Beverly Steele didn’t realize her hometown could be recognized for its historic significance. It’s one of the only two African American homesteading communities left in the nation. In Royal, Florida, Black families are still holding onto the inherited 40-acre plot passed down nearly two centuries ago. It’s a rare reality in America today, given the […]
Black land
Posted inCommunity, Culture, Economic Development, History
Black Burial Grounds Are Disappearing as Families Fight to Protect Them
The first time Terry O’Neal walked into an old cemetery, she found splintered coffins pushed up by storms and time, with “skeletons sitting outside of caskets.” In Chloe, Louisiana, the acre that holds generations of Black, Creole, and Indigenous families looked more like an abandoned field than a resting place, she recalled. The neglect in […]
Posted inHistory, Money
Charleston’s Gullah Geechee Community Demand 7,000 Acres in Reparations
Marcus McDonald’s roots run deep on both his sides of his family in Charleston, South Carolina. He’s a descendant of the Boone Hall Plantation, where his ancestors in his father’s family were once held captive. They come from a line of Gullah Geechee people, the descendants of the West and Central Africans who were enslaved […]
Posted inEconomic Development, Rural Issues
Railroad Wins Appeal to Take Generations-Old Land in Rural Georgia
Months ago, Blaine Smith was afraid that the Georgia Court of Appeals would allow a railroad company to seize part of his family’s generations-old land. That fear came true Wednesday when the court upheld a lower court’s decision to let Sandersville Railroad exercise eminent domain to take properties from several landowners in Sparta, Georgia, to […]
Posted inEnvironmental Justice, Extreme Weather, Housing
Insurance Crisis Leaves Black Homeowners One Disaster Away From Homelessness
The insurance check to rebuild Zaire Calvin’s family properties came in at just under $300,000, a drop in the bucket compared to the roughly $2.1 million they had been worth. His family had five homes sprawled across two lots in the leafy suburb of Altadena, California, before the Eaton Fire unleashed its wrath, leveling both […]
Posted inCourts, Culture, History
S.C. Court Victory Grants Gullah Geechee Temporary Access to Blocked Cemetery
Julia Scott is disappointed. Despite a judge granting her and other Gullah Geechee residents in St. Helena Island, South Carolina, access to the centuries-old Big House Cemetery, they must give the property owners — who put up a gate to block the entrance — written notice first. “It’s a start, but I am not pleased […]
Posted inCourts, Economic Development, Eminent Domain, History, Politics & Policy, Rural Issues
Georgia Is Letting a Railroad Seize Land a Black Family Has Owned For 100 Years
SPARTA, Ga. — In 1850, Andrew Benjamin Tarbutton enslaved 25 people in central Georgia. A year later, he purchased more than a dozen additional people off the docks in Savannah and marched them toward his home, setting the foundation for his family’s generational wealth. Four generations later, a railroad company owned by one of his […]
Posted inEconomic Development, Eminent Domain
Mississippi Residents Say City Quietly Marked Their Homes for Takeover
Greg Gipson walked out of a federal appeals court in Louisiana last week feeling a bit more hopeful about a case that was dismissed in Mississippi over his historic neighborhood’s designation. Gipson and other residents drove 93 miles from Ocean Springs, Mississippi, to New Orleans to persuade a panel of federal judges to reconsider whether their […]
Posted inEnvironmental Justice, Politics & Policy, Rural Issues
After a White Town Rejected a Data Center, Developers Targeted a Black Area
In December, on a two-lane road not far from the ACE Basin, a protected ecosystem and wildlife refuge in South Carolina, Paul Black drove past St. Paul AME Church and the cemetery where his wife’s grandfather, great-grandfather, and great-grandmother are buried, then slowed as the trees opened onto the piney tract. Black is an environmental […]
Posted inClimate Change, Housing, Politics & Policy, Rural Issues, Wealth Gap
This Mississippi Delta Home Could Collapse Before Help Arrives
SIDON, Mississippi — Malissa Whitehead is known for making tea cakes and blueberry pies during the holidays — but as Christmas approaches, she’s uneasy about baking anything in the house she’s lived in for 40 years. The kitchen ceiling wood is peeling, revealing small holes and chipped paint. On the outside, the roof is covered […]