The Colored History of Skidaway Island

Skidaway Island, Georgia is one of the most affluent communities in the United States. It is well known for its waterfront properties and numerous golf resorts. It sits just outside of Savannah, Georgia- to the southeast- and includes one of the largest gated communities in the country.

You may recall that General Tecumseh Sherman’s march to the sea ended with the capture of the port of Savannah, Georgia on December 21, 1864. You may have even heard of General Sherman’s Special Field Order No. 15, aka “40 acres and a mule” where confederate plantation lands would be redistributed to the newly freed slaves with each family to receive a plot of not more than (40) acres of tillable ground beginning with “a strip of coastline stretching from Charleston, South Carolina, to the St. John’s River in Florida, including Georgia’s Sea Islands”. In total this was approximately 400,000 acres of land that was to be redistributed.

General Sherman got the idea from a meeting with 20 leaders of the black community in Savannah on January 12, 1865 where he bothered to ask them what they wanted for their own people as a result of their slavery and the war. And their answer was to own land so that they could be self-sufficient.

What you probably did not know is that Baptist minister Ulysses L. Houston, one of the group that had met directly with Sherman, led 1,000 blacks to Skidaway Island, Ga., where they established a self-governing community with Houston as the “black governor.”

Sadly, after Abraham Lincoln was assassinated on April 14, Andrew Johnson became president. He was sympathetic to the South and rescinded the order within the year and Skidaway Island was taken back from these freed men. Skidaway Island was just over 16 acres out of the 400,000 acres that was all taken back from these freed men.

We hear about reparations, but it is rare that you get a specific observable example to see the long term implications of denying land ownership to the black community and how it compounds their poverty over decades while- like interest- it compounds the wealth of whites. As you might have guessed Skidaway Island is currently 97.57% white. There are essentially no blacks living in those waterfront homes or playing on those golf courses, one of which is called the Plantation Golf Course. All the affluence that would have accrued to the blacks is still to this day benefitting whites, who live in gated communities and still do not associate with blacks.