Tax Liens Cost Generations of Black Americans Their Land
LONG READ
To the east of the Gay Fish Co. dock on South Carolinas St. Helena Island, a new bridge soars above the water, high enough for the shrimp boats to clear as they head to sea. It hits ground near the gatehouse for the private Harbor Island, where some of the colorful triple-decker beach homes have backyard tennis courts and putting greens. Across the water to the south, a guard turns the uninvited away from Fripp Island, a playground studded with luxury homes and three golf courses. The gate to a third private island is down Sea Island Parkway toward the mainland. Hilton Head is a short boat ride away.
In the middle of them all sits St. Helena, the largest of the sea islands that stretch out from the antebellum city of Beaufort. St. Helena has no golf courses, no gated guardhouses. Mobile homes are its primary housing stock.
Bordered by tidal estuaries, sounds, and bays, the island holds a special place in Black history. Freed slaves flocked here after the Civil War. They held political power and produced one of the highest concentrations of Black landowners in the US. Gullah culture, the richest expression of African traditions and language in the country, is centered here. But St. Helena is also a case study in how Black-owned land is lost.
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Just west of the Gay dock, across an inlet filled with seagrass, sits one of St. Helenas few residential subdivisionsHorse Island, a loop of two-story homes, many with long docks reaching into the tide. John and Hilda Gay, founders of the fish company, developed the subdivision in the 1960s on 40 acres of land that a Black woman named Evelina Jenkins thought she owned.
For the final 35 years of her life, Jenkins lived across the street from the entrance to Horse Island, watching land that had been in her family for three generations become a middle-class subdivision, with lots snapped up by transplants from the inland South and the Midwest. She and her children made a living as farmhands and as nannies, cooks, house cleaners, dockworkers, and caregivers, including for the Gays and their company, while the land they once owned generated money for White families. One piece of it, an islet in the tidal river, eventually sold for $1.5 million as a private island.
Jenkins and her family were among thousands and thousands of Black families who lost their land, or a better description is that they had it taken or stolen in the first half of the 20th century, says US Representative Jim Clyburn, whose district includes coastal South Carolina. I distinguish taken from stolen because these were things that were done in plain sight and with the help of government.
The loss has repercussions for family wealth to this day. Those are the things that people dont think about, Clyburn says. They think about how somebody can now sit at a lunch counter and ride anywhere on a bus. But that is not the real legacy of Jim Crow. The real legacy is this kind of stuff. Thats the wealth taken from Black families. And White families got wealthy unfairly. And it was legal, all legal.
Families, they hand things down to their people. We didn't have that kind of start
On the day Jenkins found out her familys land was gone, shed planned to pay her annual property taxes the way she always did, giving the money to a White man whod get it where it needed to be. It was sometime in the 1960s. She caught a ride across the Richard V. Woods Memorial Bridge into Beaufort and went to the office of a lawyer named William Levin, to whom shed been passing her tax money. This time, Levin told her that the land wasnt hershed bought it decades earlier at a sheriffs sale for back taxes. The cost was $26. The money shed been paying had been rent, he said. He was telling her because hed sold the land in 1961 to the Gays, and now they intended to subdivide it. She and her family would have to move.
She came back just distraught, so upset, says Delphine Gillard, Jenkinss granddaughter.
To the east of the Gay Fish Co. dock on South Carolinas St. Helena Island, a new bridge soars above the water, high enough for the shrimp boats to clear as they head to sea. It hits ground near the gatehouse for the private Harbor Island, where some of the colorful triple-decker beach homes have backyard tennis courts and putting greens. Across the water to the south, a guard turns the uninvited away from Fripp Island, a playground studded with luxury homes and three golf courses. The gate to a third private island is down Sea Island Parkway toward the mainland. Hilton Head is a short boat ride away.
In the middle of them all sits St. Helena, the largest of the sea islands that stretch out from the antebellum city of Beaufort. St. Helena has no golf courses, no gated guardhouses. Mobile homes are its primary housing stock.
