Lowcountry Gullah activist Luana Graves Sellars talks about slavery’s long shadow and predatory development in the coastal southeast.
May 17, 2024
Luana Graves Sellars is the founder of the nonprofit organizations Lowcountry Gullah and the Lowcountry Gullah Foundation. She is a renowned community activist, writer, and host of the Lowcountry Gullah podcast, which focuses on the tradition and history of the Gullah people.
The Gullah people, often referred to as the Gullah Geechee people, are descendents of enslaved people of West Africa who were forcibly brought to the United States to cultivate rice in the coastal regions in South Carolina and Georgia, as well as parts of North Carolina and Florida.
A large part of my conversation with Luana focuses on a concept called heirs property, a form of land ownership that occurs when someone dies without a will, leaving heirs without a clear title to the property. Without definitive proof of land ownership, heirs property owners can’t get home improvement loans, farm loans, and certain kinds of insurance, among a host of other things.
Luana discusses why things like racism and unequal access to legal help makes heirs property one of the biggest threats to Black land ownership in the United States. That threat is magnified by resort style development near Gullah Geechee homes on the sea islands of South Carolina, which are popular vacation and second-home destinations.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Sarah Melotte, the Daily Yonder: Can you tell us a little bit about yourself and how you started the Lowcountry Gullah Foundation?
Luana Graves Sellars: I was asked to do some freelance writing on the Gullah culture for Hilton Head Monthly several years ago. It sparked my interest in discovering my own culture. As I was doing the work that I was doing, I realized that not only was I working and learning about my own history and culture, but I also learned about some of the critical issues that the culture was having.
And so that’s why I started both of the nonprofits, one that educates and documents the culture, and then the other one that protects the historical land. So that’s the short answer.
DY: What were some of those interesting things that stuck out to you as you were learning more about your own culture in the process?
LGS: Well, when I first started I was writing about the first families of Hilton Head. That’s the name of the series that I did for the magazine. And as I was going along, somebody just came up to me and said – When are you going to write about your own family? And I grew up knowing that I had two aunts who would always say that they were Geechee. But they never told me what Geechee was or why they were saying that.
My grandmother’s maiden name was Ravenel. So I was always familiar with the fact that we had family in South Carolina. But the more I started to dig into my family’s history and origin, the more I learned that not only did I have a Union colored troop soldier that I’m descended from, who was originally enslaved in the Charleston Georgetown area, but I also found on my grandmother’s other side that I was related to Catherine and George Ward, who were enslaved on a rice plantation in Georgetown, South Carolina.
[Ravenel is a famous last name in Charleston, South Carolina. It comes from a large planter and slave owner, Henry Ravenel, who died in 1867].
I was on another freelance writing assignment in Georgetown when I discovered the plantation that they were enslaved on – Brookgreen Gardens which is in South Carolina. So I started doing research on the slave owner Joshua John Ward and his connection to rice in the history of America.
DY: And you said that was on your mother’s side?
LGS: Yes. My mother is fully Gullah.
DY: Did you grow up in Georgetown?
LGS: No, I grew up in Long Island, New York. And my mother grew up in New York. That’s what’s so fascinating about the whole discovery. My grandmother and her sisters as children around 9, 10 or 11, all came up to New York to live. And so my South Carolina connection, I knew about it, but had no idea that it ran as deep as it did. But my mother decided to retire here, and I kind of always felt like I would eventually retire here. But I hadn’t planned on coming to Hilton Head as soon as I did.
DY: Speaking of the Gullah Geechee Corridor in South Carolina, it’s a very unique and special place and has been for generations. But for our readers who haven’t heard of the area before, can you tell us a little more about the history of the region and the importance of the ancestral land?
LGS: Gullah are the direct descendants of West African enslaved people. And they were specifically captured because they were educated, skilled, and proficient in growing rice in West Africa. There’s actually a rice coast which is where the Gullah come from. There’s several countries that were growing rice for generations and for centuries in West Africa.
And so the colonists who were along the coast wanted to grow rice, but they weren’t able to do it. And the West Africans were very good at mixing salt water and fresh water to grow their rice. And so because the land in West Africa and along the sea islands is almost identical in temperature and topography, they were specifically brought over here and garnered a higher price because of those skills that they had. So that’s why there’s a difference between enslaved people inland versus those along the coast.
