Gullah Geechee Residents on South Carolina island requested an injunction against private landowners in effort preserve burial grounds and traditions; court denied landowners’ motion to dismiss the case

December 16, 2025, Beaufort, SC –  Members of the Gullah Geechee community on St. Helena Island in South Carolina today urged a county court judge to restore, for a temporary period, their access to their local community’s centuries-old cemetery. They filed a lawsuit in April against private landowners who have installed lock gates that, in violation of South Carolina law, prevent them from exercising their right to visit, maintain, and hold burials at the cemetery and to use and enjoy an easement along a long-existing road that leads to the cemetery. In today’s oral argument, the plaintiffs’ lawyers requested a temporary restraining order, filed in July 2025, and a preliminary injunction to allow them access while their lawsuit is pending.  The court is taking those requests under advisement and denied the defendants’ request to dismiss the case.

The plaintiffs – the Big House Cemetery Committee, Shanoma Watson, Julia B. Scott, Jimmy Pope, Sheila Middleton, Tamika Middleton, Mary Mack, Pastor Leroy Haynes, Sherike Bennett, Sherika Chisolm, and Arlene Covington – hail from one of the largest remaining Gullah Geechee communities, which is waging a broad struggle to preserve its land and heritage from new development and gentrification on St. Helena Island. Cemeteries are under particular threat because they are often located on valuable waterfront property.

“They are holding hostage the bodies of our relatives—bodies that have no meaning to them and do not represent anything to their culture, whatsoever.  It’s just plain wrong,” said plaintiff Arlene Covington of the defendants’ efforts to block her and other community members’ access to the cemetery for the last year.   

Big House Cemetery was once part of a plantation where the ancestors of the plaintiffs and other community members were likely enslaved. Following a tradition that dates back to slavery, the plaintiffs had continued to bury their loved ones and maintain their plots at the cemetery throughout their lives. Oceanside burials are significant to the Gullah Geechee community, as they believe their loved ones' souls use the water to return to Africa in death. 

But in May 2024, defendant Theresa Ainger placed and began using a locked gate along the road to the cemetery, which rendered the cemetery completely inaccessible to vehicles, preventing the elderly from visiting the cemetery and the community from holding burials and maintaining plots. In May 2024, for example, when five members of the community died in a three-car crash, their families could not bury them alongside their kin and had to use a cemetery twenty miles away. Defendants Robert Cody Harper and Robert Walter Harper, Jr. later installed a separate gate that further blocked access to the entrance to the cemetery. 

A temporary restraining order and preliminary injunction require that the plaintiffs will continue to suffer irreparable harm without the court’s entry of an order enjoining the defendants’ obstruction of their access for a temporary period of time. Such is the plaintiffs’ experience, their lawyers said today, pointing out that the plaintiffs and the larger local community are unable to visit their loved ones, maintain their plots, and hold burials. They also argued that the plaintiffs are likely to succeed in their lawsuit – another requirement for the injunction. As detailed in the amended complaint, filed in July 2025, South Carolina law clearly protects the right to access and use cemeteries. By denying access, the defendants are also violating the right to use and enjoy an easement, or right-of-way, on a road to the cemetery that the plaintiffs and local community have used for generations. 

“This case is about so much more than a property dispute between neighbors; it’s about how the unilateral decisions by the defendants have blocked the local Gullah Geechee community on St. Helena from accessing the sacred space that is the Big House Cemetery,” said Korbin Felder, a Justice Fellow and attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights. “There has only been one route in recent memory that people have used to access the Big House Cemetery:via Everest Lane and Everest Road. The plaintiffs and the community are asking the court to restore this access and thus, their ability to visit, mourn, and memorialize their loved ones.” 

“South Carolina law has long recognized the sacred right of families to visit, honor, and bury their loved ones,” said Tyler D. Bailey of Bailey Law Firm, LLC, co-counsel in the case. “What we're asking the court to do is simply enforce that right. For the Gullah Geechee community, these aren't just graves, they're the resting places of ancestors who survived the unimaginable and built something beautiful on these Sea Islands. Blocking access to Big House Cemetery doesn't just violate the law; it severs a spiritual connection that has sustained this community for generations.” 

The Gullah Guchee descend from enslaved people from west and central Africa forced to work in the lowlands of the southeastern United States. Located in the largely isolated Sea Islands, they developed their own language and culture in the antebellum era. After the Civil War, St. Helena Island was one of the first places to welcome newly emancipated Black people. On St. Helena and the other Sea Islands, formerly enslaved people established self-governance, financial independence, and self-determination earlier than anywhere else in the country.

As new developments and residents enter areas designated to the Gullah Geechee Cultural Heritage Corridor, families of formerly enslaved people are increasingly blocked from public areas such as burial grounds they once could access without issue. The plight of the plaintiffs mirrors that of other Gullah Geechee communities in the Sea Islands, such as Tybee Island and James Island, who have also fought for the right to access burial grounds, and more broadly, to maintain autonomy over ancestral land. 

For more information, please see the case page.