Bordered by tidal estuaries, sounds, and bays, the island holds a special place in Black history. Freed slaves flocked here after the Civil War. They held political power and produced one of the highest concentrations of Black landowners in the US. Gullah culture, the richest expression of African traditions and language in the country, is centered here. But St. Helena is also a case study in how Black-owned land is lost.
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Just west of the Gay dock, across an inlet filled with seagrass, sits one of St. Helenas few residential subdivisionsHorse Island, a loop of two-story homes, many with long docks reaching into the tide. John and Hilda Gay, founders of the fish company, developed the subdivision in the 1960s on 40 acres of land that a Black woman named Evelina Jenkins thought she owned.
For the final 35 years of her life, Jenkins lived across the street from the entrance to Horse Island, watching land that had been in her family for three generations become a middle-class subdivision, with lots snapped up by transplants from the inland South and the Midwest. She and her children made a living as farmhands and as nannies, cooks, house cleaners, dockworkers, and caregivers, including for the Gays and their company, while the land they once owned generated money for White families. One piece of it, an islet in the tidal river, eventually sold for $1.5 million as a private island.
Jenkins and her family were among thousands and thousands of Black families who lost their land, or a better description is that they had it taken or stolen in the first half of the 20th century, says US Representative Jim Clyburn, whose district includes coastal South Carolina. I distinguish taken from stolen because these were things that were done in plain sight and with the help of government.
The loss has repercussions for family wealth to this day. Those are the things that people dont think about, Clyburn says. They think about how somebody can now sit at a lunch counter and ride anywhere on a bus. But that is not the real legacy of Jim Crow. The real legacy is this kind of stuff. Thats the wealth taken from Black families. And White families got wealthy unfairly. And it was legal, all legal.
Families, they hand things down to their people. We didn't have that kind of start
On the day Jenkins found out her familys land was gone, shed planned to pay her annual property taxes the way she always did, giving the money to a White man whod get it where it needed to be. It was sometime in the 1960s. She caught a ride across the Richard V. Woods Memorial Bridge into Beaufort and went to the office of a lawyer named William Levin, to whom shed been passing her tax money. This time, Levin told her that the land wasnt hershed bought it decades earlier at a sheriffs sale for back taxes. The cost was $26. The money shed been paying had been rent, he said. He was telling her because hed sold the land in 1961 to the Gays, and now they intended to subdivide it. She and her family would have to move.
She came back just distraught, so upset, says Delphine Gillard, Jenkinss granddaughter.
It crushed her.
Many details are lost to history, including how Jenkinss land ended up in a tax sale in the first place and why the family wasnt aware of it. Some family members blame Levin. Others suspect a relative helped divert the tax money. No one has any proof. County records show that the land was sold in 1932, and census records partly back up Jenkinss claim that she had no idea it was gone. The family told census takers in 1940 that they owned the land free and clear. They may have said the same in the 1950 census, but its impossible to know. The US Census Bureau neglected to microfilm that years housing forms for much of the country, according to the National Archives, and theyre now lost.
The ripple effects of the wealth transfer are less elusive. The White families who ended up with the Jenkins family land would have been prosperous anyway; the land made them more so. For Jenkinss family, the land was a lost opportunity to build wealth. I grew up thinking we were the poorest people in the world, but apparently we werent at one time, says Rosalyn Small, a great granddaughter of Jenkins who lives in Huntsville, Ala. Families, they hand down things to their people. We didnt have that kind of start. Everything we did, we had to do it on our own.
The Jenkinses land was lost in an early version of a tax collection mechanism still in place today, the tax lien sale. Levin gained ownership of the land by paying the familys back taxes, plus some fees. The family then had a year to pay him back, plus interestbut, not knowing theyd lost the land, they made no effort to get it back.
