Black on Hilton Head

For years, the staff of The Island Packet had been reporting on a simmering racial conflict on Hilton Head Island. Threats of a boycott of resort hotels. Battles over whether to keep black-majority voting districts. Anger here. Dissatisfaction there.

“Those stories always left a bad taste in our mouths when they hit the front page, on deadline,” editor Frank Smith wrote. “They raised issues without raising consciousness. Our fear was that they did more harm than good.”

To provide some context and history to the racially charged debate, staff members prepared a special six-part report on what has happened to native black residents since white development began in the 1950s.

 

Hilton Head, S.C. — Juan Byars speaks with a quiet and collected, yet angry, voice. Driving down William Hilton Parkway, he says he feels excluded from vast sections of an island that “was built in the sweat and blood” of his slave ancestors, was farmed and fished and hunted by them as freedmen, and now is being swallowed by development.

Byars, a sixth-generation black islander, finds that he has to seek permission to pass through Sea Pines Plantation gates to visit his family’s pre-Civil War cemetery. He refuses to pay the $3 gate fee required for non-residents to enter the development.

This day, when Byars tells a security guard the nature of his visit, he’s waved in without a request for payment. Still, Byars says, “the message is clear” to black islanders: “Don’t make a left, don’t make a right off Highway 278, because you’re not green enough.” On Hilton Head, “money is the law.”

When Byars arrives at the small cemetery, he says that like almost all the island’s black burial grounds, it used to sit near the water. This is in keeping with a Sea Island belief that the open water is the pathway to Africa for the spirits of the dead.

Now the graves are separated from Calibogue Sound by the 18th hole of the Harbour Town Golf Links. Bordered by a rail fence, the cemetery sits in the shadow of tall condominiums. A tourist takes a snapshot of it.

The issues facing Byars and other members of his community comprise a rainbow of facts and feelings. Their hopes and fears, attainments and frustrations, cannot be painted in simple blacks and whites, cannot be stereotyped. But on an island that not so long ago was rural and had a predominantly black population of farmers and fishers, rapid white population growth and economic expansion over the past 30 years has built into a growing sense of isolation and victimization.

 

Breaking Point

According to established, black community leaders in their 40s and older — and according to a new and upcoming generation of organizers — the situation may be reaching a breaking point. They say blacks who feel excluded from benefits of development want to find ways to work with the establishment to share the wealth while also preserving their Sea Island and Lowcountry cultures.

Unless serious efforts to find solutions on both sides begin soon, they say, it might become too late to make a difference — permanently harming not only the black community but the island business and social community as a whole.

This picture has emerged over the past year and a half, from interviews and from various meetings of black community members — including forums of the Native Matters Committee formed by Mayor Jerry Barkie to enable black islanders to bring their concerns to him.

Black islanders — from young to old, from blue collar to white collar — agree that they face common problems. They say their community’s troubles are with local government — from taxes to zoning to lack of services.

Their troubles are with the resort- and tourism-based businesses, which are perceived as exploiting workers through low pay and few benefits. Their troubles are with the “plantation” developments and their gates — behind which few local blacks can afford to live, and through which few pass, save for service jobs. And their troubles are with an apparent lack of concern for the Gullah tradition — a mixture of African and American cultures they want to preserve in day-to-day life rather than on museum shelves.

Simply from the patterns of migration to Hilton Head, local history for most white island residents and businesses begins with Charles Fraser’s discovery of the island’s development potential in the 1950s. “The problem is that a lot of people who are key in policy-making positions now don’t know the history of native blacks on Hilton Head,” says native islander Thomas Barnwell Jr., a black landowner and a rental-housing developer.

“They don’t give a damn,” the 56-year-old Barnwell said in an interview before his recent appointment by Town Council to the Planning Commission. “If they did, the corporate structure would take some time out and say: ‘Hey, there are some species here that are tipping on the endangered area.’ They would take some time to understand how to deal with that because it would help them to have friends.”

Black landowners — many of whom hold property gained by forefathers freed from slavery — say a combination of low wages and high taxes makes it hard to hold on to property they can’t afford to develop. And some black laborers — including many who commute from elsewhere in Beaufort County or from neighboring Jasper, Hampton, Colleton, or Allendale counties — say they earn inadequate pay and appreciation for making the island’s tourism-and-retirement economy run.

