19 Families Buy Nearly 97 Acres Of Land In Georgia With Plans To Build A City Safe For Black People

Where there’s a will, there’s a way.

Nineteen families joined in together to purchase 97 acres of land in Georgia that they intend to use to build a city that will be safe for Black people, CNN reports.

“Welcome to Freedom!” real estate agent Ashley Scott said as she looked over the property that she and several groups of families bought in August.

“I’m hoping that it will be a thriving, safe haven for people of color, for Black families in particular,” Scott says.

The land is east of Macon, in the rural part of Wilkinson County, Georgia. Initially, Scott and her friend, investor, and entrepreneur Renee Walters hadn’t planned on buying such a large plot, but the vision was always clear—to create a safe space for their Black families.

“Being able to create a community that is thriving, that is safe, that has agriculture and commercial businesses that are supporting one another and that dollars circulating in our community, that is our vision.”

After the jolting deaths and racist unrest that took place in the country this year—the death of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, both who were black and killed at the hands of police, and close to their recently purchased property was the racially motivated death of Ahmaud Arbery, a black man who was jogging and gunned down by two white citizens in Brunswick, Georgia—provoked the women to search for a community they could start for themselves.

“Watching our people protesting in the streets, while it is important, and I want people to stay out in the streets, bringing attention to the injustices of Black people. We needed to create a space and a place where we could be a village, again, a tribe, again,” Scott said. The two shared the initiative to launch and create a new city originated by Black families.

“We wanted to create this safe space where we can address our own issues and concerns.”

“We both have Black husbands. We both have Black sons. And I was starting to get overwhelmed and have a sense of anxiety when my husband will leave the house to go to work,” said Walters. “So, it was like, OK, what can we do? And once I saw the post of Toomsboro going viral, about a town being on sale, I was like, ‘Oh, this is perfect.'”

Both women reached out to family and friends to share their interests and ask who else would like to join their efforts, then they created the Freedom Georgia Initiative to spearhead the purchase. The plan is to call the Black city, Freedom, Georgia.

After Walters caught wind of the Town of Toomsboro for sale ad going around, she called Scott and said, “Ashley, did you see the article about Toomsboro for sale? For the price of a small condo, we could buy a whole town for $1.7 million,” Scott said.

The website for the sale of the town, toomsboroforsale.com, was run by developer Tim Bumgardner, who owned more than 30 properties around town, CNN affiliate WGXA originally reported.

“It is one of the few places where you can buy a whole town with every kind of building including a historic inn, a syrup mill, an opera house, a school house, a railroad depot, a cotton warehouse, a restaurant, a barbershop, a water wheel, a grist mill, a work shop, a filling station, and several houses,” the ad read.

However, mayor  Joyce Denson let it be known that the town itself was not actually up for grabs, “I have gotten calls from New York. I’ve gotten calls from North Carolina. I’ve gotten tells calls from California,” Denson says. “We welcome business. We want new people to come in. The thing that we want to make sure is that you promote and help keep the flavor of the community.”

Scott and Walters chose to look for land in the area, and that is when they discovered the acreage for sale just outside Toomsboro, in unincorporated Wilkinson County.

“It was just such a beautiful piece of land. It was affordable, and it just made sense that we could create something that would be amazing for our families,” said Scott.

What the women have done is not unheard of, especially when it comes to Blacks in the United States, Black people have combined their resources to create a collective or cooperative economics long before.

“We have a very long history of doing cooperative economics, economic cooperation, creating our own communal towns,” says Jessica Gordon Nembhard, author of Collective Courage: A History of African American Cooperative Economic Thought and Practice and professor of community justice at John Jay College.

“More recently, we’ve been establishing community land trust, which actually give official land ownership to the community.”

In fact, Hobson City, Alabama, was the state’s first all-Black city that was founded in 1899 after blacks were given the boot from the neighboring towns. In June, Hobson celebrated Juneteenth with one simple message: “Black Towns Matter” in honor of the town’s heritage.

“There’s so many former Black cities,” said Scott. “We hope that we can be one of those as well.” When asked why they want to create an all-Black city, the two shared the same sentiments: “It’s impossible to have anything exclusively Black because our families are integrated,” says Scott. “We are an integrated, tolerant and diverse community even as Black people, so we don’t intend for it to be exclusively Black, but we do intend for it to be pro-Black in every way.”

The first phase of the development is to clear the land, farming, and then creating a man-made lake for sustainable fishing. At a ribbon-cutting ceremony, Scott admitted that they didn’t know the exact history of their land purchase, the symbolism of reclaiming the land gives them a chance to write their own story.

At the end of their development plans, they envision a fully operational, self-sufficient city, with a mark on the map, Freedom, Georgia.

“To be able to pass this land down to my children and to the children that are represented by each of our 19 families. As a piece of legacy. We’re hoping to create legacy.”