In the wake of the Civil War, Black people throughout the South founded autonomous communities, often on flood-prone land, in hopes of escaping white supremacy.

Today many of those freetowns are gone.

And the ones that are left are fighting for their survival.

Read more in my latest story for The Guardian.

In Turkey Creek, Patrick White points out community advocates from his church. Slowing encroachment has required a multigenerational effort.

On Google Earth, Turkey Creek, Mississippi, is easy to miss: two splashes of green squished inside North Gulfport’s beige city grid. With US Route 49 to the west, Gulfport-Biloxi international airport to the south, and an international shipping channel to the east, the historic Black community is hemmed in. Airport storage, apartment complexes, warehouses and industrial sites – including a toxic Superfund site – have taken hefty bites out of the formerly rural community. But the land in and around Turkey Creek hasn’t always been coveted.

“Snake infested, mosquito infested, and not on high ground” is how Derrick Evans, the great-great-grandson of Sam Evans, one of Turkey Creek’s founders, imagines the land in 1866, when four newly emancipated couples purchased eight 40-acre plots of swampland from the Arkansas Lumber Company. “It was a wilderness with nothing there, but wetlands and swamps and Black people. And because it was the least desirable land, it was the most affordable.”