On 2 October, in a gymnasium in Beaufort, South Carolina, an auctioneer announced real estate properties that were up for bid. At different points throughout the proceedings, several people rose from their seats and yelled: “Heirs’ property!” The auctioneer would then clarify for the hundreds of others in attendance – those who had come hoping to buy land – that the property up for bid belonged to descendants of enslaved people, a group known as the Gullah-Geechee. The owners had failed to pay taxes; therefore, their homes and land had been seized by Beaufort county and were up for public sale.
The custom at these delinquent tax sales in Beaufort is to abstain from bidding on Gullah land, the aforementioned “heirs’ property”. Across the low country, land once owned by formerly enslaved people and their descendants is being lost rapidly to development. With that land loss comes the degradation of Gullah culture, which once flourished in places like Beaufort, Hilton Head and other islands off the eastern coast of the US. As a means to help preserve Gullah land from this tide of coastal development, officials in Beaufort county allow heirs, as the descendants are called, to claim their land when it comes up for bid at auction. The hope, in explaining to attendees that the county’s practice is deference to the owners, is that would-be bidders will respect the custom and not make offers on the historic land.
Of the more than 250 properties featured in the October auction, at least 10 belonged to heirs. When a Gullah heir kept their land, promising to pay the delinquent taxes, the crowd in the gym clapped. Some non-heirs bid anyway, effectively taking the properties out of Gullah hands. “The land loss we are dealing with now is due to predatory development and greed,” said Luana Graves Sellars, a director at the non-profit Lowcountry Gullah Foundation, which helps Gullah families hold on to their land by raising money to pay the outstanding taxes on their behalf.
The struggle over Gullah land is not just playing out in Beaufort county; developers are targeting warm weather coastlines in Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Florida. Just north of Beaufort county on St Helena Island, Gullah residents are fighting developers’ plans for golf courses and gated communities. Two hours south of St Helena Island in Harris Neck, Georgia, Gullah people are engaged in a legal battle over land taken from them by the US government during the second world war. Nearby on Sapelo Island, Georgia, descendants of people who bought or were granted the land on which they were enslaved are fighting zoning changes that could alter the rural pace of an island that has only two paved roads.
Zoning changes that favor developers over residents with low incomes, and rising property values brought on by wealthy land buyers, are two of the root causes of Gullah land dispossession. But the rising property values in particular tend to have a more insidious effect: they result in higher taxes that many Gullah owners struggle to pay. Developers know this, and often target Gullah land for its real estate value, ignoring its historic significance. Under South Carolina law, counties are allowed to put properties that are tax delinquent up for auction. Anyone who registers with the county by submitting a copy of their photo ID ahead of a sale can bid on the properties, which can go for thousands, tens or hundreds of thousands, or even millions of dollars above the cost of the taxes owed. Once a bidder buys a property at auction, the owner has a year to pay their outstanding taxes – in many cases less than $1,000 – to the county, plus a 12% fee on those taxes to the bidder. This process is called “redeeming” the property.
In the case of heirs’ properties, some bidders might view the chances of redemption as higher because of the sentimental value of the land to descendants, according to Teagan Grant of the Beaufort county treasurer’s office, which conducts the auctions and seeks unpaid property taxes. “To look at it from an investor’s standpoint, the chances that [the owners are] going to redeem their property are pretty good,” Grant said, noting that property owners are warned that their land and homes could come up for auction if they don’t pay their taxes. “As much as it’s not the way we want it to be, there’s a higher chance of it being redeemed and [bidders] getting a return on their investment.”
Even if a home isn’t redeemed by the owner, winning bidders assume that the property will be worth far more than the taxes owed. At the Beaufort auction, a property on Hilton Head with $63,000 in unpaid taxes went for more than $2m, bid on by a representative of an international hedge fund who had flown in from Chicago for the event. One heirs’ property in Hilton Head, which had just $965 in unpaid taxes, was won by a man whose final bid was $29,000. The heirs’ representative, an elderly Black woman, looked on in tears and disbelief as the man kept bidding higher and higher amounts. The man, who refused to identify himself to the Guardian, argued that if the properties were of such historical importance the county should not have put them up for auction. “All I did was bid on property, which is my right,” he said. Records obtained by the Guardian show that his bid was placed on behalf of Pegasus Property Management LLC. (A business registered under that name in South Carolina has no online presence or phone number associated with it and could not be reached for comment.)
Last year, Rahein Singleton briefly lost the property his grandfather and uncle had passed to him and his cousin 20 years ago. Singleton said his home, situated on the western edge of Hilton Head, was bought by a developer at last year’s auction. With the help of Graves Sellars and others, Singleton was able to pay back the county and redeem his property. A truck driver, Singleton said he struggled last year to make his property tax payment of $1,700 for his 1.95 acres of land and the trailer in which he lives. While Singleton’s property taxes haven’t gone up as significantly as some of the other heirs’ properties that went up for auction last month – one property showed an increase of $700 in taxes since 2013 – he wonders whether property tax appraisals are part of a systematic plan to remove working-class Gullah people from their land. “In my eyes it’s a scheme to raise property taxes so people can’t afford it, then other people come in and buy the land to develop it,” Singleton said. “It’s sad.”
Though Beaufort county doesn’t give special consideration to heirs’ land at delinquent tax auctions, it does give them a rare opportunity to claim their properties at the sales. Some counties don’t provide that option for heirs at all. Still, Beaufort county officials don’t keep track of how many heirs’ properties come up for auction each year, leaving that task to advocates like Graves Sellars, who hopes that state or federal officials will see the importance of preserving Gullah land and step in to help. Last year, Graves Sellars and other members of the newly created Heirs’ Property Study Committee submitted a study to the South Carolina legislature detailing their plans to preserve Gullah land. Among their recommendations are the creation of a statewide database of heirs’ properties, the ability to redeem property without interest penalties, and exemptions, freezes and limits on property taxes for heirs’ land. The study noted that as many as 40,000 acres of heirs’ property existed in 2011. Much of that land – owned by hundreds of families and potentially thousands of individual heirs – is likely now out of Gullah hands.
“If an enslaved person bought the land, the family shouldn’t have to pay taxes on it,” Graves Sellars said. “Call it reparations if you want, but this land needs to be protected.”
