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A once thriving Black community along the Georgia coast called Harris Neck is now covered with greenery. During its heyday in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the area boasted a school house, general store, firehouse and seafood processing plants, and supported 75 Black households on 2,687 acres. The inhabitants were Gullah Geechee people, the descendants of formerly enslaved west Africans, who remained on the Sea Islands along the south-east US where they retained their distinct creole language and culture following the civil war.
In 1942, though, the community was leveled to the ground when the federal government kicked the families off of the land using eminent domain to build an army airfield. For nearly 50 years, the descendants of the Harris Neck community have fought to regain their ancestral land through peaceful protests and lobbying local and federal governments to no avail.
Tyrone Timmons’ great grandfather’s oyster factory on more than 300 acres of land was one of the casualties during the government takeover. A few years ago, Timmons and his family walked the former oyster factory grounds for the first time in decades. A clearing lined with shrubbery and oak trees with low hanging limbs led to a bluff that overlooked marshland. It was a profound experience for 52-year-old Timmons, “to be able to just walk on that property”, Timmons told the Guardian, “to just be able to feel that sense of being home, feeling complete”.
Now, as the president of the advocacy group the Direct Descendants of Harris Neck Community (DDHNC), Timmons has continued his family’s legacy of watching over the grounds, even if he doesn’t live on them himself. Two advocacy organizations composed of descendants – Harris Neck Land Trust established in 2005 and DDHNC started in 2019 – have worked to educate the public and petition the government to return the land.
Ultimately, the Harris Neck Land Trust wants the federal government to grant the descendant community, composed of thousands of people spread throughout the nation, 500 acres. They plan to open a Gullah Geechee restaurant and to grant plots to descendants, though the land trust believes that only a few dozen families would rebuild on the property. The land trust also plans to create a replica of a homestead that is open to the public, which will consist of a home, garden and live animals, and where descendants will engage in traditional Gullah Geechee practices such as weaving sweetgrass baskets. Additionally, DDHNC is requesting the original school to be rebuilt.
In the meantime, older descendants are working to pass their knowledge to younger generations by hosting annual commemorations of the 1942 diaspora and offering tours of the former sites. DDHNC worked with the US Fish and Wildlife Service to create QR codes on placards stationed near some of the old buildings, which visitors scan to hear the history behind the locations as told by descendants. Brandon Lewis, the DDHNC’s vice president, said he shares the community’s story with the youth through social media, with the hope of, “galvanizing everybody so that we move as one unit from the oldest to the youngest”.
Throughout the years, the community has made small gains in its efforts to return home. The McIntosh county board of commissioners passed the Harris Neck resolution in 2007 to acknowledge the county’s role in overtaking Harris Neck nearly 60 years earlier at the behest of the Harris Neck Land Trust. And in 2020, DDHNC secured a memorandum of understanding with the US fish and wildlife services, which has overseen the land since 1962. The MOU outlines an agreement between the descendants and the government agency to work together in highlighting the Harris Neck community’s impact on the area.
Even though the descendants have garnered a few incremental wins, they may face challenges from a federal administration that has opposed reparations for Black Americans and racial equity efforts. “With the election of Trump”, said Dave Kelly, the Harris Neck Land Trust’s former executive director, “there is no chance of victory for us during this administration.”
Still, Timmons is hopeful that he will one day see the land returned to his family and other descendants. “We never gave up hope,” Timmons said. “Even right now, we have not given up hope of going back home.”
‘We lost everything’
The story of Harris Neck began after the civil war. In 1865, the plantation owner Margaret Ann Harris left in her will more than 2,000 acres of land to Robert Delegal, whom she formerly enslaved. Delegal later sold the land to 75 Gullah Geechee families. By the late 1800s, Harris Neck was a self-sufficient Black community.
“We knew the land, we were farmers and fishermen,” said Wilson Moran, who is Gullah Geechee and an advisor for the Harris Neck Land Trust. “We did the crabs, the shrimp, the fish, the horses, the clams, the conch. We did rice, cotton and other agricultural products. So we became quite successful … we had our own fire station at our own school, and we had our own community.”
That all changed during the second world war when the federal government assumed ownership of the land and families were only given a few weeks to move by 27 July 1942. “This was in July, at harvest time,” Moran said, “Therefore, we lost everything.”