Andrew Kahrl, a professor of African-American history at the University of Virginia, is an expert in the role tax policies have played in shaping the racial wealth gap in the US. Hes paid particular attention to tax sales such as the one that cost the Jenkins family their land.
Tax sales have been around for at least a century, Kahrl says, and took wing in the Great Depression, around the time the Jenkins land was lost. Interstate Bond Co. in Atlanta developed the first large-scale business based on tax sales, paying delinquent taxes on farmland in the South. Typically the company didn't want the land; it made its money from the interest farmers had to pay to get it back. The idea spread. In cities across the US, a new breed of lawyers turned tax-buying speculators sprang up in response, often targeting poor minority neighborhoods, Kahrl wrote in a study of a predatory tax lien operation in Chicago in the 1970s. (In that instance, a lawyer known as Chicagos tax lien king got a key deadline for repayment moved to right after Christmas, in a successful bet that many homeowners would be distracted and short on cash.)
The tax lien industry took off particularly in the states that allowed the highest interest rates and offered taxpayers the least protection. Some states allow usurious interest. In Texas, taxpayers pay 25% if they redeem their land within a year, 50% if they take longer. In Indiana, Maryland, and South Carolina, investors collect interest not only on the owed taxes and fees, but also on whatever premium they paid over that amount, which encourages investors to bid more at auction and makes it harder for taxpayers to buy back their property.
Black families in the US bear a heavier tax burden than White ones. A 1973 study by the Department of Housing and Urban Development found higher tax rates in Black neighborhoods in 10 cities across the country. More than four decades later, a 2020 report from the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis found Black and Hispanic homeowners paid 10% to 13% more in property taxes than Whites for homes with the same market value.
Today 30 states sell tax liens, and investors buy $3 billion to $5 billion in tax liens a year, says Brad Westover, executive director of the National Tax Lien Association, a trade group. Tax sales help local governments pay for services and generally dont cost families their homes, Westover says. Less than half of 1% of liens result in a taxpayer actually losing their property, and 70% of the land lost that way is vacant, according to the organization.
Most of the hedge funds and people who are in this space recognize that this is simply an arbitrage business, Westover says. Investors do not know anything about the demographics of the delinquent taxpayer.
Regardless of what investors know, a number of studies agree: Black families are disproportionately represented both in the ranks of those whose property is sold at tax lien sales and those who later lose their land because of it.
The second event was the Union Armys Special Field Order No.15 in January 1865. It confiscated 400,000 acres along the Atlantic Coast from North Florida to Charleston, S.C., including St. Helena, and ordered the land given in 40-acre plots to freedmen. The orderthe storied promise of 40 acres and a mulewas rescinded after the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln, as Andrew Johnson invited White planters to reclaim their land. Many did so, but not on St. Helena, now heavily populated by Black farmers with four years of freedom under their belts.
Black land ownership on the island was exceptionally high in the post-Civil War years.
The freedmen bought the abandoned land, often from Union soldiers whod acquired it for taxes. By the late 1880s, the areas population was more than 90% Black, with really, really high rates of land ownership, says
Caroline Grego, an historian of the period. Farmers supplemented their income working in the phosphate mine and harvesting oysters to sell in town. They built a middle class and political clout, including a Black sheriff and port master. They sustained this society for almost two decades after the White South began stripping Black citizens of their rights in the Jim Crow era, which lasted until the civil rights movement of the 1960s. Land ownership led to the sustenance of this community that was able to bolster itself against Jim Crow for a very, very long time, Grego says.
Many details are lost to history, including how Jenkinss land ended up in a tax sale in the first place and why the family wasnt aware of it. Some family members blame Levin. Others suspect a relative helped divert the tax money. No one has any proof. County records show that the land was sold in 1932, and census records partly back up Jenkinss claim that she had no idea it was gone. The family told census takers in 1940 that they owned the land free and clear. They may have said the same in the 1950 census, but its impossible to know. The US Census Bureau neglected to microfilm that years housing forms for much of the country, according to the National Archives, and theyre now lost.
