They shot the music video on the island’s north end, and the people showed up, and so did the bicycles.
The bikes were important. They were strong visual elements of the video, and the act of riding them — people uniting around a common purpose and traveling toward it — was critical to the message of the song. “Ride for the Island,” the song’s called, one of 23 tracks on Spiritual Gangsters, a mixtape featuring Hilton Head Island Gullah rappers “Baby Joker” — Anthony Johnson — and “Q. Smalls” — Quintin Smalls. Since early September, when the video was shot along Gumtree Road, about 1,500 copies of the mixtape have been distributed in Savannah and the Lowcountry, in other parts of South Carolina, and in Atlanta and Washington D.C. Its tracks are “clean” — no profanity — by design. The mixtape avoids messages of violence and drug use, for example, found in some modern hip-hop — Johnson and Smalls wanted to make sure their message was heard. Their songs retain the in-your-face quality of gangster rap but channel it through faith.
And one of the themes is something that’s come up in various Hilton Head Town Council meetings, a problem that’s discussed in the Native Islander community — and the refrain of “Ride for the Island:” “I ride on Hilton Head Island A Gullah Gullah culture that they kickin’ to the side Tryin’ to take the land but can’t sell piece of my pie My family means forever-ever ’til the end of time”
Tai Scott, who’s lived on Hilton Head since 1997, said he’s never seen local Gullah artists share this kind of message through hip-hop. Like Johnson and Smalls, he worries about the disappearing Native Islander culture: “The way we look at this now, we’re the last of the Mohicans,” Scott said. “It’s now or never.”
And Scott thinks Spiritual Gangsters will resonate with people outside the Lowcountry, throughout the “Gullah-Geechee corridor,” where — as on Hilton Head and in other parts of Beaufort County — the descendants of freed slaves continue to challenge partition sales of heirs’ property; work through complex zoning and development regulations that restrict land usage; and fight to preserve their culture and history. Writing for The Nation in June, Leah Douglas focused on Hilton Head’s Allen family in her in-depth examination of heirs’ property and disappearing black farmland. “A 2001 report from the US Agricultural Census estimated that about 80 percent of black-owned farmland had disappeared in the South since 1969,” Douglas wrote. “Approximately half of that land was lost through partition sales.”