A county commission in rural Georgia is asking a judge to throw out a lawsuit challenging zoning changes in one of Black America’s most treasured former enslaved communities in the rural South.
The legal action, filed in October on behalf of a group of Black residents in the Hogg Hammock community on a Georgia barrier island — descendants of enslaved persons among them — challenges local zoning changes that put pressure on them to sell their homes on an island that houses one of the last surviving Gullah-Geechee communities along the U.S. southeast.
The suit came in response to a decision by McIntosh County commissioners to relax zoning restrictions that, until then, had prohibited development on the island where dirt roads and quaint homes have come to define the region’s cultural and historical roots.
The Nov. 20 counteraction filed in a Superior Court in Savannah by the McIntosh board adds another layer to the ongoing legal drama with Black landowners in Hogg Hammock, a poor and secluded coastal community nestled in the wetlands of Georgia’s Sapelo Island.
Attorneys with the Southern Poverty Law Center represent dozens of Gullah residents in Hogg Hammock, a small island town about 60 miles south of Savannah, founded by former enslaved people who worked the plantation of Thomas Spalding in the years before the Civil War.
The community, which is listed on the National Register of Historic Places, sits on hundreds of acres in the south-central area of Sapelo Island, according to the Sapelo Island Cultural and Revitalization Society.
The entire island, which covers 16,500 acres of McIntosh County, is the fourth-largest in Georgia. The majority of the island is owned and managed by the state, except for Hogg Hammock, which remains an unincorporated district of McIntosh County.
Hogg Hammock is reachable only by boat, while greater Sapelo Island — where the obscure town is situated — is largely owned by the state of Georgia….
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