Last week, members of the Gullah Geechee community on St. Helena Island in South Carolina 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.
"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.
"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 Justice Fellow Korbin Felder.
Read the full press release and learn more about the case on our website.
