In rural Georgia, a vote threatens the Gullah-Geechee community

In a small, wood-paneled courtroom in rural south-east Georgia, with painted portraits of McIntosh county’s current and past white judges on the walls, three county commissioners dismissed a colleague’s plea. At stake was the size of structures built on Sapelo Island, which is home to the last intact Gullah Geechee community in the United States. Roger Lotson, the sole Black commissioner on the otherwise all-white panel, had asked the commission to do what the residents of the remote sea island had been asking for years: maintain limits on the size of homes there to dissuade developers and non-descendants from encroaching on their land. On Tuesday night, for the third time in two weeks, Sapelo residents and their supporters packed the courtroom to make their voices heard. Three white commissioners ignored them. 

By a 3-2 vote, the McIntosh county commission approved a zoning ordinance change that will allow homes on the island to be as large as 3,000 sq ft – double the size of the current limit, and far larger than the small homes and trailers in which most of the descendants live. The measure may open the floodgates to wealthy prospective land-buyers looking to build vacation homes on the mostly-uninhabited island. Unlike St Simons Island and Hilton Head, where the culturally Indigenous Gullah Geechee are all but forgotten amid a tourist haven of pristine golf courses and private beachfronts, Sapelo Island has so far avoided the contemporary explosion of development that has displaced Gullah communities. Black Sapelo residents, whose formerly enslaved ancestors started taking control of the land they toiled upon when Sapelo was abandoned after the US civil war, worry that Tuesday’s vote may turn their island into a muted version of nearby island destinations, where mainlanders have run roughshod over the quiet, rural lifestyles that descendants had enjoyed for centuries.

The Sapelo ordinance change is in line with much of the history of the island. Residents I’ve spoken to in recent years say they’ve always felt that outsiders with political and legal power have worked to make Sapelo their own. The change was first proposed to the public in 2019, and documents obtained via open records requests show that the powers that be in McIntosh county have been hashing out the particulars mostly behind closed doors. Last week, a non-profit working to protect the ecological and social history of Georgia’s coastline obtained an email showing that Bill Hodges, a local engineer with a home on Sapelo, had been emailing with county officials about the zoning change for months before Tuesday’s vote.

Hodges, who owns one of the only Sapelo homes tall enough to have an ocean view, is one of the few white landowners there who have fought zoning rules in an effort to allow larger homes. He sits on McIntosh county’s development authority with another white Sapelo landowner, Sam Oliver, who also owns a home on a coveted marshfront lot. Both men purchased their land from Black descendants. When I reached Oliver by phone ahead of Tuesday’s meeting, asking him if he had worked with Hodges on the zoning change, he told me: “Anywhere else you’re not limited in the size. I don’t know why we have to make things weird at Sapelo.” (Hodges did not return a request for comment.)

Residents, landowners and supporters of the Hogg Hummock community on Sapelo Island fill a courtroom in Darien, Georgia, on 12 September 2023. Photograph: Russ Bynum/AP

The men are part of a longstanding pattern: white mainlanders purchase land from Black descendants who are either too poor to say no to the healthy sums being offered to them, or who no longer have living familial ties to Sapelo. The mainlanders then build their own homes, increasingly turning Sapelo into a weekend getaway for hunting, fishing and marshfront nights. The displacement that results infringes on Sapelo’s Gullah heritage, and is part of the larger story of racial strife that has dominated life in McIntosh county. “Welcome to the confederacy of McIntosh. Ain’t nothin’ changed here, just the players are different,” said Loretta Sams, who attended Tuesday’s vote and told me she was a sixth generation descendant of Bilali Muhammad, the famous Sapelo ancestor who was enslaved by the former congressman Thomas Spalding. “What they don’t understand is that this isn’t 1972, this isn’t the Tom Poppell era anymore.”

Welcome to the confederacy of McIntosh. Ain’t nothin’ changed here, just the players are differentLoretta Sams

Black people have been packing courtrooms and government buildings since well before the era of Tom Poppell, the infamous white sheriff who presided over a system of political corruption, graft and police brutality in McIntosh county. He was also among an early generation of white interlopers who purchased land on Sapelo in the 1970s, and whose actions were the beginning of a mindset of undermining established Gullah ownership. After years of fighting his disreputable power structure, Black residents finally secured representation on the county commission in 1978, but Poppell’s legacy remains. For 28 years, Poppell’s brother, Adam Strain Poppell, was clerk of the courts, overseeing a criminal justice system that disproportionately punished Black McIntosh county residents. Strain Poppell’s grandson, Ad Poppell, is the current county attorney and looked on during Tuesday’s meeting.

