In rural Georgia, a vote threatens the Gullah-Geechee community

Descendants of enslaved people lost a bid to limit development on an island they inhabit, ensuring the encroachment of mainlanders

In a small, wood-paneled courtroom in rural south-east Georgia, with painted portraits of McIntosh county's current and past white judges on the walls, three county commissioners dismissed a colleague's plea. At stake was the size of structures built on Sapelo Island, which is home to the last intact Gullah Geechee community in the United States. Roger Lotson, the sole Black commissioner on the otherwise all-white panel, had asked the commission to do what the residents of the remote sea island had been asking for years: maintain limits on the size of homes there to dissuade developers and non-descendants from encroaching on their land. On Tuesday night, for the third time in two weeks, Sapelo residents and their supporters packed the courtroom to make their voices heard. Three white commissioners ignored them.

By a 3-2 vote, the McIntosh county commission approved a zoning ordinance change that will allow homes on the island to be as large as 3,000 square feet - double the size of the current limit, and far larger than the small homes and trailers in which most of the descendants live. The measure may open the floodgates to wealthy prospective land-buyers looking to build vacation homes on the mostly-uninhabited island. Unlike St Simons Island and Hilton Head, where the culturally Indigenous Gullah Geechee are all but forgotten amid a tourist haven of pristine golf courses and private beachfronts, Sapelo Island has so far avoided the contemporary explosion of development that has displaced Gullah communities. Black Sapelo residents, whose formerly enslaved ancestors started taking control of the land they toiled upon when Sapelo was abandoned after the US civil war, worry that Tuesday's vote may turn their island into a muted version of nearby island destinations, where mainlanders have run roughshod over the quiet, rural lifestyles that descendants had enjoyed for centuries.