‘A double-edged sword’: The Gullah Geechee people in a complex struggle over land

The Beaufort county council meeting was packed with residents eager to speak about a potential golf course on St Helena Island, South Carolina on 8 April. At stake was the future of a 500-acre property known as Pine Island Plantation/St Helenaville, where a developer had plans of building a golf course.

Those who were against the development of the property cited “backroom shenanigans”, a reference to alleged deals that the developer made with elected officials in a nearby town to garner their support for his plan, and the need to protect the local community. “We’re asking that you listen to the 20,000 people who signed a petition saying that we don’t want this,” Marque Fireall, a St Helena Island resident said.

The people in favor of the golf course argued that the development could bring needed infrastructure, resources and jobs to the island. “I think that the CPO should be abolished,” said the real estate investor Jesse Gantt about the “cultural protection overlay”, the island’s zoning law that bans the development of golf courses and gated communities. “It doesn’t allow me to do what I need to do with my property.” Local zoning ordinances, he said, prevented him from building tiny houses for veterans on his St Helena land.

The dispute illustrates the broader tug of war between preservation and growth on the sea islands throughout the south-east US. Created in the late 1990s, the cultural protection overlay is the brainchild of local activists and members of the Penn School for Preservation, an educational program on land use, also known as the Penn Center. It was developed to protect the land of Gullah Geechee people, the descendants of formerly enslaved west Africans who were forced to work on the islands’ rice and cotton plantations, and who remained in the area following the Emancipation Proclamation.

Although by many accounts the CPO has helped St Helena maintain its rural character, some say it has overreached its intent by preventing Gullah Geechee residents from developing on their land. “They’re still losing their property at the delinquent tax sale,” Gantt told the Guardian. When residents are unable to pay for their property taxes from the previous year, their land could be auctioned at an annual tax sale in October, which is how dozens of Gullah owners have lost their properties in recent years. “So the CPO has absolutely no advantages for the Gullah people.”

Ultimately, the proposed golf course has served as an ideological battleground for St Helena residents, with some advocating for increased development and infrastructure and others considering it a threat to environmental preservation and the Gullah Geechee way of life. “We’ve got to keep asking the question of the people who live within the CPO district,” said Emory Campbell, a former Penn Center executive director. “Are you satisfied with your lifestyle now versus the lifestyle of [the more developed island] Hilton Head?”

A ‘dangerous and bad precedent’

St Helenaville was once a small village and a port for steamers transporting cotton from the island to the mainland until the civil war, when the white residents fled and Black freedmen from other parts of the south occupied the area.

In 1867, after President Andrew Johnson pardoned Confederate landowners and allowed them to return to their properties, white people started to flock back to St Helena Island. Still, for several centuries, the Gullah Geechee have preserved their distinct culture and customs. The island remains one of the last largely undeveloped sites in the area, which can be partly attributed to the CPO’s success in protecting the land from outside developers.

Despite tens of thousands of petition signatures and dozens providing opposing testimony at county council meetings for over a year, the developer Elvio Tropeano has challenged Beaufort county’s efforts to prevent the golf course in state and federal district courts. His legal challenges question the validity of the CPO as he has pushed for his luxury golf course plan to be approved by county government. Tropeano denied multiple requests for an on-the-record interview.

On 16 September, in a win for proponents of the CPO, the Beaufort county council hosted an executive meeting where they voted 8-3 to reject Tropeano’s golf course plans and to back the zoning requirements. But hearings are yet to be set for the state and federal appeals. If Tropeano is granted an exception to the CPO to allow for the development of his golf course, it could create a “dangerous and bad precedent for Beaufort County and St Helena”, said Jessie White, a director at the environmental advocacy organization the Coastal Conservation League, which helped form the CPO and is one of several organizations that filed a motion to intervene in the case. On 18 October, the Beaufort county council filed a motion to dismiss in the federal case.

“It signals that St Helena is basically open for any developer to come to Beaufort county and try to use financial means, political pressure to get whatever rules they want for a development,” said White about the threat the cases pose. “It essentially undermines the continuation of the CPO, because the CPO has very specific and limited restrictions and if the county were to allow one developer to pursue those very explicit restrictions, there’s really no way for them to say no to the next person who comes and asks for the same treatment.”

