August 4, 2002 -- Just call him Ted "40 Acres and a Jackass" Turner.
The media mogul has sued a group of elderly black residents - direct descendants of slaves - on St. Helena's Island off the coast of South Carolina, claiming they are trespassing on his land.
I was about to ask if Turner had no obligation to stake a public claim on the property at the time he filed the deed. Is that not why "claims" are called such?
Regards,
Az
I suspect there is little or no money to be raised by speaking up for these poor folk. In fact, I'd wager they've each gotten more money from Ted Turner over the years than most of those poor folk will see in their lifetime. Therefore Je$$e and Al $harpton aren't beating a path to their defense.
Old Ted is the type individual that the South Carolina Supreme Court would foam at the mouth to help.Send his case to them.They are the ruling class Soo-Preme.I can see them now honoring old Ted with all his wealth,or does he still have it? They probably would call a recess to have tea and crumpets in the middle of the defendants arguement.
Just exactly the kind of act one would expect from a liberal democrat when blacks are involved. This would only have been news if a rich white republican had done the same thing; after all, the democrats are the party of the poor people.
I was just thinking the same thing! Where are all the black people's defenders against the EVIL WHITE MAN - Ooooops! I forgot it's the EVIL WHITE REPUBLICAN MAN.
Just some more on the socialist exploitation of minorities. I don't think we will see this on CNN.
Ted Turner in S.C. Land Fight Thu Aug 1, 2:01 PM ET By ALLEN G. BREED, Associated Press Writer
ST. HELENA ISLAND, S.C. (AP) - Harry Coaxum never felt the need to post "No Trespassing" signs on the tract of woodland and marsh his father left him. That was how the 47 "founders" intended it when they pooled their money 82 years ago to buy a patch of this sea island paradise.
Their property belonged to everybody - and to nobody - in the island's close-knit Gullah community. But as he rounded a bend one recent languid summer day, Coaxum was met by a yellow sign that warned: "POSTED. ... Private property. Hunting, fishing, trapping or trespassing for any purpose is strictly forbidden. Violators will be prosecuted."
The warning was issued by "T. Turner."
That's Ted Turner, the media mogul who has become the nation's largest private landowner, with 1.7 million acres. He has sued Coaxum and the other heirs, owners of about 328 acres, over their alleged encroachment on 68.6 acres he claims title to.
Turner's lawyers say they anticipate "resolving this issue amicably."
The 79-year-old Coaxum, speaking in an accent tinted by the African cadences of his Gullah ancestors, says: "It's a shame. He owns that much property, and he wants to take 68 acres from the poor people."
When the 47 blacks bought the old Baker Plantation in 1920, it took several years to pay the $3,200 sale price. Every year at tax time, the families pitched in. If they came up short, the community held fish fries and sold poultry to make up the difference.
When family members needed firewood, they went to their forest at the island's end, and the lush stands of pine, oak and magnolia provided. Folks from the surrounding community went, too, to gather wood for fires and yaupon leaves for tea, to fish for drum in the waters of the Port Royal River, or just to have a picnic. They started calling it Lands End Woodland Club.
Club secretary Gloria Cartwright believes her father, Fred Fripp, and the other founders could somehow see the future.
She has seen how blacks have been pushed off Hilton Head, St. Simons and other nearby sea islands by development. The Gullah - coastal blacks who have maintained some of the speech and traditions of their slave ancestors - have lost so much ground, in fact, that the National Parks Service launched a three-year study to find ways of stemming the tide.
"He was a foresighted person ...(who) knew that if we as black folks didn't get as much of the property as we could, it would be lost," she says of the educator who learned and later taught in a blacks-only school on the island. "It would all be white-owned."
Over the years, as the islands around him became whiter, Harry Coaxum would receive letters from developers in Charleston and Savannah, asking him to sell. He never even bothered to see how much they were offering.
"That's one thing our father would teach us," he says. "Whatsoever we do, try to keep this property."
The heirs were so intent on keeping the land that, in 1994, they sued themselves.
Because the founding 47 owned the land in common and died without leaving wills, title to the property passed undivided to each of their heirs. This same practice has left blacks in many parts of the South vulnerable to speculators, who track down disparate heirs, buy a few out and use that minority ownership as leverage to go to court and get the rest.
