Hurricane Florence and the Displacement of African-Americans Along the Carolina Coast

The places that are most threatened by Hurricane Florence this week, especially along the coast of the Carolinas, were heavily and, in some areas almost entirely, populated and owned by African-Americans a century ago.

While many of these black residents have since moved elsewhere, those in pockets like Princeville, North Carolina, remain. One of the oldest towns incorporated by African-Americans in the United States, Princeville was devastated by Hurricane Matthew in 2016, but many residents chose to stay, hoping to avoid “another lost colony.”

Regina Cobb, 50, and her family have lived in Princeville for generations. “If it floods this time, I think my family is out,” she said this week. “This is God’s way of saying: ‘It’s time to do something different.'”

African-Americans have been driven from their homes in the region for decades, but the decision to leave has not always been theirs to make. In 1950, African-Americans were about a quarter of North Carolina’s population, according to census data. Today, blacks are roughly one-fifth of the total population.

Andrew W. Kahrl is a professor of history and African-American studies at the University of Virginia and the author of “The Land Was Ours: African-American Beaches from Jim Crow to the Sunbelt South.” Here we discuss race and the displacement of black coastal communities on the Atlantic.

A: White plantation owners never thought twice about acquiring this land, and many of these areas were abandoned after the Civil War. The same was the case with the Sea Islands and Hilton Head. Union Army forces captured that early in the Civil War and white planters fled the area, leaving it to their former slaves.

That was where the whole idea of “40 acres and a mule” was first born. That’s where William Tecumseh Sherman began handing out land plots to freed slaves to begin farming and become independent landowners. African-Americans flocked there in order to seek freedom from Jim Crow and from the plantation economy.

A: You began to see an explosion in coastal development in the 1950s targeting African-American landowners for displacement, often through various speculative schemes that tried to fleece them of their property.

Local governments worked alongside private developers to essentially steal land from black folks through various legal mechanisms. Until the 1950s, Hilton Head Island was where African-American children could grow up without seeing a white face for their entire life. Today, it is a playground for mostly white and wealthy people.

It was around this time that America’s coastlines became highly coveted and desirable places to live and vacation. That’s really the story of postwar America: The middle class is growing, real-estate growth and development is a major engine of the economy, but it’s at the expense of African-American communities.

A: People in coastal areas 100 years ago lived much more in harmony with these volatile, mercurial environments. First of all, the areas were sparsely populated, which makes sense because they were highly prone to storms that caused substantial damage.

The folks who lived there had a better understanding of nature’s limits. In the 20th century, the Army Corps of Engineers, federal programs and agencies, local governments, as well as private developers came in. They thought that coastal areas could be stabilized and made suitable for large-scale development.

That has really led to the point where not only do these areas continue to be subject to massive storms, but the sheer number of people who are living in these areas is mind-boggling, given how vulnerable they are.

A: Bridges and causeways were built right up to the ocean’s door and, all of a sudden, Americans were flocking to the sea to build second homes. Suddenly, African-Americans are in the crosshairs of this growth industry. Many of the decisions that were being made were similar to the decisions that were being made in the cities with urban renewal, where black neighborhoods were the ones being demolished and cleared out.

Similarly, decisions were often being made by the Army Corps of Engineers and local officials that would literally eat away at black-owned land. There were communities whose acreage was washed-out to sea, as a result of erosion that was directly caused by the engineering decisions that were being made by public officials in the interest of facilitating commerce and growing the economy. Again, growing the economy at the expense of vulnerable populations.

Here we have this effort to enhance the environment in the interest of economic growth, but doing so in a way that really destroyed the foundations of black communities.

A: The very types of environmental engineering practices and other measures that aimed to make these areas what they are today, and worked to build up the coastal real estate markets, ultimately did so in ways that were damaging to the environment and unsustainable. They were the very same measures that worked to displace and dispossess black people of their land a century ago.

These are the same areas that are now facing a dire threat from this hurricane.