40 Days. 7,000 Acres. The Charleston Reparations Task Force Is Done Waiting on Words.

Reported by Maya Brown, Live 5 News, Charleston, SC. The Charleston Reparations Task Force, in coalition with Gullah Geechee community members and descendants of enslaved Africans, confronted representatives of three major Lowcountry plantations and issued a formal demand for land transfer and reparative justice.

1. This is reparations as land, not cash — and it is the most specific demand in the current movement.The Charleston Reparations Task Force is not asking for a check. They are demanding the physical transfer of more than 7,000 acres of former plantation land into permanent Gullah Geechee stewardship, with a clear vision for what that land would do: affordable housing, community development, land-based education, and cultural preservation. This is the most concrete, place-specific reparations demand in the country right now.

2. Three of the Lowcountry’s most profitable plantations are being asked to give back land their wealth was built on.Boone Hall, Magnolia, and Middleton Place collectively span nearly 8,300 acres. They host weddings, garden tours, and heritage events that trade on the aesthetics of the plantation era while erasing the communities whose labor created those aesthetics. The task force is demanding that profit model be confronted directly.

3. The 40-day deadline expired June 1st. All three plantations declined to appear on camera.They sent written statements stressing awareness, respect, and commitment. The task force’s response was clear: those words have been heard before, and they change nothing. The question now is what accountability looks like after the deadline passes.

4. Boone Hall’s new conservation easement locks the land into tourism and agriculture with no Gullah Geechee input.Just months before this demand, Boone Hall announced a permanent conservation easement protecting the land for agriculture, education, and tourism. No Gullah Geechee community was consulted. No descendant community holds any stake. The easement was celebrated as conservation. The task force calls it another erasure.

5. The Gullah Geechee community is facing cultural extinction through displacement, not just history.This is not about the past. Tourism is surging. Development is accelerating. Historic Black settlement communities in the Lowcountry are being priced out and built around. The demand for land is a demand for survival — for the continuation of a living culture, not just the commemoration of a dead one.

“It can be unsettling to know that they do events and weddings and different things like that without speaking to the communities around them that were affected by it.”
— Community member, Charleston Reparations Task Force