As lawsuit against private landowners proceeds, Gullah Geechee community can now access cemetery for funerals and maintenance

February 23, 2026, Beaufort, SC –  After a hearing in December 2025, a court today ordered landowners on St. Helena Island in South Carolina to remove all obstructions to local Gullah Geechee residents’ access to their centuries-old cemetery. Under the temporary injunction issued Friday – which will remain in place while the community members’ lawsuit seeking permanent and complete access proceeds – the landowners must open the gates blocking off the road that leads to the cemetery for burials, funerals, and maintenance.

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 – sued the landowners in April 2025. The landowners are violating South Carolina law by preventing community members from exercising their right to visit, maintain, and hold burials and funerals at the cemetery and from using a longstanding easement that previously provided access to the cemetery, the suit says. 

“This order means a lot to me,” stated plaintiff Julia B. Scott, who has at least three generations of family members buried in the cemetery. “Now we can use the road to access the cemetery for funerals and clean-up efforts, and I know that when my time comes, I can be laid to rest next to my mother and other family members. I hope and pray that one day soon we will again be able to visit the cemetery anytime, without having to ask.”

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 travel across the water to return to Africa in the afterlife. 

In 2024, defendant Theresa Ainger installed a gate that 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, 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 on the other side of the island. Defendants Robert Cody Harper and Robert Walter Harper, Jr. later installed a separate gate that further blocked access to the cemetery. 

This decision follows a state court hearing in December, attended by a courtroom full of local Gullah Geechee residents, in which the plaintiffs’ legal team from the Center for Constitutional Rights and the Bailey Law Firm argued their request for a temporary injunction and the plaintiffs and other community members testified in support. At the hearing, the court also denied, from the bench, the defendants’ request to dismiss the case.  

“Our clients seek nothing more than a return to their decades-long use of Everest Road to access the beloved resting place of their loved ones,” said Kayla Vinson, a Center for Constitutional Rights Staff Attorney. “With this injunction, they can now keep doing the sacred work of taking care of the cemetery with the peace of mind to know that they can hold a burial there, if necessary. This victory is the first step in the right direction, and we look forward to the day when their access to the Big House Cemetery is fully restored.” 

While the injunction is temporary, it, along with the denial of the dismissal request, indicates the court’s view of the strength of the case: specifically, its findings that the plaintiffs are likely to succeed on their legal claims, that they have suffered and will continue to suffer irreparable harm without the injunction, and that they have no other adequate legal relief.

“Today's ruling is a victory for every family who has been told that their history matters less than someone else's property line,” said Tyler Bailey of the Bailey Law Firm. “The Gullah Geechee community on St. Helena Island was here long before these gates went up, and they will be here long after they come down. This case reminds us that growth and development must happen with communities, not at the expense of the people and traditions that make those communities sacred.”

The plaintiffs 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.

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.