Three black communities (and an entire culture) in Plantersville, South Carolina are under threat from rich developers who are buying up the land from underneath them and essentially trying to force them out.

A $250 sewer service charge that they don’t want and didn’t ask for is forcing people out and has led to 20 homes being put on the market in the last week alone.

BBC News reported tat developers looking for ex-plantation land and land along the coast are responsible for trying to squeeze people out. In this case, people who have been there since they inherited and bought land after the abolition of slavery. These South Carolina people are Gullah Geechee, descendants of former slaves.

Lillian Milton, had no idea that her home had been sold until she went to a South Carolina council office to settle her tax bill. She said:

“They had sold everything, the property, the house and all and when I offered to pay them with a cheque, they told me I couldn’t. I had to get cash money – 880 some dollars that I had to pay them to get my place back,”

Milton found out that she owed $250 for sewer service, at that time she was not even connected to the sewer system! She went onto say:

“It’s like they were saying if I didn’t get on the system I wouldn’t have no place to stay.”

Reverend Ben Grate said:

“The only people we see are the developers,”

“We call them ‘strangers’ and we are afraid of them. Because they come to take your land. They are millionaires, in big cars, driving slow, staking out property, dreaming on what it would be like to have a motel on the river right here.”

“We fear losing our home, our land and our tradition and our way of life,” Grate later added. “That is all at stake here because where do we go from here? We would be back into slavery. We feel that the same thing happened to the slaves when they were coming over. They stripped them of their land and their homes and their way of life.”

This isn’t just people being forced off their land, this is the loss of a people and a culture, they are being scattered and chipped away at.

Vice has a video (below) on the vanishing history of these people:

More info BBC: http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-37994938