Researchers identified 255 heirs of the original purchasers. Tom Davis, a lawyer working pro bono for the club, contacted about a fifth of them and got them to exchange their individual property rights for membership in a nonprofit corporation, the Lands End Woodland Club, which would hold the land in trust.
In 1996, a judge awarded full title to the club.
While preparing for the quiet-title suit, Davis had the property surveyed. The 1992 plat showed that a stretch of woods on the eastern border overlapped with a map of Turner's holdings.
Normally, Davis would have sued Turner to settle the boundary. But bringing attention to the situation would have started a feeding frenzy among area developers, he says.
"In terms of strategy, I didn't want to be faced with the prospect of trying to convince heirs to become a member of the club and at the same time have an adjacent property owner offering them dollars for their interest," he says.
Davis chose to fight that battle another day. It appears that day has finally come.
O. Stanley Smith Jr. was sitting in a car outside the Beaufort County Courthouse, Turner beside him, listening intently to an agent's voice coming from a two-way radio. Turner was trying to buy a coastal island at a courthouse auction, and Smith had convinced him it'd be best if he not be seen.
"I said, `Ted, don't walk in that courthouse,'" Smith recalls. "`The price will go out the roof.'"
Turner lost the bidding war to an Atlanta office furniture magnate in a "baggy tweed coat." But Smith convinced him to buy nearby St. Phillips Island - which Smith owned - and a docking area on neighboring St. Helena Island.
It was 1979, the year before Turner launched CNN - when the yachtsman and Atlanta Braves owner was listed as a mere millionaire.
Since then, Turner has become famous for buying land and restoring it to its natural appearance. His holdings include 15 ranches in six Western and Midwestern states, but Smith says Turner, a native of Savannah, also "has a kinship for the Low Country."
Six years before Turner's purchase, a previous owner had the property surveyed. The survey showed 298.4 acres of marsh and woodlands.
The western edge of that survey stretches into what the Woodland Club says is theirs.
Cartwright reaches into a tote bag and pulls out a small tube bearing a 4-cent stamp. She removes a piece of fragile onionskin paper and gently unrolls it.
It is a plat drawn for one of the people who sold the Baker place to the 47 blacks.
The survey counts 327 acres, the eastern edge of which clearly extends beyond where Turner says the line is. The boundaries follow a 3-foot-high earthen "line dam" that Harry Coaxum says has been there since before he was born.
The old plat matches the heirs' 1992 survey almost line for line. But in the universe of land disputes, it is what's on file in the courthouse that matters - and this crumbling piece of paper was never filed.
"I couldn't convey the property if there was a cloud over it," says Smith, who claims he was unaware of any boundary conflicts. "There was no cloud."
Turner's attorneys argue that the heirs should have spoken up in 1973, when his survey was drawn, or in 1979, when Turner filed his deeds, or in 1992, when the heirs' survey showed a conflict with Turner's plat. By staying silent, they argue, the club relinquished any rights it might have had.
"Defendant has intentionally and maliciously interfered with the Plaintiff's property rights ...," the suit declares in the harsh-seeming language of land law.
Turner, the vice chairman of AOL Time Warner, has declined comment on the case, which has not been set for trial. But his representatives say this isn't David vs. Goliath. They point out that Turner's charitable foundation has given about $100,000 to organizations working to preserve Gullah culture in South Carolina and Georgia - and to stem the development that threatens it.
Harry Coaxum hopes Turner will relent. But he is ready for a fight.
Walking along the earthen dam, Coaxum points past the posted tree to a small pond. Locals call it "Son's Pond," after his father's nickname. This is where Coaxum hunted rabbits as a boy and gathered Spanish moss to feed the milk cows.
The notion of giving in to a lawsuit, even one filed by a man such as Turner, is as foreign to Coaxum as the idea of selling his legacy.
"It mean everything to me," Coaxum says in a voice both defiant and sad. "Everything."
EDITOR'S NOTE - Allen G. Breed is the AP's Southeast regional writer, based in Raleigh, N.C.
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