The ripple effects of the wealth transfer are less elusive. The White families who ended up with the Jenkins family land would have been prosperous anyway; the land made them more so. For Jenkinss family, the land was a lost opportunity to build wealth. I grew up thinking we were the poorest people in the world, but apparently we werent at one time, says Rosalyn Small, a great granddaughter of Jenkins who lives in Huntsville, Ala. Families, they hand down things to their people. We didnt have that kind of start. Everything we did, we had to do it on our own.
The Jenkinses land was lost in an early version of a tax collection mechanism still in place today, the tax lien sale. Levin gained ownership of the land by paying the familys back taxes, plus some fees. The family then had a year to pay him back, plus interestbut, not knowing theyd lost the land, they made no effort to get it back.
Andrew Kahrl, a professor of African-American history at the University of Virginia, is an expert in the role tax policies have played in shaping the racial wealth gap in the US. Hes paid particular attention to tax sales such as the one that cost the Jenkins family their land.
Tax sales have been around for at least a century, Kahrl says, and took wing in the Great Depression, around the time the Jenkins land was lost. Interstate Bond Co. in Atlanta developed the first large-scale business based on tax sales, paying delinquent taxes on farmland in the South. Typically the company didn't want the land; it made its money from the interest farmers had to pay to get it back. The idea spread. In cities across the US, a new breed of lawyers turned tax-buying speculators sprang up in response, often targeting poor minority neighborhoods, Kahrl wrote in a study of a predatory tax lien operation in Chicago in the 1970s. (In that instance, a lawyer known as Chicagos tax lien king got a key deadline for repayment moved to right after Christmas, in a successful bet that many homeowners would be distracted and short on cash.)
The tax lien industry took off particularly in the states that allowed the highest interest rates and offered taxpayers the least protection. Some states allow usurious interest. In Texas, taxpayers pay 25% if they redeem their land within a year, 50% if they take longer. In Indiana, Maryland, and South Carolina, investors collect interest not only on the owed taxes and fees, but also on whatever premium they paid over that amount, which encourages investors to bid more at auction and makes it harder for taxpayers to buy back their property.
Black families in the US bear a heavier tax burden than White ones. A 1973 study by the Department of Housing and Urban Development found higher tax rates in Black neighborhoods in 10 cities across the country. More than four decades later, a 2020 report from the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis found Black and Hispanic homeowners paid 10% to 13% more in property taxes than Whites for homes with the same market value.
Today 30 states sell tax liens, and investors buy $3 billion to $5 billion in tax liens a year, says Brad Westover, executive director of the National Tax Lien Association, a trade group. Tax sales help local governments pay for services and generally dont cost families their homes, Westover says. Less than half of 1% of liens result in a taxpayer actually losing their property, and 70% of the land lost that way is vacant, according to the organization.
Most of the hedge funds and people who are in this space recognize that this is simply an arbitrage business, Westover says. Investors do not know anything about the demographics of the delinquent taxpayer.
Regardless of what investors know, a number of studies agree: Black families are disproportionately represented both in the ranks of those whose property is sold at tax lien sales and those who later lose their land because of it.
St. Helena Island - ArcGIS StoryMaps
https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/a73616da14944289ae1c832d5fe3bd1a
The second event was the Union Armys Special Field Order No.15 in January 1865. It confiscated 400,000 acres along the Atlantic Coast from North Florida to Charleston, S.C., including St. Helena, and ordered the land given in 40-acre plots to freedmen. The orderthe storied promise of 40 acres and a mulewas rescinded after the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln, as Andrew Johnson invited White planters to reclaim their land. Many did so, but not on St. Helena, now heavily populated by Black farmers with four years of freedom under their belts.
Black land ownership on the island was exceptionally high in the post-Civil War years.
