Off the side of a lonesome dirt road in Coastal Georgia, a group of African American residents came together to build a church. It was small and modest with a cross outside—a beacon for the weary. Rising Daughter Baptist Church rose in 1900, planted fourteen miles from the Atlantic coast near the marshes off the Little Satilla River. At Rising Daughter, members fell in love, got married, baptized children, and mourned losses. Those who’d gone on were buried in the cemetery next to the church, where the constant humidity deposited green algae on the gravestones, along with tufts of Spanish moss that fell like tinsel from the oaks. Despite the challenges they faced in the years after the Civil War, Rising Daughter’s congregation of a few dozen people took comfort in the history their kin had forged there. Like many Black churches, Rising Daughter was a place of refuge against the terror of Jim Crow and a haven to organize resistance. The local NAACP held meetings there for many years, continuing into the 1980s, a time of seismic change for the community.

For generations, most people in the rural county, including members of Rising Daughter, worked in agriculture, shrimping, or at the Gilman Paper mill. But in the 1980s, after the construction of the Kings Bay naval submarine base, Camden County began to transform. The Kings Bay base, whose name comes from the plantation that once stood there, held the government’s East Coast cache of nuclear warheads. As the Navy moved in, the population boomed, the job market expanded, and Camden County, which was 66 percent white, became more diverse. The base also drew occasional disarmament and anti-Reagan protesters, but that was a trade-off worth accepting. Tourism to picturesque Cumberland Island—whose beaches were once a getaway for scions like the Carnegies and Kennedys—was flourishing, and politicians reminded their constituents that the nuclear base, even if it seemed a little menacing, was ushering in a new era of progress to South Georgia.

But for many people in countryside communities like Spring Bluff, where Rising Daughter was located, it seemed not much had changed. In 1985, you could still walk down the road in Spring Bluff and wave to the grandmothers shelling peas on their front porches and the folks working in the fields. Pulpwood crews were hauling pine trees to Gilman Paper’s factories, the same as generations had before them. Off Highway 17, Rising Daughter and its cemetery remained, with concrete angels holding vigil over the graves of church members who’d been born into slavery. Politicians could claim that they were building the future, but for the Black community in Camden County, the past was always present, and a “new Georgia” had yet to arrive.