Census reports show that the black population on Hilton Head has grown by 70 percent to 2,259 residents since 1975, while the white population has jumped by 307 percent to 21,208 residents. In the past five years, the white population has grown 22 times faster than the black population. Poverty levels among blacks on the island run three times higher than among whites.

The census figures omit an even more important factor: Black islanders have their roots in the land, and their land-holdings have decreased. On an island of about 42,000 acres, blacks hold an estimated 3,000 acres, almost all of it undeveloped.

 

Race and Economics

They can’t prove it, but members of the black community sometimes wonder if — in the areas of both land and jobs — problems are compounded by a subtle form of “institutional racism,” according to Emory Campbell, a black Hilton Head native who directs Penn Community Center on St. Helena Island.

From black community leaders to office secretaries to waitresses, talk about cultural and social pressures always circles back to economics. Island and other Lowcountry black residents, they say, are dealing with economic difficulties that put a disproportionate share of their race at a disadvantage. They talk of a widening gap between rich and poor and say affluence on Hilton Head makes the poor feel poorer.

“This whole business of race relations in the United States and on the island has to do with economics,” Campbell says. “It has to do with how much opportunity there is.”

Island blacks today find themselves in a society that emphasizes “rugged individualism” and independence, he says, instead of their old ways of working together on the land and sea. Before, “you plowed your land and grew crops. Today, the town says, ‘you’ve got to do A, B, C, and D to use your land. ’”

Black islanders opposed formation of the Town of Hilton Head in 1983, saying it would bring over-regulation of their land and — with a plan to provide only a “limited-services” government — offer no benefits in return. Today, many say those fears came true. For example, Campbell says, “it’s a sin” that the town has not required or provided a means for non-plantation communities to get infrastructure — such as public water service, which has been left in the hands of private utilities and public service districts.

If the town has been a sinner, it made at least one attempt at redemption in the 1980s. Town Council helped the Rural Water District get grants and loans for a $1.24 million project to bring two wells, 6.2 miles of water mains, and 332 fire hydrants for 225 customers in the Squire Pope community, where many of the residents are black. Water began flowing in 1989 and reaches most, but not all, in the area.

But Campbell, who was the water district’s chair when the project began in the late 1970s, notes that “we didn’t need a town to get water there.” In fact, the town’s formation delayed the project by several years: “Ironically, the establishment of the town disqualified us from getting Farmers Home Administration grants as a rural community.”

Both Campbell and Barnwell, current chair of the Rural Water District, complain that residents of the Spanish Wells community are paying property taxes to Hilton Head Public Service District No. 1 for water they don’t receive. Residents of the Chaplin community and businesses on the west side of William Hilton Parkway also are without public water.

Since “mainstream America has come and imposed things on this tradition” of living off the land, Campbell says, blacks require infrastructure to change their land from traditional to modern-day uses.

 

Growing Condos

When the civil rights movement of the 1950s was growing in other parts of the South, Campbell recalls, it didn’t become an issue on undeveloped Hilton Head. “We didn’t have segregation on Hilton Head, except for the schools,” he says. Hilton Head blacks and the few white families who had lived on the island so long that they, too, considered themselves native to the island, got along like family.

But 27 years after passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, some island blacks feel more socially and economically segregated than ever. “All these things are new,” says Campbell, who literally walks into a part of black history when he goes to work each day. The Penn Center, founded in 1861 by two Pennsylvania Quakers, was the nation’s first school for freedmen. Converted from a school to a community center in 1948, it now works to preserve Gullah culture and to meet social and educational needs of area blacks.

Campbell bristles at the suggestion — made by critics of a CBS 60 Minutes segment on Beaufort County titled “The New Plantations” — that development has provided jobs and services that would have been unavailable if “growing butter beans” had remained the economic base.

“That’s an insult. We done pretty good with the butter beans,” Campbell says. “We had just gotten out of slavery” and were taught how to farm vegetables. “Who’s going to teach us how to grow the condo?”

To people who say that black islanders can take that responsibility, Campbell replies: “We ain’t been free that long.

“I’m not saying that anybody owes me anything.” he says. But, he adds, island blacks would welcome some help to make better lives in the new economy. “Look, we all want to rise together.”