Developers have Black families fighting to maintain property and history
Associated Press/Report for America
PHILLIPS COMMUNITY, S.C. (AP) — The Rev. Elijah Smalls Jr. once grew okra, butter beans and other vegetables in the neighborhood where his family has lived near the South Carolina coast since not long after the Civil War. That was before new half-a-million-dollar homes in a nearby subdivision overwhelmed the drainage system.
Runoff meant for sewers now pools in the 80-yearold veteran's backyard, making gardening impossible.
Smalls and his relatives are among the many original families still living in historic settlement communities around Charleston. People who had been enslaved at Phillips Plantation bought patches of it to make their futures. Their descendants question whether the next generation can afford to stay.
“This is the only place I wanted to live and raise my family,” said Fred Smalls, standing outside the home where his two sons grew up.
All along the South Carolina coast, land owned by the descendants of enslaved people is being targeted by developers looking to make money on vacation getaways and new homes. From Myrtle Beach south to Hilton Head, Black landowners who inherited property have been embroiled in disputes with investors looking to capitalize on rising real estate values.
State reforms approved in 2017 provided what supporters described as “shark repellant” — a law that made it harder for developers to strike deals below market prices with distant heirs who had long since moved away.
But skyrocketing property taxes are creating a growing burden as assessments rise. Younger family members may not qualify for homestead exemptions and other tax breaks. Elders worry that their family legacies — established by formerly enslaved ancestors who acquired land despite entrenched racism across the defeated South — are slipping away.
Most of the hundreds who still live on the remaining 450 acres or so of Phillips Community trace their lineage to the founders. Residents enjoy the pace of the South Carolina Lowcountry in the settlement communities, where neighbors have long taken care of each other.
“If we don’t take steps to protect them, we’re going to lose them parcel by parcel," said Coastal Conservation League Executive Director Faith Rivers James.
Orange mesh fencing lines the dirt expanse of a new development site that encircles the ranch-style house where Josephine Wright has taken her stand. The 93-year-old woman is the matriarch of a family that has owned land on Hilton Head Island since Reconstruction.
“I’m being surrounded, really,” Wright said recently in the Brooklyn accent she picked up before returning to her late husband’s home 30 years ago in Jonesville Historic Gullah Neighborhood.
They wanted tranquility as his Parkinson’s disease progressed.
But gone is the lush greenery that once grew on 29 acres previously owned by other relatives bordering Wright’s home. A Georgiabased developer, Bailey Point Investment, LLC, broke ground last summer on a 147-unit vacation rental complex there.
Managers of her family's trust failed to pay escalating tax bills.
The land sold at a 2014 tax auction for just $35,000 — a fraction of its current worth.
Then the investment company sued Wright, who owns her one acre separately. The company alleged that a corner of her screened-in porch, a shed and a satellite dish encroach on the construction project. A lawyer for the company did not return a call from The Associated Press.
She suspects they want to run her off, but she's not intimidated. NBA superstar Kyrie Irving and filmmaker Tyler Perry have lent their support. Town officials don't intend to issue building permits until the case is closed. She says other residents have thanked her for holding out.
She expected to spend these days in peace. Her small home remains the gathering spot for an extended family that includes 40 grandchildren, generations who she hopes will also enjoy the land.
“I just want to be able to live here in this sanctuary with a free mind,” Wright said.
The first self-governed town of formerly enslaved people in the United States was located on Hilton Head Island.
Wright’s neighborhood gets its name from a Black Civil War veteran named Caesar Jones who had escaped enslavement and purchased more than 100 acres himself, finding refuge in marshland that had been dismissed by colonists as unsuitable for farming.
It’s hardly undesirable today. The advent of air conditioning helped make coastal land more appealing. New highways improved access to the coast, where population increases have made South Carolina the 10th fastestgrowing state during the past decade.
Those searching for land found easy targets in the Gullah Geechee community, owned by descendants of West Africans who were forced into slavery on rice, indigo and cotton plantations along the Atlantic coast. They developed their unique culture on isolated islands, but their separation from the U.S. legal system left them vulnerable to exploitation.