On April 30, 2025, residents raised in St. Helena Island, SC, filed a lawsuit against Theresa Aigner, Robert Cody Harper, and Walter Robert Harper, Jr, newcomer neighbors who have obstructed access to the Big House Cemetery, a community cemetery that is vibrant with Gullah Geechee culture and is current home to the ancestors of long-standing community members in the local neighborhood. The named Plaintiffs in this case – Shanoma Watson, Julia B. Scott, Jimmy Pope, Sheila Middleton, Tamika Middleton, Mary Mack, Leroy Haynes, Sherike Bennett, Sherike Chisolm, and Arlene Covington, along with the Big House Cemetery Committee (hereinafter collectively, “Plaintiffs”) – have relied on the Big House Cemetery as a source of historical, cultural, and spiritual significance. For several decades, the only route to the Cemetery for funerals, interments, visits, and maintenance has been along Everest Lane and Everest Road (collectively referred to as “Everest”). According to community members, these roads were named “Everest” because they lead to the place where their ancestors will “forever rest.”

For generations, the community was able to access the Cemetery via Everest until May 2024, when a new neighbor, Theresa Aigner, and eventually Robert Cody Harper, and Walter Robert Harper Jr., put up gates blocking communal access. As a result, Plaintiffs and the broader community have been barred from the opportunity to physically access, maintain, or bury their loved ones in the Cemetery for over a year. In an effort to remove the blockage, the community is asking 1) the state court to declare that our clients and the broader community have protected rights under South Carolina law to access, bury in, and visit loved ones at the Cemetery and 2) to prevent the defendants, Theresa Aigner, Robert Cody Harper, and Walter Robert Harper Jr., from violating such rights. The Plaintiffs also seek monetary damages for the economic and mental damage that they've experienced due to the Defendants’ deprivation of the aforementioned rights.

This lawsuit mirrors the plights of other communities in the Sea Islands such as Tybee Island and James Island, who have also fought for the right to access and visit their family members at burial grounds, and more broadly, their struggle to keep autonomy over land that is ancestral to the Gullah Geechee community, like in Sapelo Island. The fight to protect burial grounds, many of which hold formerly enslaved people, is an act of resistance against gentrification and erasure of local Black history and culture. As new developments and unfamiliar residents enter areas designated to the Gullah Geechee Cultural Heritage Corridor, families of those buried are routinely blocked from public access to burial grounds.