South Carolina

littlemissmartypants

(25,599 posts) Sat Nov 4, 2023, 04:55 AM Nov 2023

Inside a controversial auction of Gullah-Geechee homes: 'This land needs to be protected'

Tax-burdened property owned by the descendants of formerly enslaved people in South Carolina is being sold to hedge funds and developers

Justin Glawe
Fri 3 Nov 2023 14.00 EDT

On 2 October, in a gymnasium in Beaufort, South Carolina, an auctioneer announced real estate properties that were up for bid. At different points throughout the proceedings, several people rose from their seats and yelled: “Heirs’ property!” The auctioneer would then clarify for the hundreds of others in attendance – those who had come hoping to buy land – that the property up for bid belonged to descendants of enslaved people, a group known as the Gullah-Geechee. The owners had failed to pay taxes; therefore, their homes and land had been seized by Beaufort county and were up for public sale.

The custom at these delinquent tax sales in Beaufort is to abstain from bidding on Gullah land, the aforementioned “heirs’ property”. Across the low country, land once owned by formerly enslaved people and their descendants is being lost rapidly to development. With that land loss comes the degradation of Gullah culture, which once flourished in places like Beaufort, Hilton Head and other islands off the eastern coast of the US. As a means to help preserve Gullah land from this tide of coastal development, officials in Beaufort county allow heirs, as the descendants are called, to claim their land when it comes up for bid at auction. The hope, in explaining to attendees that the county’s practice is deference to the owners, is that would-be bidders will respect the custom and not make offers on the historic land.

Of the more than 250 properties featured in the October auction, at least 10 belonged to heirs. When a Gullah heir kept their land, promising to pay the delinquent taxes, the crowd in the gym clapped. Some non-heirs bid anyway, effectively taking the properties out of Gullah hands. “The land loss we are dealing with now is due to predatory development and greed,” said Luana Graves Sellars, a director at the non-profit Lowcountry Gullah Foundation, which helps Gullah families hold on to their land by raising money to pay the outstanding taxes on their behalf.

The struggle over Gullah land is not just playing out in Beaufort county; developers are targeting warm weather coastlines in Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Florida. Just north of Beaufort county on St Helena Island, Gullah residents are fighting developers’ plans for golf courses and gated communities. Two hours south of St Helena Island in Harris Neck, Georgia, Gullah people are engaged in a legal battle over land taken from them by the US government during the second world war. Nearby on Sapelo Island, Georgia, descendants of people who bought or were granted the land on which they were enslaved are fighting zoning changes that could alter the rural pace of an island that has only two paved roads.
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https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/nov/03/gullah-geechee-auction-land-real-estate-south-carolina

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