Seventy percent of the landowners were Black, while around 20% were white. In return for seizing their land, the federal government compensated Black landowners $26.90 per acre on average, while white landowners were paid $37.31 per acre, according to a 1985 US Government Accountability Office report. Moran, now 82 years old, was the first to be born to the displaced community after they were forced off of the land. He grew up in a shack two miles away from the original property and recalled hearing stories about his family quickly rebuilding their lives while his mom was pregnant with him. “They almost died,” Moran said, “but they survived.”
In 1943, shortly after Moran was born, the US army corps of engineers constructed an air field that was in use for one year. After the land sat unused for several years, the federal government conveyed it to McIntosh county to use it as a public airport. But the county mismanaged the land for more than a decade, resulting in illegal activities including gambling to occur there, according to the Harris Neck Last Trust. For the property’s latest iteration, the federal government transferred it to the US fish and wildlife service in 1966, creating the Harris Neck National Wildlife Refuge that remains in operation today.
Throughout Moran’s childhood, he heard stories from family members about Harris Neck’s zenith and their dream to one day return to the land. But Jim Crow policies were in effect at the time, so the families had little power to resist the government takeover.
Following the civil rights movement in the late 1970s, former members of Harris Neck and their descendants hosted marches and erected tents on Harris Neck in an attempt to reclaim the property. Timmons recalled visiting the land at five years old in 1979. He watched his father and several other men – Edgar Timmons Jr, Ted Clark, Chris McIntosh Jr, Hercules Anderson – engage in a peaceful sit-in on the property. Federal marshals grabbed his father’s arms and dragged him and the other men to the back of a police van, Timmons recalled, and they spent more than 15 days in a Savannah jail.
“My dad was not a criminal,” Timmons said. “All he was doing was just sitting in to get noticed, to get heard, to want to go home.”
Following the protest, Edgar Timmons Jr and others in a group called the People Organized for Equal Rights filed a motion for the federal government to return Harris Neck in 1980. But a district judge in Georgia ruled against it, stating that only Congress could offer redress.
The People Organized for Equal Rights unsuccessfully attempted to convince Congress to sponsor bills to help return the land to its original owners until the group eventually dissolved with little gains. But the initial movement sparked the creation of the Harris Neck Land Trust two decades later.
Kelly, the Harris Neck Land Trust’s former executive director, was a writer in California in the early 2000s and became involved in the movement when he moved to Georgia to research the Harris Neck community. In 2005, Kelly, Moran, and reverend Robert Thorpe – one of the original inhabitants of the community – created a trust to represent all 75 families. An advisory board consists of Gullah leaders such as Emory Campbell, and law professor and former Black Panther Party activist Kathleen Cleaver.
Over the years, the Harris Neck Land Trust has researched court documents, federal and county records, located the families who lived on the land until the 1940s and lobbied Congress. The members were encouraged by other restorative justice efforts in recent decades such as the 1988 redress of more than $1.6bn to more than 80,000 Japanese Americans who were incarcerated during the second world war, and the return of 16,000 acres of land to the Colorado River Indian Tribes in 2005.
Members of the trust testified before a congressional natural resources subcommittee in 2011, but the federal government didn’t budge in ceding any of the land back to the descendants. Congress was “deeply entrenched and resistant”, Kelly said. “They thought that if they gave us even 10 acres, that it would create a precedent that lots of people would use nationally. People would come out of the woodwork all over the country demanding their land back.”
Meanwhile, another advocacy group formed. In 2019, Timmons’ aunt, Frances Timmons-Lewis, co-founded DDHNC to recognize the Timmons family’s contributions to the former community; her ancestors had employed thousands of Gullah people for their seafood processing plant. “It was a need to hear our side, to hear our story,” Timmons-Lewis said, “to shine the light of truth on the accomplishments of my grandfather, my grandmother and others who worked so hard and accomplished so much before the government came in and took that land”.
In late July, attendees joined DDHNC’s fifth annual commemoration of the 1942 disbursement of the Harris Neck community. At the First African Baptist Church in Townsend, Georgia, speakers from the descendant community talked about their movement over a breakfast of shrimp, gravy and grits.
Afterwards, attendees toured the location of the original First African Baptist Church, the old post office, courthouse, school, Timmons Oyster Factory, a convenience store, and lodges where women and men separately gathered. Those areas are now bare earth, with signs that show what once stood there.
Lewis, Timmons-Lewis’s youngest son, hopes that his family’s efforts to preserve their history continue with future generations. “The main thing is the story,” he said. “We never want the story to be buried, and we want the truth to always stay at the top.”
