HARRIS NECK NATIONAL WILDLIFE REFUGE, Ga. — Over the course of what was a scorching, yet typical May day across Coastal Georgia, Willie Moran made it a point to stop and take a deep breath at every sight of water.
Looking out across the estuaries and salt marshes teeming with wildlife, he repeatedly reminded his tour group of Black environmentalists, “The only thing between us and West Africa, where they took us from, is this: the Atlantic Ocean.”
The Transatlantic Slave Trade wouldn’t be the last time his family line was severed from their home.
For generations, Black communities across the United States have watched their land vanish under the banner of the “public good.” Perhaps there is no stronger example of this than in Harris Neck.
In 1942, the federal government seized Moran’s family’s land and dozens of others in the community for a national security project and promised one day to return it. Yet, still today, it remains in the hands of the government.
For decades, Moran and other descendants have written formal letters to presidents, including Barack Obama and Joe Biden, for an executive order to return just a portion of the land to its past owners, and they’ve lobbied Georgia legislators for support.
Nothing has shifted, Moran said.
“We need to let everybody know our history, because the more of us understand our story, this will continue and spread,” the 82-year-old said. “They tried to erase the whole thing, but we’re still here, and if we don’t get more support, I guess they’ll be glad when I’m dead because they think it will die with our generation.”
Now, in a political climate where such a move seems even more unlikely because of the gutting of civil rights offices and environmental protections, descendants have also looked for support from power brokers in the American conservation movement, a historically white movement often known for its support of ecology and wildlife over humans, particularly people of color.
That May day, he took a group of Black environmentalists, including representatives from the federal government, across the land where his mother, Mary, was born and raised.
Today, Harris Neck is a 2,824-acre peninsula preserved by the federal government in rural McIntosh County, Georgia, about 30 miles south of Savannah. But for generations it was a land maintained by the Gullah Geechee, a community descended from West Africans brought to the region as enslaved laborers who, after emancipation following the Civil War, became landowning farmers when the plantation owner deeded them the land.
Drawing on skills passed down from rice-growing ancestors in places like Sierra Leone, Black families in Harris Neck built a thriving, self-reliant settlement by the early 20th century. They sustained themselves through fishing, crabbing, gardening, and operating oyster and crab processing houses, all while preserving the Gullah language, African-rooted spiritual traditions, and a way of life deeply tied to the land and waterways.
At the peak of World War II, President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration seized the land for an airfield. The government gave residents, including Mary, who was pregnant with Moran at the time, just days’ notice to leave and little compensation before demolishing and burning homes and scattering the community.
The airstrip was never used. The marshland they tried to build on top of would not cooperate.
Despite federal promises following the war to return to their land, the pledge was never honored. Instead, in 1948, the federal government transferred the property into the hands of power brokers in majority-white McIntosh County. The county was supposed to maintain the site, but for more than a decade, officials ignored the land. It quickly became overrun with illegal activity, including drug smuggling, according to the Harris Neck Land Trust and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
After years of local mismanagement, the federal government reclaimed the land in 1961 and, in 1962, established what is now the Harris Neck National Wildlife Refuge without ever restoring the families’ ancestral home or addressing the historic injustices that uprooted this once-thriving Black community.
Today, the wildlife refuge still holds the overgrown cemetery, brick foundations, and living memory of the displaced families, whose descendants continue to fight for the recognition and return of their ancestral lands.
Harris Neck’s ecological importance lies in its diversity of habitats feeding into the ocean, a mix of marshes and ponds that support nearly 350 bird species. It is a critical nesting, foraging, and wintering ground for rare and threatened migratory birds like wood storks and painted buntings, as well as many species of waterfowl and wading birds. It is also integral in maintaining Georgia’s wetlands that protect the area from flooding and storms as climate change intensifies sea level rise and hurricanes.
Moran, who has been advocating for the return of the land since 1971, and others argue that they have the tools to protect the area themselves.
“If the descendants got that land back, we’d be able to take care of it properly, we did for generations,” said Moran, a member of the Harris Neck Land Trust. “But the bottom line here is racism still prevails.”
In a statement, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said the agency is “dedicated to working with the entire Harris Neck community to identify opportunities that honor the area’s rich history and cultural traditions, with particular attention to its environmental significance and the community’s longstanding connection to the land and waters.”
But last year, the agency said returning parts of the land to descendants carried a “primary risk” in which “the American public [would] lose equitable access to their public lands and the conservation and public use benefits” of a national wildlife refuge.
