For Gwinnett County NAACP President Penny Poole, it is not enough for county commissioners to cancel a scheduled April 25 vote on using eminent domain to take properties in the Promised Land community from the Livsey family.
She feels the county needs to go back to the beginning of its efforts to create a historical park in that community and re-evaluate the whole thing.
Part of the plans for the park include re-creations of slave quarters. The Promised Land was a plantation before and during the Civil War, decades before the Livsey family bought it in 1920.
Those plans for slave quarters make the fact that Gwinnett was willing to use eminent domain to take the land from a Black family that owned it for more than a century particularly jarring to supporters of the family.
“What’s going to need to happen is the history of this decision needs to be looked at, not just what they did recently, but what they have been doing and where they are intending to go with this,” Poole said. “Evidently, this is a series of moves that have been made and now that their vision is so clear on what they are attempting to do, they need to walk it all the way back.”
The Promised Land matter has put a spotlight not only on the use of eminent domain by local governments, but also on how members of the Black community feel their history has been treated in Gwinnett County.
That has brought up some conflicting opinions on how the county should approach the Promised Land issue.
“Thomas Livsey Sr. began discussions with the county in 2016 to preserve the Promised Land and protect it from development or destruction or cause distress in the family after his passing,” said Commissioner Ben Ku, whose district includes the Promised Land community, in a statement on Thursday.
“The county agreed and have been working with Mr. Livsey since, purchasing several properties…
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