The New York Times writes in an editorial:
Six years ago, Congress took note of one of the nation’s great sagas of endurance — descendants of slavery who survived for generations on the barrier chain of Sea Islands along the southeast coast. The government created a cultural heritage corridor from North Carolina to Florida to celebrate the Gullah and Geechee peoples, as they are known. It is sadly ironic that one of the last intact communities — the saltwater Geechees of Hog Hammock on Sapelo Island off Georgia — now must fight for its historic landhold in the face of a sudden burst of exorbitant real estate taxes from local government. “The whole thing just smells,” Jasper Watts told Kim Severson of The Times.
These tax increases will be ruinous in that community where people who have long held their little patches of island land have little means to make cash incomes. There is no decency, no justice, no fairness in this move.
