On idyllic Gwynn's Island, echoes of a racial divide

[Blue_Tires]

GWYNN'S ISLAND - Sandy Tabb didn't set out to be a pioneer. She was just homesick.

The single mother of five had been living near Charlottesville, but she and her kids missed the Chesapeake Bay environs of her native Gloucester County.

In 2006 she saw an ad in the Gloucester newspaper for a rental property on Gwynn's Island, in neighboring Mathews County. A spacious, four-bedroom brick house with a water view, it seemed perfect. Tabb says she called the rental agent and rented it over the phone, sight unseen.

Gwynn's Island is, indeed, an idyllic place. A marshy triangle of sand and towering pines at the mouth of the Piankatank River, it has been beckoning mainlanders for eons. Native Americans used it as a hunting preserve and place of worship as long ago as 10,000 years.

Its first European settler, a Welshman from the Jamestown colony named Hugh Gwynn, arrived around 1635. "Gwynn" is Welsh for "white."

Tabb didn't know much about the island's history. She just wanted a nice place near home with lots of room for the kids.

When she showed up to see the house in person, the rental agent was "visibly shocked, surprised and disturbed" to discover that Tabb is African American, according to a fair-housing lawsuit filed last month in federal court.

What followed, according to the lawsuit, was an ultimately successful 18-month campaign of racial harassment and intimidation calculated to drive Tabb, 39, and her children - Gwynn's Island's only black family - off the island.

Tabb's allegations paint Gwynn's Island as a place seemingly left behind by modernity, stuck in a time warp where overt racism still rears its head.

http://hamptonroads.com/2009/04/idyllic-gwynns-island-echoes-racial-divide