The freedmen bought the abandoned land, often from Union soldiers whod acquired it for taxes. By the late 1880s, the areas population was more than 90% Black, with really, really high rates of land ownership, says
Caroline Grego, an historian of the period. Farmers supplemented their income working in the phosphate mine and harvesting oysters to sell in town. They built a middle class and political clout, including a Black sheriff and port master. They sustained this society for almost two decades after the White South began stripping Black citizens of their rights in the Jim Crow era, which lasted until the civil rights movement of the 1960s. Land ownership led to the sustenance of this community that was able to bolster itself against Jim Crow for a very, very long time, Grego says.
Jenkinss grandfather Caesar Scott bought 40 acres of St. Helenas Pine Grove Plantation in 1884, paying a former Union Army soldier from Massachusetts $400. Scotts holding included the land that would later be called Horse Island and a smaller island called Little Horse. Scott and his family, including daughter Olivia Scott Jenkins and granddaughter Evelina, worked the land, growing vegetables and rice.
Part of the 66 acres bought by Caesar Scott and lost in tax sales.
Evelina was tall and slim. She had some Native American blood, and you could see it, says Gillard, whom Jenkins raised while her mother cared for a child of the Gay family. Her mother was Blackfoot. She had a tiny nose, and her eyes looked like they always had eyeliner. Jenkins wore work clothes and was always working. She had a longtime boyfriend and two children who lived to adulthood. She was known in the family as a wizard with numbers.
Her wooden house had porches front and back and was full of children, including Gillard, her six siblings, and her cousins. All of them called Jenkins Mama. She grew okra, tomatoes, corn, and famously large sweet potatoes, sold most of her harvest, and gave some away to the community. She fished in the tidal waters, casting nets she made herself. She basically lived off the land, Gillard says.
By the 1930s, when Jenkins was in her 20s, the islands prosperity had been battered by two hurricanes and the loss of the phosphate industry, along with Jim Crow and the Depression. People were desperate, says Stephen Schein, a White Beaumont native whose family ran grocery stores that served the local Black population. They had nothing. They had houses you could see through. There were unscrupulous people who would tell you, You owe so much in taxes that you are going to go to jail. All you need to do is sign over your deed to me.
The use of White middlemen to pay property taxes was common. So were tales of predation, especially with property taxes. People were doing stuff who had access to the Black population, because the Black population trusted them, says Joe McDomick Jr., a retired Black judge who worked for years to save St. Helenas Black-owned land from tax sales. There were some Black folks back in the day who didnt feel safe going to the courthouse to pay their taxes. They thought it was not necessary if they could have a White person do it for them. It could be anybody. It could be an insurance person. We had White people going door to door collecting insurance, and people would give them their tax money. It could be a neighbor.
For almost 40 years, tax sales on St. Helena and in the rest of Beaufort County went through the countys sheriff, J.E. McTeer. Appointed in 1926 at the age of 22 to fill his dead fathers seat, McTeer, a White man, remained the top law officer in the majority-Black county until he was voted out in 1962. He prided himself on using his own version of African witchcraft or voodoo to control the islands Black population, brazenly making up hexes and spells in competition with St. Helenas Black witch doctors. In part because of that, he never had to carry a gun. He would later get into real estate development on St. Helena and write a book on his magic trade:
Fifty Years as a Low Country Witch Doctor.
Records about the Scott land are a mess. They show that by the end of his life, Caesar Scott had 66 acres on St. Helena. McTeer sold it all from Scotts estate in 1932 at a sheriffs sale for $26. He sold the same property again in 1936, for $40. The double sale is a mystery. The buyer both times was Levin, who for a time shared a downtown Beaufort office building with McTeer.
Levin was one of five children of shopkeepers Morris and Alice Levin, whod immigrated from Russia and were part of a small but vibrant and progressive Jewish community in Beaufort. A great nephew, Ken Goldman of Minneapolis, says his great-uncles and -aunts were on the right side of civil rights history in a South that was not easy on Jews. He remembers the veranda of their Beaufort home full of friends from the North.
