Keith Rushing

speaker

315 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 27 Jul

Keith Rushing’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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How to Be a Better Human · How to understand your family history (w/ Keith Rushing) · 27 Jul 2026 podcast

But it was in the 1950s when you started to see two men in particular who came and did a whole logging operation to make money timbering on the land.

And then it went from that to this idea of vacation homes, like retirement homes, hotels,

gated communities, the idea of like the coast as a place for recreation, but also to retire.

And if you were to go back to the early part of the 20th century, you had wealthy white businessmen who owned a lot of land in the South.

So most Black people lived in the North of Hilton Head, so in the upper quarter to a third.

And so you had these wealthy white businessmen that owned land, but they didn't develop it.

They'd go down there with friends and hunt.

And so Black people used the island all over the island.

however they wanted.

So where they lived, where they could also go hunt and fish in the South.

So as this development happened and you started to have gated communities, people found themselves like locked out of areas where they had always been.

So that was, I think, the start of a process where you see more kind of exclusion

and in a sense, segregation, where segregation didn't exist.

My cousin Phoebe, who's 97, never having experienced like segregation on the island, like she didn't, you know, you had almost no contact with white people.

Families would go to Savannah and sell produce and go to market.

And I think when you went to mainland US, you wouldn't encounter segregation, but on the island, they didn't.

But through this process of gentrification and locked communities where only residents could be,

people who were Black in Gullah Geechee found themselves locked out.

I mean, not to go in the weeds about it, but aggressive ways of taking land away from folks, like people would buy the rights as an heir.

So their land was heir's property.

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