The sweetgrass baskets sold along Highway 17
in South Carolina
are not just intricate souvenirs; they are physical manifestations of survival. Growing
up in the Gullah Geechee corridor of the Lowcountry, my cultural heritage was
woven into the coastal marshland. My family has lived on the same plot of land on St.
Helena Island for six generations. However, as luxury resorts and coastal developers
rapidly gentrified the surrounding islands during my childhood, I watched our deep
cultural roots become increasingly vulnerable to complex legal exploitation.
The greatest threat to my community's heritage is not the forgetting of our
dialect or traditions, but the systemic loss of our physical land through "heirs'
property" loopholes. Because ancestral land was frequently passed down without
formal, probated wills, developers easily exploit fractured ownership to force court-
ordered auctions. When I was sixteen, I sat in a county courthouse and watched my
great-aunt fight a grueling, expensive legal battle simply to keep the acreage our
family had farmed since Reconstruction. That devastating legal reality taught me that
preserving cultural heritage requires much more than storytelling; it requires
rigorous, structural legal defense.
I am currently a sophomore pursuing a Bachelor of Arts in Urban Studies with a
concentration in Historic Preservation. My professional objective is to become a
preservation planner and land-use advocate specializing in the protection of heirs'
CULTURAL HERITAGE
S C H O L A R S H I P A P P L I C A T I O N E S S A Y
FLD: URBAN STUDIES
FCS: HISTORIC PRES.
