PARADISE STOLEN

Black families were cheated out of their land on Skidaway Island. Now it's a wealthy white enclave

- Alexia Fernández Campbell and Pratheek Rebala

KAREN DOVE BARR parked her cart next to a “Golfers Only” sign. Up ahead, men in khaki shorts and polo shirts leaned on golf clubs around the 12th hole. Houses with large wooden decks dotted one side of the fairway. On the other side, miles of shallow salt marshes extended to the horizon.

As Dove Barr walked along a footpath, her tennis shoes crunched ancient oyster shells—an echo of a past when Indigenous and later enslaved people once lived and fished here. “That’s where Mr. Waring would launch his boat,” she said, pointing to a shaded patch of Georgia shoreline.

William Waring was a wealthy Savannah physician whose family once owned this land and enslaved dozens of people on it. The Waring estate—about 1,300 acres and roughly the size of 980 football fields—was one of several massive plantations on Skidaway Island, back then a short boat ride from Savannah.

Today, that land is home to a lavish gated community called The Landings, where nearly everyone gets around on a golf cart. “I hate to say it, but this is paradise,” said Dove Barr, peering through aviator glasses at the glittering tidewater marsh.