The agency noted that it has been part of congressional hearings in 1979 and 2011, and federal court decisions that have reaffirmed the current ownership. Additionally, in 1985, a federal government audit of the situation found no legal concerns.
“I know what segregation is, I know what Jim Crow is — I’ve lived it,” Moran said. “This feels the same way, but I have to keep that trauma down so I can tell the story without the anger because I’m charged to do this for my ancestors.”
The national struggle for Black land and environmental justice
The battle over Harris Neck lays bare a broader history of Black land loss in America, where “public good” projects, from parks to conservation areas, often came at the expense of communities of color. For generations, the practice of federal projects erasing Black land also eroded wealth, culture, and stewardship traditions that had nurtured the land for generations.
In some cases, it was for sprawling parks like Central Park, where Manhattan’s Seneca Village, a thriving 19th-century Black landowning community, was razed through eminent domain. In others, it was for beaches, flood-control projects, or even conservation areas, where promises of environmental protection masked forced removals and undervalued payouts. While such displacement is often linked to the creation of national parks at the expense of Indigenous peoples, Black landowners also saw their property absorbed into public lands or tourism zones, erasing family wealth and community roots.
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As climate change underscores the value of local, traditional land care, the fight for Harris Neck is about more than property, descendants said. It is a demand for justice, historical recognition, and a new vision of conservation rooted in equity.
Today, across the South, partnerships between legal aid groups, environmental nonprofits, and Black landowners are working to reform heirs’ property laws and secure access to conservation programs. In North Carolina, the National Audubon Society has teamed up with the Center for Heirs’ Property Preservation to keep Black-owned land from being sold off or divided. As Jennie Stephens, CEO at the Center for Heirs’ Property Preservation, puts it: “Once this land is lost, everything –– be it human or bird –– that uses this land, they’re in jeopardy.”
McIntosh S.E.E.D., a Black-led conservation organization founded in the same county as Harris Neck, owns a 1,148-acre forest 40 miles north of the community. It is the first Black-owned community forest in the U.S. Its work, inspired by the converging ways that extreme weather and discriminatory land deals have erased Black ownership around Harris Neck, has focused on using traditional land practices to address climate change impacts, from heat destroying crops to the stronger, frequent storms and hurricanes displacing communities.
“There are dollars there to manage and maintain land across the South,” said Moran, who is a former board member of S.E.E.D. and who grew up growing food and fishing for oysters and crabs near Harris Neck. “We just need the funds needed to properly manage [to] make it to us.”
Black landowners have historically maintained high ecological value on their land by drawing on generational knowledge and sustainable practices, such as crop diversification, soil conservation, and ecosystem stewardship, rooted in both African and Indigenous traditions. As noted in a National Wildlife Federation report, “Black farmers and landowners have always known that when you give to the land, the land gives back.”
Why Harris Neck descendants still fight
Descendants are fighting to make sure the story does not die with them. Young people like Mya Timmons, 25, are deeply engaged in preserving the history of Harris Neck in ways that might better connect with a new generation. Timmons, whose great-grandfather William Timmons was one of the largest Black landowners in Coastal Georgia, has created plant guides and coloring books that highlight the cultural significance of their community. Last year, she visited her old elementary school, sharing her coloring book and some of the real plants from Harris Neck with students to connect them to Gullah Geechee traditions.
“Before I started the initial project, I had no interest in plants,” she said. “It was really through this project that I became more connected to my cultural heritage, and everything Gullah Geechee. I feel a true connection to the land and water now.”
When her uncle, Edgar Timmons Jr., was around her age in 1979, he was jailed for a month along with three other descendants for attempting to regain access to the land. His lifelong struggle, he said, is driven by watching the devastation his grandfather William carried in the years after his land was seized.
“It was promised to some of the residents during the time of the takeover by the federal government that the land would be returned after the war,” he said, “and even though we don’t have it yet, we still all have a deep, deep connection to it.
Despite little legal precedent for his family and loved ones to recoup their land, Moran, too, has no desire to give up the fight. In his eyes, there is always room for change and restitution.
“I was born only a few months after this happened,” he said from his front yard just a few miles from the wildlife refuge. “I can trace my family back to Africa, I still have stories of songs from before we were brought here. It puts into perspective that this didn’t happen too long ago.”
“We can always do the right thing,” he said.