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Ninety-three-year-old Josephine Wright’s home has been in her family since the end of the Civil War.
Now more than 150 years later, developers who tried to buy her out have filed a lawsuit against her, built a road about 20 feet from her front porch and show no signs of letting up.
But Wright is putting up a fight. She has countersued the developers, enlisted the help of a civil rights attorney and so successfully argued her case in national media, she’s got celebrities like Tyler Perry and Kyrie Irving lining up to help. An online fundraising effort for Wright had brought in more than $167,000 by Tuesday.
“They’re messing with the wrong lady,” Wright’s granddaughter, Charise Graves, told USA TODAY.
“She is not going anywhere.”
Sanctuary no more
Josephine Wright has been living at the home on Hilton Head for the past 30 years after she and her husband retired from their jobs in New York City. He was an attorney, she worked at the Department of Motor Vehicles.
It was just Wright after her husband died in 1998, though the home is a favorite gathering spot among her 16 children, 40 grandchildren, 54 great-grandchildren and 16 great-great-grandchildren.
“This has always been a sanctuary,” Wright told USA TODAY.
That is until last year. That’s when she said developer Bailey Point Investment LLC began doing work around and even on her property, like cutting down trees and kicking up dust that covered her car and house. Around the same time, she said other strange things started happening, including flattened tires and a snake hanging in a window.
Bailey Point Investment owns land on every side of Wright’s 1.8-acre property after acquiring it in 2014, and is developing a 147-home subdivision in the area. The company tried to buy Wright’s property a few years back, offering just $39,000, she said.
The situation escalated in February, when Bailey Point Investment sued Wright in local court. The lawsuit said that Wright’s screened-in porch, a shed and a satellite dish were encroaching on the company’s property, causing a nuisance, lowering property values and delaying their development plans.
The shed, porch and satellite dish “continue to annoy and disturb” the company, which is entitled to “just and adequate compensation for its losses, inconveniences, aggravation, unnecessary expenditures of time and efforts and disruptions,” the lawsuit said.
Neither Bailey Point Investment’s attorney, Helen Bacon Hester, nor company representatives have returned requests by USA TODAY for comment.
Wright and her family believe the lawsuit was an intimidation tactic. If it was, it didn’t work.
Fighting back
Wright obtained an attorney and filed a countersuit against Bailey Point, denying all the company’s claims and asserting that Bailey Point Investment had been engaging in “a consistent and constant barrage of tactics of intimidation, harassment, trespass, to include this litigation in an effort to force her to sell her property.”
“Wright … has been deprived of the peaceful enjoyment of her property, her property has been damaged and she has been threatened,” the countersuit says.
A hearing has been set for Sept. 14 for both lawsuits.
An article in Hilton Head’s Island Packet newspaper began drawing attention to the battle in mid-May, with civil rights attorney and former South Carolina Rep. Bakari Sellers tweeted it to his 400,000 followers.
The story took off in local and national media and on June 28, Hollywood heavyweight Tyler Perry posted a TV station’s story that quoted Wright as saying, “I’ve pretty much been a fighter all my life.”
“Well, that makes two of us. Ms. Wright,” Perry wrote. “Please tell where to show up and what you need to help you fight.”
Soon after that, celebrities including recording artists Fantasia and Meek Mill posted their support, and Dallas Mavericks star guard Kyrie Irving donated $40,000 to a GoFundMe that Graves started to help her grandmother pay for attorneys’ fees and a new fence to create a barrier between Wright’s property and the new development.
Wright’s story has also made the rounds on TikTok, racking up hundreds of thousands of views on various creators’ pages.
“How dare they bother her,” one user wrote. And another: “Leave that sweet lady alone.”
A lot of comments encouraged Wright not to give up the fight.
They need not worry, Sellers said.
“She’s a short lady, but a very powerful lady,” he said of Wright, who stands at about 5 feet tall. “It’s the true epitome of David versus Goliath, but it’s a little different because she’s a very powerful woman and the community’s rallied around her. Black, white, Democrat and Republican.”
‘A tragedy’
Among those supporting Wright is the Jonesville Preservation Society, a neighborhood group that formed last year directly in response to what they say was a blindside approval of Bailey Point Investment by town planners.
Assistant town manager Shawn Colin said the town followed all the required rules, but has since added another layer to its process for more transparency.
Kelley LeBlanc of the Jonesville Preservation Society told USA TODAY that it’s not a case of not-in-my-backyard-ism.
“These houses are estimated to sell at $400,000 to $800,000,” she said. “We want to protect our beautiful island and do not need more unaffordable houses.”
She called Bailey Point Investment’s action against Wright “a harassment lawsuit” and said that what’s happening to Wright has been a longstanding problem on the island for the Gullah-Geechee community.
The Gullah-Geechee, descendants of West and Central Africans, made up just about all of Hilton Head’s population until the 1950s. Where they were once in the tens of thousands, the population is now in the hundreds because of land grabs and increased development, LeBlanc said.
Sellers said he’s seen developers “use whatever tactics they can to take property” from the Gullah community.
“It’s really been a tragedy for the Gullah community,” LeBlanc said. “Josephine is kind of the poster child.”
Wright said it has been an “extremely stressful” time.
All she is wants is for “these people will leave us alone and let me keep my property for the sanctuary of my family,” she said. “That’s what I’m hoping, to have peace of mine and peace of my property.”
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