Bakari Sellers and others pledge support to Josephine Wright in her fight for her land

When Josephine Wright’s extended family learned they would have a chance to speak directly to Hilton Head officials Friday evening, they bought their plane tickets immediately.

Three of the Jonesville Road resident’s grandchildren secured flights on Thursday, traveling on short notice from as far as New Jersey and Maryland just so they could make it to a forum with local officials to advocate for their family’s land and their 93-year-old grandmother. She is the landowner who has been sued by Bailey Point LLC and is at the center of the latest conflict between multi-generational landowners and the developers that are seeking to reshape the island.

The development company claims Wright’s 1.8 acre property contained three encroachments that spill onto their 29-acre parcel, which will be the future home of a 147-unit neighborhood. Two of the issues outlined in the lawsuit have since been removed, but the family said it won’t alter or remove the final alleged encroachment, their home’s screened back porch.

Wright and her family — who are Gullah — believe the lawsuit is an intimidation tactic, meant to put financial strain on their family and force them to sell the remaining land including a home that has been with the family since shortly after the Civil War. Wright’s plight has drawn the attention of both local leaders and prominent people in government and law at the state-level.

“When I read that article, it broke my heart,” Hilton Head Mayor Alan Perry said at a Friday evening forum organized by Ward 1 Councilman Alex Brown, primarily to discuss the town’s progress on its workforce housing plans.

Bakari Sellers, who served in the South Carolina House of Representatives from 2006 to 2014, put out a call to his 400,000 Twitter followers, asking if anyone could connect him with Wright. In the tweet, Sellers wrote he was interested in providing pro bono legal services to the family.

A GoFundMe account started on Wednesday has, as of Saturday morning, already garnered nearly seven thousand dollars from hundreds of donors. Daniel Anthony, president of the Jonesville Preservation Society, said the community group has also thrown its full support behind Wright.

Uraina Wright-Davis, one of Wright’s 40 grandchildren and a federal law enforcement officer from Maryland, spoke passionately before the attendees of Friday evening’s forum, asking Brown and Perry what they could do to protect her grandmother.

“That’s my biggest thing, is to make sure the elders like my grandmother, who’s 93 years old, be respected,” Wright-Davis said. “They have sown into this community before people who want to come in and start tearing stuff up.”

Brown responded, pointing to town initiatives like the recently organized Gullah Geechee Historic Neighborhoods Community Development Corporation as ways to protect Native islander landowners from large, corporate developers looking to push them out of their legacy homes.

“That is going to have a keen focus on what y’all are talking about as far as protecting people long-term,” Brown said. “Having land on Hilton Head is generational wealth. How do you keep it, and how do you sustain yourself? That’s the question, and I’m with you 100% on this.”

After the event ended, Perry spoke with Wright directly, indicating his own support.

“The town is behind you 100%. You don’t go and buy 29 acres of land and not do your due diligence (on potential encroachments),” he told her.

The town is limited in steps it can take outside of indicating its support for Wright’s fight, however, since the lawsuit is between a resident and private business entity.

“From a town standpoint, it’s between a developer and a citizen. I don’t know, legally, what the town can do, except for push what’s right,” Perry told The Island Packet. “I do have to question when somebody goes in and buys a large piece of land that is within an heirs’ tract, that they don’t have all the boundaries set. I hope to goodness that the developer is really not trying to push her out to get that land.”

The Island Packet has continued to reach out to Bailey Point LLC attorneys, but received no response.

‘She didn’t want us storming down here’

Throughout the event, Josephine Wright sat quietly and watched. It wasn’t until the gathering drew to a close that Wright-Davis spoke up, raising the topic of the lawsuit.

Wright-Davis said Wright is generally more reserved compared to her grandkids. She didn’t immediately tell her family exact details about the issues that had arose with construction surrounding her home and the legal action.

“She really was vague, she didn’t want to involve us because she knows her grandchildren,” Wright-Davis said. “She didn’t want us to come down here, all 40 of us, with our kids and our kids’ kids, she didn’t want us storming down here, because that was our first intent: to protect our grandmother.”

Their grandmother’s parcel is especially important to the family, as it’s one of their last remaining pieces of property on Hilton Head, said Charise Graves, another of Wright’s grandchildren.

The Wrights once had around 40 acres of land on Jonesville Road, held in a land trust and slowly sold off over time by “senior members” of the family, Graves said. Some of that land became part of the future Bailey’s Point development.

“That was all unbeknownst to us,” Graves said. “It’s sad, but you can’t trust everybody in your family. Luckily, I know I’ve got people here I can trust.”

Like other family members said previously, Wright-Davis reiterated that the family understands Hilton Head is a desirable construction location, and that developers have the right to build on land they’ve purchased. Their grandmother has been the target of harassment and intimidation, they say, that goes beyond those rights.

Brown exchanged contact information with the family, Wright-Davis said, and promised to follow the situation closely.

“But talk is talk, we want to see some action,” she said.