“This is the place where I wish I had grown up cause this is my heritage,” said Wilson Moran, as he walked through the national wildlife refuge that was once his parents’ neighborhood.

Moran wants the federal government to give back land it seized from his parents just before he was born in 1942. They were part of Harris Neck, a small community founded by former slaves, making their livings by harvesting shellfish from Georgia’s coastal wetlands.

“This was their independence,” Moran said. “This was their freedom. This was their life.”

A cracked runway serves as a reminder of the World War II army airfield that forced residents off their land. While government seizures for the war effort were common around the country, Harris Neck’s former citizens believe their community was targeted because of race.

“They wouldn’t treat their own like that, so what else would it be?” said Rev. Robert Thorpe, who remembers being evicted from Harris Neck as a young boy. “They didn’t treat us like human beings.”

Rev. Thorpe and others from this community are asking Congress to return the land. But Harris Neck is currently a 2,800 acre national wildlife refuge. And its managers say even moderate residential development would disrupt the fragile ecosystem they’re trying to maintain.

“Not only would we lose our endangered wood stork colony, we would lose probably all the other nesting, wading birds, shore birds,” said Jane Griess, project leader of the Savannah Coastal Refuges Complex of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. “It would just be a detrimental impact.”

In addition to wildlife, the refuge attracts more than 90 thousand tourists a year — roughly eight times the residential population of rural McIntosh County.

“To turn this land back over to the original owners is not only legally incorrect, but economically it borders on a disaster for this very poor county,” said Russ Wigh, a business professor at Savannah College of Art and Design.

According to Wigh, the federal government provided fair compensation to Harris Neck residents and that alleged discrepancies in payments were based not on race, but property improvements. He also disputes claims that residents received promises that the federal government would return their land after the war.

“The premise that racial discrimination, the premise of a promise by the Defense Department to give the people back their land — these have no basis in fact, no basis in writing whatsoever,” Wigh said.

Nevertheless, former Harris Neck residents and their descendants remain determined in their ongoing efforts to convince federal lawmakers that Harris Neck’s culture deserves protection in addition to its wildlife.

“This is our home,” Rev. Thorpe said. “We’re gonna die here. This is the rest of our life. Then you take it away from me and give it to the birds? Then you call that fair?”

Related Post: FOX News photographer Tom Jachman’s video and photo essay.