“We lost again,” JR Grovner, a Sapelo descendant who is part of efforts to preserve Gullah Geechee heritage on the island, told me at the meeting. Sapelo islanders have brought forth a slew of civic complaints in the past few years, and recently sued the county for failing to provide adequate services such as good roads and emergency services on the island. What’s more, the potential land rush from wealthy mainlanders due to the new zoning change will almost surely be accompanied by a hike in property taxes. Residents say they simply cannot afford another increase, which in previous years has been as much as 540%. “My taxes on a trailer went up $700 last year,” Grovner told the commission. “On a trailer.”

As most of the crowd shuffled out of Tuesday’s meeting following a vote they’d hoped would go their way, David Stevens, the commission chair, addressed the room with a stunning prepared statement. He blamed “misinformation, lies and fake news” for putting McIntosh back in the spotlight, which first shone on the county during the Tom Poppell era. The meeting even resembled those from the early 70s, which discouraged publicity: attendees were barred from bringing their phones or cameras into the meeting, and journalists were only allowed to do so after pressure from the attorney general’s office. The meeting was not recorded or livestreamed by Darien Telephone, the local company that usually does so for government meetings. Descendants I spoke to noted that an owner of Darien Telephone has a home on Sapelo and had signed a letter supporting the zoning change. Stevens, the commission chair, is the company’s director of operations. (The company and Stevens did not respond to requests for comment.)

skip past newsletter promotion

Our US morning briefing breaks down the key stories of the day, telling you what’s happening and why it matters

Privacy Notice: Newsletters may contain info about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. For more information see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

after newsletter promotion

David Stevens, left, speaks alongside fellow commissioners Roger Lotson, center, and Kate Pontello Karwacki, right, in Darien, Georgia. Photograph: Ross Bynum/AP

Stevens went on in the meeting to reference the time he spent with older Black descendants on his first trip to Sapelo in the 1980s, saying the current generation of descendants would never have “it”, seemingly referring to the kindness, respect and cooperation of previous generations. He decried a “change of the culture” on Sapelo from that era of descendants to the current one, blaming the younger descendants themselves for the transfer of land from Black hands to white ones. “If you don’t want these outsiders, if you don’t want these big homes being built, I think Miss Cornelia Bailey said it best,” Stevens told the remaining crowd, referencing an elder descendant. “Stop selling your land.”

Part of the reason descendants have sold their land over the years is that the county has purposefully made life difficult there, according to a federal lawsuit that was settled last year. The lawsuit, brought forth by descendants, accused the county of failing to provide services such as timely trash pick-up and the aforementioned emergency services, and of failing to enforce zoning violations by white residents. In a recent op-ed, Patrick Zoucks, the county manager, argued that the settlement of that lawsuit – money that some descendants accepted, and some did not – was one of the final hurdles in the path toward Tuesday’s ordinance change. He also mentioned the high number of complaints about white landowners like Hodges who have built homes in violation of previous zoning ordinances, arguing it is “literally impossible to regulate what an individual does inside of her or his house after the certificate of occupancy is issued”.

Sams told me she felt that Zoucks’s statement – that the county simply can’t enforce its own rules if non-descendants break them – shows the county’s lack of concern not just for Sapelo’s Black descendant residents, but also its history. “We’re the county’s unwanted, adopted child,” she said.

By the time residents arrived back on Sapelo after the meeting, a power pole had gone down in a marsh and the entire island was without electricity. A backup generator failed and Sapelo lost water access. Residents were told by the power company on Wednesday afternoon that power wouldn’t be restored until Thursday. But there was one place on the island that did have power. A short drive from Hogg Hummock, where Grovner’s parents and other descendants live in small homes surrounded by forest, sits the gleaming white mansion of the tobacco magnate RJ Reynolds. He was the last man to privately own much of Sapelo Island before the modern battle over land ownership – between Black descendants and encroaching white people – began a half century after his death in 1918. Reynolds’s former home is now a tourist attraction for mainlanders seeking first-class accommodations on Sapelo. Some descendants work there, cooking and cleaning for wedding parties and other events for the white guests of the island.