her legal bαttle to protect her family home from an encroaching developer
Kyrie Irving of the Dallas Mavericks has given a 93-year-old woman from South Carolina $40,000 to aid her in her court fιght to defend her family home from an invading developer.
Bailey Point Investment Group is suing Josephine Wright, a longtime resident of the picturesque Hilton Head Island in South Carolina, for allegedly impeding the developer’s work on a 147-unit building next to her property. Her property is a 1.8-acre lot that was originally settled by escaped slaves and has been in her family since the Civil War. In 2012, Wright received her late husband’s share of the property.
In 2017, he covered funeral expenses for a 14-year-old at Irving’s former high school in New Jersey as well as tuition for a 12-year-old suffering from the crippling migraine dιsσrder pseudotumor cerebri. More recently, Irving helped the family of Shanquella Robinson, a woman who was killed while on vacation in Mexico last year, by covering burial bills and other expenses.
According to the Brooklyn team site NetsDaily.com, Irving has actually given more than $500,000 to various gofundme causes.
Irving recently renewed his contract with the Mavericks for a three-year, $126 million agreement. Last year, he was traded to Dallas for Brooklyn, but that didn’t help Dallas make the playoffs. Bailey Point claims ownership of a portion of the land that Wright’s residence is built upon, including her porch, in its lawsuit.
Wright asserts that her property is 22 feet from the Bailey Point border, and her supporting neighbors agree with her.
They are greedy and unethical, and they want all the property they can get their hands on, according to Wright. “I don’t want to say anything that can be used against me,” he stated.
“I just want to keep my stuff and for them to leave me alone,” he said.
Wright has now appointed Bluffton-based attorney Roberts Vaux to represent him in the legal bαttle.
The NAACP and former state legislator Bakari Sellers have also backed her.
The development company was initially approached by the sellers in an effort to start a conversation about the issue, but they got no answer. The non-answer is perhaps even more disrespectful than a no, Sellers told the media.
Despite being among the first to move there permanently following the Civil War, Gullah landowners in particular have seen their portion of island land reduced to a tiny percentage of private proprietors.
There is a systematic campaign to remove property from Black people in our neighborhood who have had amazing lives, sellers told reporters.
“This is about generational wealth, which is extremely elusive.” We know we deal with heirs’ property a lot down here, so this is about land ownership, he said. Wright’s granddaughter Charise Graves described the upheaval her elderly grandmother has had to deal with in the past year to reporters, saying, “Unbeknownst to us, they just started tearing trees down.”
“Our home felt as though there had been an earthquake.” They didn’t even have the courtesy to inform us that this was going on.
Wright’s family has hired a third party to do a survey to determine whether the alleged encroachment violates the parcel line while the lawsuit is still in the discovery stage.
Wright claims that the distance between the end of her porch and the property boundary is around 22 feet.
