The Takeaway

The Gullah (also known as Geechee or Gullah-Geechee) are descendants of enslaved West and Central Africans who were brought on slave ships to the coasts of North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia and Florida. Their descendants retained many of their ancestors’ African traditions reflected in their arts and culture, food, and religion.

In 2006, Congress designated the Atlantic shores and sea islands from North Carolina to Florida, “The Gullah Geechee Cultural Heritage Corridor.”

One of those designated places is off the Georgia Coast, called Sapelo Island. On Sapelo Island, a small community of Gullah-Geechee people are struggling to preserve their culture, land, and future. They are descendants of enslaved West Africans, and their ancestors worked on plantations on the island until Emancipation, when they bought their own land.

The Gullah-Geechee originally owned land all over Sapelo Island and had several communities, but according to descendants, in the 1930’s, the North Carolina tobacco heir R.J. Reynolds, Jr. used coercive and exploitative tactics to move the Gullah-Geechee onto one part of the island called Hog Hammock (or called Hogg Hummock by descendants) — where they remain today.

In the 1970s, Reynolds’ widow sold most of the island to the State of Georgia, which owns 97 percent of the island. Descendants and others own the other 3 percent.

This is one of the last intact Gullah-Geechee communities in Georgia, and the number of descendants on the island is declining every year. Descendants say their people are leaving the island because they are slowly being driven off by state and county entities that are denying descendants basic municipal services, and increasing property taxes.

We spoke with Reginald Hall, CEO of Raccoon Hog Community Development Corporation and a descendant living on the island. Hall was not born on the island, but grew up visiting his grandmother. He was living in the Midwest in 2007 when his family called him back to his ancestral home to help his community and take an assessment of their survival.

Back in 2015, Hall and 56 Sapelo Island property owners, filed a federal race discrimination lawsuit which claimed that McIntosh County, the state of Georgia, and the Sapelo Island Heritage Authority were “engaged in a policy designed to make plaintiffs’ lives so uncomfortable that they abandon their homes and their land.”

In a statement to the AP, the county’s lead attorney in the lawsuit denied the county had discriminated against Hogg Hammock residents because they were Black.

Sapelo Island is located about 7 miles from the mainland, and its remote location has helped descendants preserve their Gullah-Geechee culture, but also made it difficult to live full-time on the island.

The only public access to and from the island is a state-run ferry, which only runs three times a day. It makes it hard for descendants to hold jobs off the island, and many end up working for the state institutions on the island. And the docks to-and-from the ferry, and the ferry itself, are not wheelchair accessible, meaning many of their elders cannot come to the island.

There’s also no school on the island, no medical services, no fire department, no trash collection. And on top of that, descendants’ lands are being threatened by developers and the resulting high property taxes.

In 2020, the state settled its portion of the lawsuit that descendants had filed in 2015. The state agreed to fix the aging ferry dock, and make the ferry and the docks ADA-compliant. The settlement is estimated to cost 19 million dollars in infrastructure rebuild, along with a $750-thousand-dollar payout to descendants.

And earlier this month, descendants settled the federal lawsuit against McIntosh County. The county agreed to station an emergency medical vehicle and emergency medical equipment on the island. The county will maintain and install a helipad for emergencies and evacuations, and provide a functional fire truck and firefighting training to residents who wis...

Since August 5th, hundreds of asylum seekers and migrants have arrived in New York City’s Port Authority Bus Terminal from the US-Mexico border in Texas. The buses were sent by Texas state leadership under Governor Greg Abbott, who claims that this is the city’s chance to put its "sanctuary city" status into practice. We speak with Arun Venugopal, race and justice reporter for WNYC and Gothamist, about the circumstances these travelers are now facing.

Under the Trump Administration's “Zero Tolerance” family separation border policy, over 5,600 children were separated from their families. Despite efforts from the Biden Administration to reunite families, anywhere from 700 hundred to 1000 children have still not officially been reunited with their families.

We speak with Caitlin Dickerson, staff writer for The Atlantic, whose latest investigative piece “The Secret History of Family Separation,”—which took 18 months to report and spans nearly 30-thousand words—chronicles the full scope and of the policy, its legacy, and how similar, future iterations may be adopted.

Liz Cheney lost her seat in Wyoming, and Sarah Palin returned to fill the late Don Young’s congressional seat in Alaska in the special election.

We speak with national correspondent for the New York Times, Trip Gabriel, about the these primaries and next week's races in Florida and New York.

In February, one week before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, American Basketball star Britney Griner was arrested after Russian customs officials said they found vape cartridges that contained a small amount of cannabis oil in her luggage.

Now, the WNBA star and Olympic Gold Medalist is in one of Russia's IK-2 penal colonies, a labor camp that has been described as inhumane, where people are forced to work 16-hour days and beaten regularly. The specifics of Griner’s conditions are still unknown.

Dave Zirin, sports editor for The National and author of The Kaepernick Effect, spoke with us about why we can't forget Brittney Griner's arrest and Russia's hostage diplomacy.