Attorney Ben Crump has filed a lawsuit over the October 2024 Sapelo Island dock collapse that killed seven attendees of a Gullah Geechee culture festival.

The Georgia Supreme Court on Wednesday heard oral arguments about a controversial zoning decision that threatens to change the character of an historic Gullah Geechee enclave in McIntosh County.

Early voting was already underway when a judge canceled the grassroots referendum last fall.

A new memoir by Atlanta journalist Neesha Powell-Ingabire is a reflection on slavery’s impact on the Georgia coast, her Geechee heritage, and the Geechee culture that exists today.

New zoning is put on hold while the Georgia Supreme Court weighs the validity of a referendum on the same issue.

The mental state felt by some survivors “will make the living jealous of the dead,” one attorney said.

McIntosh’s legal fees for two cases related to zoning on Sapelo Island have topped $170,000 and continue to grow. 

A special legislative hearing on the dock collapse has been scheduled for next week.

JR Grovner said that he told a Georgia DNR captain last summer that the Sapelo Island dock's gangway was “going to collapse.”

A dock collapsed at Sapelo Island, leaving several dead and many injured. The island was celebrating its annual Cultural Day.

“The zoning has an ability to eradicate more of the population, as if it hadn't already been destroyed enough,” one Gullah Geechee resident said.

More than 800 McIntosh residents have already cast their ballots regarding the repeal of Hogg Hummock zoning.

Black residents of Hogg Hummock on Sapelo Island refiled a legal challenge to zoning they fear will lead to higher taxes and push them off their ancestral Gullah Geechee community in McIntosh County.

Expelled from their property by the military amid World War II, Black families in the Harris Neck Land Trust are asking President Biden for an executive order to “correct a moral wrong.”

Attorneys plan to refile a lawsuit over zoning changes that they say threaten one of the South's last Gullah-Geechee communities of Black slave descendants. A Superior Court judge threw out the original civil complaint Tuesday, ruling that the lawsuit improperly named individual commissioners of coastal McIntosh County.