Charles Fraser

I have no desire at all to see the Black families on Hilton Head Island who don’t want to sell their land pay higher taxes than they were paying 15 years ago.

I remember I was intensely criticized because we brought in a Black man as head of employment, personnel, administration, at the Sea Pines Company. He had grown up in New Orleans and was very competent, had been to college, knew his job. They said, “Why don’t you hire Black folk?” I said, “This guy is as Black as anybody on the island.”

We put in the first houses in Forest Beach in 1953. Before that, a few had been built, about forty, at one time up at Folly Field Beach. I was not enthusiastic about the quality of them at all.

When I began to think in terms of planning the community which became Sea Pines, everyone in Savannah and Charleston—the business community—thought I was touched in the head, that at it simply could not be done.

I first saw Hilton Head Island in 1949 when I was a senior at the University of Georgia. My father was Major General J.B. Fraser. He was president of the Fraser Lumber Company.