St. Simons Island, off the coast of Georgia, is a paradise of beaches, golf courses, tennis courts, swimming pools and nature trails. Roads pass beneath live oak-tree canopies, draped with Spanish moss, linking affluent housing developments — some called, seemingly without embarrassment, “plantations.” But this lush, sunny resort island has a dark, violent, mysterious racial history that lingers today. Recently, nearly 200 residents and visitors gathered at the island’s Casino Theater to listen to the latest research from my colleagues and myself into a sensational, unsolved 90-year-old murder case with racial injustice at its heart. The murder, however, is just part of this history. Like other barrier islands, St. Simons’s main reputation is as a haven for wealthy white people and their employees. Witness the Sea Island resort and its signature Cloister Hotel. But an equally rich African American tradition exists of enslaved people raising highly prized Sea Island Cotton, and of their descendants. It involves Black resistance to slavery, post-emancipation racism and a fierce determination to keep their freedom and land. After an 1803 Savannah slave auction, a shipload of kidnapped Africans from what later became Nigeria headed for plantations on St. Simons. The characteristically rebellious Ibos revolted, throwing two white overseers overboard. On landing, an armed white crowd was determined to subdue them for field slavery. But, according to legend, more than a dozen Africans walked into the water (it’s now called Ibo Landing), choosing drowning over slavery, singing, “The water brought us here, the water will take us away.” Over time, the coast’s Gullah Geechee folklore claimed the Africans did not drown, but flew home as the flying “African Angels.” During the Civil War, following the Union Army’s occupation of the island, Confederate snipers sneaked onto St. Simons, threatening to return 600 hiding African Americans to enslavement. Ninety armed Black men drove the Confederates off the island. In 1863, the famed, predominately Black, Massachusetts 54th Regiment landed on St. Simons, effectively ending slavery there. (The Academy Award-winning film “Glory” told their story.) The 54th bivouacked in an historic Episcopal church favored by the island’s slave-owning elite, Christ Church Frederica. The regiment’s white officers’ horses reputedly stabled in the sanctuary, leaving the small church in disrepair. Related animosity among white islanders persists to this day. In January 1865, Union General William T. Sherman divided the abandoned Sea Islands plantations among former slaves. President Andrew Johnson’s administration rescinded that order, returning the land to the plantation owners. With the slave economy’s collapse, cotton production imploded. Yet Timber harvesting and sawmill work enabled most Blacks to remain on the island. After some early 20th century scouting sojourns by Gilded Age magnates, the barrier islands became a winter hunting haven for Rockefellers, Morgans, Vanderbilts and Pulitzers. Boom times in the 1920s and 1930s followed. Other wealthy northern business owners also became regular vacationers, residents and, ultimately, resort developers. After a causeway joined St. Simons with the mainland, a private aircraft landing strip became essential. The island’s Blacks paid part of the price. In 1943, Floyd White, the son of a former slave, owned five acres at the island’s runway’s foot. The Navy, the Sea Island Resort Co. and two local white men, Henry and Hampton Cofer, all bid on the land. White refused to sell. One morning soon after, as White walked down the road shoulder along his property, a motorist hit him from behind, dragging him 100 yards into a barbed-wire fence. After his death, the property was seized through eminent domain. After the war, the Sea Island Resort Co. turned the field over to the county government for the civilian airport that exists today. The hit-and-run driver was never charged for White’s death. In recent decades, the greatest threat to Black land ownership on St. Simons has been dispossession through gentrification. At its antebellum height, more than 4,000 enslaved Africans worked on the island’s 11 plantations. By 1920, Blacks still composed nearly 70 percent of island residents. But today, the number of African American is “50, at most,” according to Emery Rooks, director of the St. Simons African American Heritage Coalition. Beyond these labor and land struggles, one criminal case remains an enduring mystery: the 1938 murder of Rev. Charles Lee, rector of Christ Church, who was Robert E. Lee’s second cousin. One Saturday night, Lee wrote his Sunday sermon in the rectory. Out of the dark, someone fired two shots through a window, one a fatal head shot. The murder was front-page news in the New York Times, and Time, Life and Newsweek covered it. Suspicion in the local press and whispered gossip favored two white brothers, the Cofers, who controlled gambling, whiskey sales and (per rumor) island prostitution. Without naming them, Rev. Lee had repeatedly denounced the island’s “vice” from the pulpit. The Cofers, who would unsuccessfully bid on White’s airport land, were indicted for first-degree murder but never tried. Instead, a part-time Cofer employee, a semi-literate Black janitor named George Clayborn, was arrested for the killing, even though he had no criminal record. Despite the time, place and circumstances, Clayborn was not lynched before the trial. This was no idle concern. Between 1891 and 1894, there were three lynchings of Black men in St. Simons’s Glynn County. One involved a clock tower repairman; legend says the clock has never worked since. In 1930, Glynn County law-enforcement officers joined a lynch mob that killed two Black men accused of robbing a bank in Darien, Ga. and killing the neighboring McIntosh County police chief. Later, an all-white jury convicted Clayborn but — without explanation — recommended mercy, not execution. The NAACP’s Thurgood Marshall followed the trial. Clayborn spent 26 years on chain gangs until his 1966 parole. To this day, many islanders believe, as I do, that Clayborn was framed through perjured testimony, and that the guilty escaped justice. When the St. Simons Literary Guild sponsored a presentation on the Lee murder, historian Stephen G. Hoffius and I, with our colleague Richard McBride, discussed our research in progress, which we believe exonerates Clayborn. We drew a capacity house, overwhelmingly white, confirming William Faulkner’s oft-quoted observation that, in the South, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” Clayborn is long dead, but history has its claims. McBride has asked Georgia’s Board of Pardons and Paroles for a posthumous innocence pardon. Until the mystery of Rev. Lee’s shooting is solved, a stain of racial injustice will remain on St. Simons Island. Mark I. Pinsky is a Durham, N.C.-based journalist and author who has written about racial injustice in the South since 1973.