A Right to Legacy: Heirs Property, Memory, and Resistance in Coastal South Carolina

• In Event: The Afterlives of Waterways: Changing Sites of Violence, Resistance, and Histories across the African Diaspora

Description for Program

Coastal South Carolina reflects conflicting realities for Black landowners and communities. Imbued with histories of enslavement, dispossession, and disenfranchisement, much of this land juxtaposes Black family land, often heirs property, against a broader vision of coastal development. Heirs property, a category of property ownership highly prevalent among Black families in coastal South Carolina, is frequently subject to increased risk of dispossession due to commercial and residential development, state eminent domain projects, and increased taxation. The South Carolina Low Country has been reimagined within a state vision of coastal development aimed towards luxury tourism and recreation. Black communities have been consistently left out of that reimagination and through a series of bureaucratic and legal maneuvers have been exposed to increased risk of land dispossession. This creates a complex spatial reality where Black communities find themselves caught within a kind of no-space that negates a true occupation of citizenship (Sharpe 2016). As histories of enslavement are inscribed in coastal South Carolina, this no-space renders Black communities highly visible as historical subjects, yet simultaneously unknowable within a race-property matrix that threatens their sustained physical presence in areas many consider ancestral homelands. The built environment of coastal South Carolina requires us to be attentive to the way that plantation logics track across time and space and how economic development in the South is wrapped within a distinctly racialized capital frame (McKittrick 2013; Jenkins and Leroy 2021). Resisting the negation that comes with unvisibility, Black communities in coastal South Carolina are reasserting and reaffirming their ties to land despite shifting legal relationships to it. Through an analysis of two coastal Black communities experiencing dispossession, this paper will analyze how Black communities are resisting erasure from a coastal physical space in South Carolina by recalling and reasserting a Black past while advocating for a Black future.

Author

• Kristin McFadden, Stanford University