Georgia Supreme Court to hear Gullah Geechee appeal in April on scuttled Sapelo Island referendum

Caption

Sapelo Island residents Georgetta Grovner and Reginald Hall outside the Sapelo Island Cultural and Revitalization Society in September 2024.

Credit: Benjamin Payne / GPB News

The Georgia Supreme Court has scheduled oral arguments for this spring in a legal feud over property rights in a historic Gullah Geechee community on Sapelo Island.

The state's nine justices will convene April 16 as they review a lower court's controversial ruling last September, in which Superior Court Judge Gary McCorvey canceled a ballot referendum in Coastal Georgia's McIntosh County while early voting was in progress.

The referendum centered around Sapelo Island's Hogg Hummock neighborhood, one of the nation's last remaining communities of Gullah Geechee people — descendants of enslaved West Africans who worked island plantations from the Carolinas down south to Florida.

In 2023, McIntosh County commissioners passed an ordinance which rezoned Hogg Hummock, clearing the way for larger construction: whereas the previous law had limited residences to modest dwellings of no more than 1,400 square feet, the new measure more than doubled the maximum to 3,000 square feet.

The roughly few dozen full-time Gullah Geechee residents on Sapelo criticized the ordinance, arguing that it would open the floodgates to commercial development and vacation homes, effectively raising property taxes and pricing them out of their ancestral land.

"The zoning has an ability to eradicate more of the population, as if it hadn't already been destroyed enough," Sapelo Island resident Reginald Hall told GPB in September 2024.

That month, Hall and other Gullah Geechee activists turned out to the polls ahead of an Oct. 1 referendum, organized by a grassroots coalition of advocates, asking McIntosh County voters whether to revert to Hogg Hummock's original zoning code, which had limited houses to 1,400 square feet.

"It's a lot at stake," said Sapelo Island resident Georgetta Grovner during the September early voting period. "It's our culture, our heritage, our home. Other people like land owners that want to come and change our lifestyle that we live here on Sapelo — it's wrong."

McIntosh County attorneys sued to stop the voting, successfully convincing McCorvey to block the referendum on technical grounds six days before the election, by which point about 800 ballots had already been cast.

The referendum's organizers appealed to the Georgia Supreme Court, prompting McCorvey in November to issue an injunction against new building permits pending the high court's decision.