Tax targeting Gullah-Geechee landowners on Sapelo Island could force land loss

Dwayne Fatherree, SPLC

A community of Gullah-Geechee descendants on Sapelo Island, Georgia, are potentially facing a massive property tax increase that threatens to push them off their ancestral land and kick open the doors to massive development of the island into a vacation community for the wealthy.

At its regular meeting on Dec. 3, the McIntosh County Board of Assessors heard a proposal to drastically raise the assessed value on properties in the Hogg Hummock community, with the valuation of some lots slated to rise almost tenfold.

The effort to reassess the Hogg Hummock property is the latest move that could force Gullah-Geechee descendants from the island. The struggle to maintain the remaining Gullah-Geechee communities and their culture on the barrier islands along the Atlantic coast was the subject of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Gullah-Geechee vs. Greed series, published in October. The new McIntosh County proposal would result in annual property taxes more than quintupling by 2028.

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Hogg Hummock, which is listed on the National Register of Historic Places, is the last intact Gullah-Geechee community in Georgia’s Sea Islands. It is composed of direct descendants of enslaved people who were brought to Sapelo Island from West Africa in 1802.

In recent years, however, new investors and residents have eyed the barrier island as a development opportunity, much like Hilton Head Island off the South Carolina coast or St. Simons and other parts of the Sea Islands chain along the Georgia coast.

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