When Hilton Head is nothing but an investment, it’s nothing at all | Opinion

Janie Grant pierced her walking cane into the ground with each syllable as she told me how important land ownership is to the Gullah of Hilton Head Island.

It’s a shame she’s not still here to rap that same lesson into more heads as every twig is now being upturned on the island to build more houses and apartments that most can’t afford.

Janie Grant was an island institution. For decades she sold vegetables, preserves and quilts in a wooden stand by the side of U.S. 278.

She and her husband, James, raised nine children and a grandchild – getting them all through college – on land they bought and farmed on U.S. 278 near Singleton Beach.

That’s where she worked a garden and her vegetable stand, and it’s where she, at age 90, tapped her cane around my feet to emphasize how she went to Beaufort every year to pay property taxes to keep the land.

Her forebears saw land ownership as the key to freedom for America’s freedmen.

And from the moment a bridge was built to Hilton Head, holding onto that land has been harder.

In the 1970s, a Rev. E.M. Wiley stood before the Beaufort County Joint Planning Commission to express fear of what new plans would mean to Gullah landowners near Singleton and Burkes beaches.

“If we sound paranoid,” he said, “it’s because we are.”

At the time, Jonathan Daniels, co-founder of The Island Packet, former press secretary to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, author, and retired editor of his family’s News & Observer newspaper in Raleigh, N.C., tried to help explain that paranoia.

The words of his front-page “Sojourner’s Scrapbook” column need to be repeated today as a 93-year-old Gullah woman is being sued by a company developing land hard by her home on Jonesville Road.

‘GIDEON’S BAND’

Daniels told about the arrival here of “Gideon’s Band,” a name Federal soldiers derisively gave to young, well-heeled Northerners who came to teach freedmen during the Civil War.

“One of their principal purposes became a determination to provide the freed blacks with land of their own,” Daniels wrote, and explained that it was a complicated process involving the abandonment of land, tax sales, and the hollow notion of 40-acres-and-a-mule.

As the new book, “Gullah Days: Hilton Head Islanders Before the Bridge 1961-1956,” delineates, land was not given to the freedmen. They bought it.

“Whatever the confusion, bitterness and frustration which attended the change (in land ownership), by 1890 it was stated that three-quarters of Beaufort County was owned by blacks,” Daniels wrote.

“And, as Willie Lee Rose wrote in her definitive history of the great upheaval in this area, blacks clung to their new land possession ‘no matter what the sacrifice.’ They well understood it was ‘the basis of their security.’ ”

That process has been reversed, with land ownership flowing to whites.

‘PAWN-BROKER CAPITALISTS’

While some blacks were enriched in the process, Daniels wrote in 1978, “Only those who can think of land values merely in monetary terms can regard the shift from once poor black to rich white ownership with equanimity.

“Thoughtful blacks are beginning to fear that in land ownership the blacks are being penalized by prosperity. They are not driven from the land, but its possession by them becomes every day more precarious.”

The heart of the matter is what seems hardest to understand, and easiest to ignore.

For the Gullah, this is homeland.

For today’s developers, land is an investment opportunity no different from buying and selling refrigerators.

What Daniels wrote needs to be nailed to the doors at the county courthouse and town hall:

“The white establishment on the island has made much of the fact that development has increased employment here, lifted black earnings, and brought to blacks health care and other advantages lacking before the new white occupation began. All that may be true.

“It is equally true that development presses hard upon the possibility that the oldest islanders can hold onto the land which Yankee idealists long ago helped them to secure as a heritage and a home. Many blacks have left for the glittering cities. Sometimes only old folks with confused titles remain on the land. That land is homeland still.

“If the blacks were driven off with dollars, the result for them may be the same as if they were deprived by force. Pawn-broker capitalists will, of course, not understand this. Home, as they understand it, is a condominium, not a heritage.”

David Lauderdale may be reached at LauderdaleColumn@gmail.com.