My Great-Grandparents Bought a Plantation and Built a Thriving Black Community.

Chad Livsey, 44, is the great-grandson of Robert and Morena Livsey, who in the early 1920s bought an old plantation called the Promised Land, where 26 enslaved people had lived and worked, and its surrounding land in what is now Gwinnett County. The Livsey family built up the area, and other Black families joined them as it eventually became a thriving, self-sufficient Black community. Chad Livsey’s grandfather, Thomas, worked to preserve the area and its history, and today Livsey is working to do the same. While the old plantation home is being turned into a museum by the county and his grandfather’s estate is up for sale, Livsey said he wants everyone to remember his family’s story.

This account has been condensed and edited for clarity.

I think it’s not just an important Black story, which we need. It talks about our resilience, our entrepreneurship, how we could raise generations and build out counties and towns and churches. But it talks about the American story. Everything from America, I believe, can be told through the Promised Land.

My grandfather maintained the whole town. He would cut the grass in the whole town. He would pick up the trash around the whole town. That was his way of making sure everything was beautiful when people would pass through. We had our own restaurant, we had our own gas station, and I just want people to know that Gwinnett County is a Black county. There are multiple generations from there. There were multiple Black families, not just ours. The Anderson family is a very prominent, important family. That’s why there’s an elementary school in southern Gwinnett County called Anderson-Livsey. They wanted to name that elementary school after the Snellville family, and I remember everybody in my family fighting to change that name to Anderson-Livsey. I remember that fight; we won. It’s just one of the battles that we won because they knew how important we were and how important our history is.

For me, it’s a reason I never wait for anybody to do anything for me. If you want something done, they taught us, you have to do it yourself. I’m not waiting for anybody to help. We can help ourselves, and that’s something I think that we need to tell our children and tell generations — if you see something, if you can dream something, you can just do it. We have that power as creators.

They had restaurants, gas stations, barbers, stylists, and different things like that. I want people to remember we did all that, and we held this land down for a long time, and I want it to be a blueprint for us going forward. I think that’s an important thing. This is real history, and it’s still being written. It’s not over. The land is one thing, but we have ownership of the story, and that’s just something I want people to take away.