William Willie Levin was one of the most respected lawyers in Beaufort. He bought roughly 60 properties over the years, including an historic house on Beauforts downtown Craven Street and 19 properties purchased for taxes at sheriffs sales, many on St. Helena. The Gays paid him $5,000 for their piece of the Scott property and subdivided it into dozens of lots, which they began selling for a few thousand dollars apiece.
John and Hilda Gay moved to St. Helena to start their fish company in 1948, leaving a nice home on neighboring Ladys Island for a house so rickety you could look through the floor boards and see the chickens, says their son Charles Gay, who was then a toddler. Almost everybody else on the island was Black.
Gay remembers his father buying Horse Island: Daddy bought it from the lawyer, Levin, he says. It was an easy transaction compared with a second purchase of land next door to Horse Islandnow also a subdivisionfrom a relative of the Jenkinses named Ernest Middleton. It ended up in court nine years later, after other heirs came in from New York in a limousine and sued, Gay says. We had to buy it back on the courthouse steps after nine years, for a lot more money.
He says it was a good thing they did, though. Property values have gone way up. Property on this island has gone crazy, he says.
Gay doesnt remember anyone living on Horse Island. He says he and his family knew the Jenkins family, though, both before and after they bought the land. Yes, of course, he says. They worked for us. So did Ernest Middleton. He worked for us until he died. Jenkins family members worked on the docks and on the boats. Gay remembers one who worked as a caretaker for his parents as they aged: She was known for ferociously protecting his fathers post-lunch nap.
Over time, the land benefited both of the White families who acquired it. Hilda Gay transferred several lots to her six children, who also inherited Little Horse Island after her death, according to county records. The children sold Little Horse for $200,000 in 1998, though Charles Gay argued then and insists now that they should have held on to it.
For Levin, the benefits of his real estate ventures went largely to his niece, Helen Levin Goldman, now a retired college professor living in Minneapolis. Levin gave Goldman and her late husband, Larry, one piece of St. Helena land in 1972, for $10. Ten years later, Levin died and she inherited the Beaufort house. In 1998, Goldman sold the house to an historic Black church and gave 8 acres from the former Jenkins land to her three sons, including Ken Goldman, a marketing and retail entrepreneur, who spoke for the family.
The loss split the Jenkins family. Some relatives refused to speak to Evelina for the rest of her life, convinced shed secretly sold the land
Ken Goldman says he is fascinated by Jenkinss story and its implications for intergenerational wealth, but he is skeptical that his great-uncle did anything unethical. The family remains politically liberal. Goldman says he was stunned by what the George Floyd murder in 2020 laid bare about his citys racial relations and policing. In response, he began reaching out to released felons to offer them employment at his newest startup, an online dog accessory business that took off during the pandemic.
Back in South Carolina, the loss of the land split the Jenkins family. Some relatives refused to speak to Evelina for the rest of her life, convinced shed secretly sold the land and pocketed the proceeds. They painted her to be a bad person, like she purposely sold it and then we got all this money, says Tawana Promprakai, a great-granddaughter who lives near the entrance to the Horse Island subdivision. That wasnt right. She was displaced. She was kicked out of her home.
After losing her land, Jenkins enlisted the help of neighbors to dig out her wooden house and move it to a small plot across the road from the entrance to Horse Island. A cousin had given her the land to keep her from homelessness. Over time, the house deteriorated, and Jenkins moved into a double-wide trailer on the property. Eventually the fire department burned down the house for a training exercise.
Jenkins never got over losing the land and the rift it caused in her family. When she suffered a stroke in 1990, she talked about it all the way to the hospital in Charleston, Gillard says. She kept saying, They took my land, they took my land, as the ambulance took her away.
A housing development on St. Helena.
Activists have worked to rein in tax sales on St. Helena. They show up at sales and urge investors not to bid on so-called heirs property, which has been passed down without wills, until heirs can clear up the title. They make sure families such as the Jenkinses know when the rights to their land are about to be auctioned off.