DY: The next thing I want to ask about is heirs property. The term has different definitions in different parts of the country. Based on my understanding of what I’ve read, there’s an intent in some legislation to provide a uniform definition. But just in plain terms for someone who’s maybe never heard of this, what is heirs property?
LGS: Heirs property as a definition is land that is passed down without documentation from generation to generation. So that’s the short answer. What happened is, after slavery, a lot of formerly enslaved people were either given land or purchased land. But they were also discouraged from making wills and titling the lot. In West African tradition, land is of gods. So you don’t have a piece of paper that says this is your land. So with maliciousness, distrust, black codes, a whole list of things, land ownership for Black people were not provided the educational process that they should have received. So essentially, heirs property was created as a result of the end of the Civil War and racism for lack of a better way of saying it.
What would happen is the grandparents would pass down property to their son or daughter, and then the son or daughter to their son and daughter and so on. In a lot of cases, you might have property that was bought more than 100 years ago that by now has 100, 500, or 1,000 heirs that are rightfully entitled to a percentage of that land because there was never a will to specifically designate who the land should go to.
Sometimes there is land that a family may have had for years and someone who has been living on and maintaining and paying the taxes all of that kind of stuff. But because they are not titled owners, they do not fully own the property. And so with heirs property, it becomes very convoluted and difficult to not only figure out who all of the heirs are, but also to come to an agreement on what to do with the property.
And so the land might have been, say, $400 a year for the taxes for years. But because of development it may jump up to $2,000. So the land in some cases has become more of an economic burden than anything else. And most people don’t even know that they have heirs property until there’s an issue. Maybe someone passes away or someone wants to do something with the land and then they realize that they are not the rightful owner of that land. And so that creates a whole other level of problems.
DY: You help people with some of those issues, right? Can you talk a little bit more about what you’re trying to do with land assessor data to make these properties more easy to identify?
LGS: What the foundation does is because heirs property is so complicated and convoluted, we try to help people to identify what they have and then resolve it.
The culture is diminished by the loss of land. It’s similar to what happened to the Native Americans and to the Hawaiians when they lost their land. There are 11 states that have heirs property issues in the United States, from Virginia all the way over to Texas. So trying to get South Carolina to not only understand the problem, but also to create some consistency county by county is one of the goals that is necessary because heirs property, county by county, is not categorized in a similar manner. So Horry County, they don’t have a category for heirs property. But then you can go to Beaufort County and they do have a category for heirs property. Things like that are very significant, as well as trying to make laws that enable an easier transition of land.
If one heir says that they want to sell the land, then chances are a judge is going to force the sale of the land versus trying to make it fair for everybody. There have been several cases where one person has forced the sale who doesn’t even live on the land and may not even have seen the land. But it forces the people who are living on the land to be displaced. So it’s a significant problem and it happens just about every day and the amount of land that exists is shrinking very quickly.
DY: Sometimes the instigators of those sales will be predatory development companies, right?
LGS: Yes. If there are 100 heirs, they’re all entitled essentially to an acre, but it’s all considered one parcel. When one person wants to sell their percentage of the land, they could essentially force someone from the outside into the conversation. And then that one person could go ahead and force the other heirs to essentially buy them out. But sometimes you can’t because a lot of Gullah landowners are land rich and cash poor. So when that happens, the developer usually wins.
DY: Would you say development is the biggest threat to heirs property owners?
LGS: Yes, especially along the sea islands. And part of the reason for that is because the sea islands were considered garbage land because it was hot, it was muggy, and there were bugs and yellow fever, malaria, all of these things. So people, including enslavers, didn’t even want to live here. So that’s why you have the concentration of Gullah land ownership along the coastline.
But now obviously the sea islands are the most valuable land along the ocean that you can find in the United States because of the warm weather, the beauty of the land, all of those things. And so that’s why developers, especially predatory developers, are trying to get as much of the land as possible because of the money that they could potentially make from the land.
DY: What kinds of efforts are going on locally in Hilton Head and in Beaufort County, to either limit development, or limit the impact that resort style development has on owners of heirs property?
LGS: Beaufort County, the treasurer’s office, the assessor’s office, and Hilton Head have become very sensitive to the issues of heirs property. And so we’ve established very strong collaborations with them so that we can help families. Hilton Head specifically has been very proactive in preserving Gullah culture. There’s a Gullah Geechee task force. They just established a community development corporation that will help Gullah families to not only hold on to their land, but also to have economic development opportunities.
