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The history of land struggles in the United States demonstrates how ongoing patterns of uneven development depend upon and codify the legacies of white supremacy. In this article, we show how the histories of white supremacy continue to be embedded and institutionalized into contemporary land and property politics through the processes of racialized uneven development using the case of Sapelo Island, Georgia. We trace the history of property relations on Sapelo over four periods (covering 1802–2020) to reveal how Black, Saltwater Geechee descendants’ presence on the island has persisted despite manifold attempts to manipulate, control, and dispossess families of their land. We re-interpret Sapelo’s history through the lens of abolition ecology to articulate how the struggle for life through land consistently runs up against state-sanctioned racial violence, which perpetuates and institutionalizes systemic racialized uneven development. We argue that the “racial state” is facilitating the dispossession of Geechee cultural heritage, which lies in having access to and ownership of the land and requires new political imaginaries to combat the persistence of these tactics. 

Abstract This paper is based on the 2018 Neil Smith Lecture presented at the University of St Andrews. It considers the plantation past/futures of Sapelo Island, Georgia, one of the Sea Islands forming an archipelago along the US Southeastern coast. I work through the abolitionist efforts of the Saltwater Geechee’s who have resided there since at least 1803 to better understand how we can mobilise an emancipatory politics of land and property and to produce commons that work to repair and heal the violence done through enslavement and ongoing displacement. I weave together a series of historical threads to better situate linked ideas of abolition democracy and abolition geography, and to extend the notion of abolition ecology as a strategic notion to connect Eurocentric based political ecologies with the emancipatory tradition of Black geographies.