Georgia’s highest court sides with slave descendants fighting to protect threatened island community

By Kate Brumback, Associated Press

Georgia’s highest court Tuesday sided with Black landowners in a fight over zoning changes that weakened long-standing protections for one of the South’s last Gullah-Geechee communities founded by freed slaves.

The state Supreme Court unanimously reversed a lower court ruling that had stopped a referendum to consider repealing a revised zoning ordinance passed by McIntosh County officials two years ago. Residents of Sapelo Island opposed the zoning amendments that doubled the size of homes allowed in a tiny enclave called Hogg Hummock.

Homeowners feared the change would result in one of the nation’s most historically and culturally unique Black communities facing unaffordable tax increases. Residents and their supporters last year submitted a petition with more than 2,300 signatures from registered voters seeking a referendum in the coastal county, which lies 60 miles south of Savannah.

McIntosh County commissioners sued to stop the referendum and a lower court ruled that one would be illegal. The decision halted a vote on the zoning change with less than a week to go before Election Day. Hundreds of people had already cast early ballots in the referendum.

The high court Tuesday found the lower court was wrong to conclude the zoning ordinance was not subject to referendum procedures provided for in the Georgia Constitution’s Home Rule Provision.

More information in the original article.

Read about how some Gullah Geechee people have learned to farm the land.

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