Frankenstein's Monster: Constructing a Legal Regime to Regulate Race and Place

Abstract

The paper presents the mechanisms of displacement of Gullah Geechee people of the Sea Islands as an inheritance of colonial systems used to regulate Indigenous and Black peoples who came before them. As a sort of "Frankenstein's Monster," these systems were pieced together to fit the needs of desperate colonies at the expense of the majority of the land's occupants. I aim to show that the dispossession associated with heirs property is merely an extension of centuries of practices used to control race and place in La Florida and Carolina, illustrated through events related to the Yamasee War and Stono Rebellion.