‘Young people leave and don’t come back’

As a journalist covering Beaufort county in the 1990s, Gullah Geechee resident Theresa White observed members of her community and family hosting fish fries, selling cakes and pies to raise money to pay for their property taxes. She witnessed older people on fixed incomes borrow loans to cover their taxes and then have to take out another loan when taxes came due, she said. The endless cycle of debt that she saw in her community inspired White to found the Pan-African Family Empowerment and Land Preservation Network to help people find solutions to stay in their homes. Theresa White sees the CPO as a “double-edged sword” that helps protect the land at the expense of Gullah Geechee residents.

“[The CPO] keeps the resorts and whatever it is they don’t want to come from coming, but it also keeps the people who own land that could be profitably developed and create generational wealth and that wouldn’t have to be lost because they couldn’t pay taxes from being developed,” said White. “It’s almost like they’re choking themselves to death.”

As of 2022, she said that her organization spent more than $80,000 helping people retain their properties including by paying people’s property taxes and redeeming properties that were sold at tax sales. White said that she supports Tropeano because she believes that he’s standing up for Gullah people who want to have more freedom in what they choose to do with their land. In her work, she said that she’s seen people lose their homes to delinquent property taxes because they were hamstrung by the CPO.

“A lot of people sold property that they wouldn’t otherwise because they couldn’t afford it,” White said. “People are afraid to come out and say that ‘our family has lost land because of the CPO and we could lose our land because of the CPO because we can’t do anything with it.’”

Enslaved Africans made up the majority of St Helena Island prior to the civil war, but today white residents are 65% of the population. Black residents compose just a quarter of St Helena’s population according to 2020 census data.

Marilyn Hemingway, the founder of the Gullah Geechee chamber of commerce, is also in support of the Pine Island development because she believes that residents were not properly informed of Tropeano’s plans to create jobs on the golf course and to use revenue to invest in the community. While originally in opposition to the plan, she said that after meeting Tropeano at Pine Island and learning more about his plans that she had a change of heart and encouraged the city council to negotiate with him.

Hemingway argues that some development on St Helena Island could bring vitality to the area. “Young people leave for education and economic opportunities. And by and large, they don’t come back,” Hemingway said. “So the question becomes, what actions can we do to reverse that?” She envisions that the golf course development would help create jobs and invest in the local community so that young Gullah Geechee adults don’t have to leave St Helena to make a living.

‘Unwise planning can impact them for a lifetime’

On a traffic-free drive around St Helena Island in late spring, Marquetta L Goodwine, an author and artist known as Queen Quet, passed one-story houses and oak trees draped with Spanish moss. As the car slowed down to let a wake of buzzards cross the road and exclaimed: “That’s life in the country!”

As the chair of the cultural protection overlay district committee, she works with Beaufort county to strengthen zoning ordinances. According to Queen Quet, the CPO has no bearing on delinquent taxes: “There’s nobody that’s been displaced here by the cultural protection overlay district. The environment has been protected. Land ownership has been maintained by native Gullah Geechees.” Instead, she sees Tropeano’s development plan as a colonialist tactic meant to sow division among her community.

For many Gullah Geechee people, golf courses have been considered the “beginning of the end”, said the Penn Center’s director, Robert Adams. “At the heart of the idea of the CPO is ‘no golf course’. It invites all of the tourist infrastructure and it raises the prices of taxes for local residents who are already having a hard time holding on to their land.”

Campbell, the former Penn Center executive director, sees the effects of the CPO whenever he drives from Hilton Head Island, which has a four-lane highway, to St Helena Island, where the highway switches to two lanes.

In light of new threats to the overlay, the Penn Center will revive its educational program in 2025 and rename it the Emory Shaw Campbell Preservation School. Participants will range in age from teenagers to middle age – a demographic that the Penn Center believes will lead the future of the community. The center plans to have four cohorts of 360 people from throughout Beaufort county. It hopes that the new iteration of the school will help participants recreate the CPO in other cities and islands.

Campbell said he believes that younger generations hold the key to the island’s preservation: “We gotta make sure that [young people] understand the value of their lifestyle now on St Helena versus the lifestyle of urbanized areas.”

As they spoke against the Pine Island development at county council meetings throughout 2023, the Penn Center realized that people born after 1970 were not civically engaged, said Deloris Pringle, the chair of the Penn Center’s board of trustees. “They just don’t know the tactics,” said Pringle. “They don’t know the issues and they don’t know how unwise decisions and unwise planning can impact them for a lifetime and impact their descendants.”

The Penn Center hopes that St Helena’s CPO will be used as a model for other sea islands along the coast and that with additional funding that it will spread. Pringle added: “It is one of the best tools that communities can use in order to create good land use policy and development policy.”