Families rich in land and poor in capital continue to struggle to pay the rising taxes on the increasing value of their land, the same dynamic that plays out in gentrifying neighborhoods in cities across the US. Beaufort County has tried to protect St. Helenas Black farming culture with zoning that forbids golf courses and gated communities, but the value of the land keeps rising.
The threat of tax sales only got worse when the pandemic dried up the tourism jobs at neighboring island resorts. The tax sale market has been flooded, says Theresa White, whose nonprofit
Pan-African Family Empowerment & Land Preservation Network Inc. raises money to help Black families pay back taxes on their land. White wrote to South Carolina Governor Henry McMaster in 2020, asking him to delay the October tax sales in the state and give families more time to buy back property lost in the 2019 sale.
Families are on the ropes from Covid-19, she wrote. Clear evidence of that can be seen just driving through communities here in Beaufort County, where a sea of neon green signs have been posted on houses, gates, fences, and trees announcing that the property theyre on has been seized. White called the looming 2020 tax sale a scandalous state-sanctioned land grab of poor, unemployed, and Black peoples land by rich investors and developers from across the United States.
South Carolina law gives families a year to buy back their property for whatever an investor paid for it, plus as much as 12% interest. The interest rate is on the low end nationally, but the cost can add up in coastal areas where competitive bidding often takes prices far beyond the required minimum of twice the taxes owed.
The state didnt delay the 2020 tax sale. It did pass a law giving families another year to redeem land lost in 2019, as long as they paid another years interest. That displeased tax sale investors including Mercury Funding LLC of Memphis, which sued. According to county records, the company had paid almost $3.5 million in the 2019 tax sale in Beaufort County for property with only $95,521 in delinquent taxes. The delay meant it had to wait another year to sell, if the land wasnt redeemed. Lawyers for Mercury didnt return several calls and emails for comment.
The state Supreme Court threw out the extension on a technicality in July 2021, but not before the longer payment timeline had helped many families redeem their land, says Maria Walls, Beaufort Countys treasurer and one of the few local officials who supported the delay. In 2019 and 2020, 136 properties on St. Helena sold at a tax sale. Thanks in part to the extension and donors, owners bought back 113 of them. In the most recent tax sale, which happened in October, 36 propertiesout of 258 total in Beaufort Countywere sold. A total of $32,366 was owed on them. They sold for $486,796. The delinquent taxpayers have until this October to redeem the properties.
Evelina Jenkins died in 1997. Her descendants forged their own way. Some still live on St. Helena. Many have moved away. Theres no way of knowing how their fortunes would have been different if the land were still theirs. Gillard says that its the principle that matters most and that the people who got the familys land shouldnt have been able to benefit from it unfairly.
To Small, the great-granddaughter from Huntsville, the property might have helped her provide a home for her mother, who spent her life cleaning houses and now lives in a subsidized senior apartment off-island. It also might have helped pay for the education that she and other descendants were able to get only by enlisting in the military or taking on debt.
Some of Jenkinss heirs worked or work at low-wage jobs, cooking and cleaning at nearby resorts or homes. Many, though, pulled themselves into the middle class. Forty of Jenkinss grandchildren and great-grandchildren graduated from college. Two have masters degrees. Gillard has a doctorate and is a school administrator and educator. Promprakai, now raising her family at home, was a special-education teacher. One great-grandson is in the Navy. A great-granddaughter is an economic analyst at a bank.
Those successes dont erase the pain thats part of Evelina Jenkinss legacy. Its said in the family that some of the children whod moved from Horse Island with her had no idea what had happened until later. They would wander down to the water to catch crabs and wave at the White children moving in.
The land meant something to us, Promprakai says. This was a personal attack on what we had accumulated as a family.
Having the homestead is what is missed, Small says. Compared to everybody else, they have some place and we dont.
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