, and a Black nondescendant who owns the largest home on the island. 

Indeed, while descendants point to “white developers” shouldering out the native population, Black residents have also bought tax liens on courthouse steps and turned a profit when selling the land to outsiders building second homes. 

The struggle, to Mr. Hall, is summed up in the debate over names. A white resident paid for a sign that welcomes people to “Hog Hammock.” Descendants say a new sign is coming that spells it the original way: Hogg Hummock.

A similar struggle is playing out in slow motion between a new structure and nature itself. In a corner of Hogg Hummock stands a massive, unfinished house that ran afoul of local zoning laws – violations brought to the county’s attention by descendants. The structure can now barely be glimpsed through the maritime forest reclaiming the land, a hard-to-miss reminder of the economic, cultural, and environmental forces at play as the Gullah Geechee persist in their own reclamation efforts.