Every community that has some Gullah connection is experiencing the same thing. When it comes to municipalities, they are just as critically affected by heirs property in that you can’t collect taxes on a property that you don’t have a rightful owner. There are a lot of federal dollars that municipalities can’t even tap into because of the level of blight that might be in the community and you might have that blight as a result of people abandoning their land. So it’s not just a Gullah individual person’s problem. It’s everybody’s problem that needs to be addressed.
DY: I want to go back to what you touched on a little bit earlier about generational wealth building. People can’t make the land work for them or get things like home improvement loans or disaster insurance to build wealth for their children.
LGS: FEMA, right around Covid, just changed their procedures to allow Gullah families to tap into federal disaster funds. So for all of these years, for generation after generation, if a natural disaster came and destroyed a Gullah home, they could not get any assistance.
DY: Generation after generation, that builds up.
LGS: They wanted their descendants to not only be able to be better and do better, but also to be educated and essentially assimilate into society so they could grow and have some significant financial support through the land. That’s why there are a lot of Black farmers. Black farmers are losing land. The majority of land loss in America is of Black people, close to 90% is attributed to heirs property issues. That’s a huge number.
It’s cyclical. It’s like being on a treadmill. And so you’re just going around and around and around. You get frustrated when you keep bumping your head into walls. You can’t get money from your property. You can’t build on your property. You can’t develop your property. You can’t forest that land. You can’t get carbon credits from your land. I mean you just can’t do stuff. And it sometimes takes years to resolve heirs property.
And that’s a shame. During slavery, enslaved people saw the value of the land, right? But they also have blood in the soil. So when they purchased land and they passed it down, it’s more than just a plot of land. When it comes to the value, it’s your heritage, it’s your lineage, it is your family’s legacy.
DY: Last time we talked on the phone you told me about a few ideas about how to solve some of these challenges or learn more about these challenges and spread awareness about them. And one of them was enlisting the help of research assistants and scholars from HBCUs (Historically Black Colleges and Universities) to help with either appraisal research or property research in general. Can you share a little bit more about what that might look like and why that might be important?
LGS: HBCUs are the educational institutions that grew out of slavery essentially. So the connection right there is a powerful one. I just went to a conference in Boston a couple of weeks ago and there are a lot of universities that are starting to do a lot of heirs property work, Howard University being one of them. The land is evaporating so quickly that we’re at a critical point right now and it needs to be addressed.
DY: I wanted to know what kind of research you think would be most effective. Is it related to tracking down heirs or identifying properties or collecting oral history?
LGS: All of the above. Because part of the problem is that Gullah culture is a face-to-face oral culture. Slaves were not allowed to learn to read and write. So what they had was the memories and the stories that they could share. And so, the elders who are in their eighties or nineties, they’re the keepers of the culture and the stories. But they’re passing away and once they pass away and those stories are not captured, it’s gone forever. The clock is ticking. On Hilton Head this weekend one of the elders passed.
But there are a lot of things like being able to get wills. The process for accepting wills in South Carolina should be changed so that there are different ways that would kind of circumvent probate court, specifically for heirs property owners. There should be a tax freeze on the percentage of taxes that heirs property families have to pay. It’s not my fault if my family has been living on this land for 125 years and someone next door buys the land and builds a McMansion next door. Now my taxes are going through the roof just because someone decided to move in next door. I mean, things like that should be looked at and protected so that people can maintain the land that they have.
DY: Do you find that when you’re talking to non-Gullah people, that they are kind of receptive to what you’re saying?
LGS: It depends on who the audience is. What I have found is most non-Gullah don’t even know that heirs property issues exist. So for a lot of people it’s really a learning curve of “Oh my gosh! I didn’t even know that heirs property existed.”
Then you have people who just want to golf – “I just want to move and vacation where I want vacation and seeing that mobile home is an eyesore for me.”
There’s an African proverb that says that one does not live their life for themselves. They live their lives for themselves as well as the voice of their ancestors. And so that’s why I do what I do because the ancestors were not allowed to speak. They weren’t supposed to communicate amongst themselves. They were essentially silenced. And so I firmly believe that my work is the voice of the ancestors.
