Gullah Geechee descendants are fighting to keep what is rightfully theirs.
- Zoning changes and development pressure invite larger homes, higher taxes, outside buyers, threatening Hilton Head Island descendants.
- Land embodies culture; losing property risks erasing Gullah Geechee language, foodways, farming practices and community survival.
- Organizing grows, led by Pan-African Family Empowerment and Land Preservation Network (PAFEN), part of a broader fight for Black land ownership.
Their homes, land, and culture are still under immense threat, as property pressures and development threats expand around one of the South’s last historically Black coastal communities, according to The Guardian.
Residents have pushed back against zoning changes they say would invite larger homes, higher taxes, and outside buyers with no stake in the island’s legacy. The backlash has become a test of who gets to shape the future of a place that has long been treated as both a heritage site and a target for development. In a map shared by The Guardian, most of Hilton Head Island’s 1,100 residents were the descendants of freedmen in 1940; in 2020, only 6% of the island’s population was Black.
What makes the fight bigger is the way culture and land are tied together. Gullah Geechee traditions grew out of the isolation of coastal plantations, where enslaved Africans and their descendants preserved language, foodways, and farming practices that still define the region today. That history matters now because land ownership has always been the foundation of survival, and losing it can mean losing the community itself.
“There’s been a renewed emphasis now on Black people helping each other, because of all the stuff that Trump and them are doing and all the discrimination that’s going on,” said Theresa White, the CEO and founder of Pan-African Family Empowerment and Land Preservation Network (PAFEN), to the outlet. “People are realizing that they might have to come back here to live on the property that their families have owned.”
The Gullah Geechee people’s deep roots stretch back to the post-Civil War period, when formerly enslaved families gained access to land and built settlements across the Lowcountry.
Some of these settlements became a rare holdout against displacement, making today’s fight part of a longer struggle over Black land ownership in the South.
