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@GullahSc

Jan 15

Happy #MLKDay! What do devout Quakers, the Gullah Geechee community of St. Helena Island, S.C., the Civil Rights Movement and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King’s have to do with each other? In a word—everything. Dr. King worked on many of his orations on the sea island.

St. Helena Island is home to the Penn Center, originally called the Penn School, which was established in 1862 by Quaker and Unitarian missionaries from Pennsylvania six months before the Emancipation Proclamation was announced. It was the first of its kind the South.

The Penn School’s mission was to teach Gullah Geechees trades and how to read in an effort to help them transition from enslavement to freedom. During the 1960s, the center hosted numerous interracial human rights conferences at a time when this was dangerous to do.

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@GullahSc

Nov 10, 2023

Native Americans—made up 25% of the enslaved population of South Carolina colony in the early 1700s. Yes, you read that right. Some British settlers enslaved some of the colony’s indigenous inhabitants—many were sent to labor on plantations in the West Indies.

While the majority of the stolen labor used to jump start the South Carolina colony’s burgeoning economy came from the African Ancestors of the Gullah Geechee, Indigenous people were in the fields with them—until they weren’t.

Before tribal beefs displaced some, and European diseases killed many, the coastal South Carolina plain was once home to more than a dozen distinct groups of Native Americans. richlandlibrary.com/blog/2022-12-1…

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@GullahSc

Jul 30, 2023

Using modern mapping techniques, researchers found that over 236,000 acres of rice fields—built on the backs of the Gullah Geechees ancestries—once covered 160 miles of coastal South Carolina, from Georgetown and Horry counties to the SC-GA border.

Until now, the size of rice farms had underestimated, ranging from 50,000 to 70,000 acres. The revised acreage is more than double previous estimates—and Georgetown County was the epicenter of the rice industry created with the knowledge, skills, and labor of enslaved Africans.

Georgetown County produced nearly one-half of the total rice crop grown in the United States. Local planters made large fortunes off of the stolen labor of enslaved Africans—making Georgetown the wealthiest county in the 13 original colonies.

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@GullahSc

Jul 13, 2023

The Southern front porch is as American as mom, the flag, and apple pie—right? Not quite, according to the late John Michael Vlach, PhD, an anthropologist and historian, who maintained that this architectural mainstay was brought to the Americas by enslaved Africans.

In “The Afro-American Tradition in Decorative Arts,” Vlach wrote that Henry Glassie, another eminent anthropologist, ethnographer, and folklorist, noted that southern homes in America in the 1800s began to look "for all the world like a veranda in Yorùbáland."

Vlach added, “It is now widely acknowledged that European houses do not have structures equivalent to the broad, open front porches of American houses.” They had no need for porches where the the majority of the plantation class came from during the colonial period.

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@GullahSc

Jun 9, 2023

Did you know that this famous watercolor of enslaved Africans celebrating some event or day on a Beaufort County, SC, plantation is the only known painting of its era, the late 18th century, that depicts captives by themselves—concerned only with each other.

Entitled The Old Plantation, this painting is considered the best known depiction of the life and culture of enslaved Africans in early America. No one knows what they are celebrating, but scholars have sussed out some of the story by the instruments they play and their clothes.

During the period when the painting was probably made, about one-third of the enslaved population had been born in Africa. Between 1760 and 1790, close to 53,000 captive Africans are estimated to have been imported into SC—although the actual figure was probably larger.

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@GullahSc

May 31, 2023

The roots connecting Gullah Geechee people to Sierra Leone are deep. But how did Carolina Gold seed rice end up there and in Liberia in the early 1840s? And why is it connected to the successful revolt enslaved Africans waged on the Amistad?

In February 1839, slave hunters abducted, and or brought, a group of Mende men, women, and children from Sierra Leone and shipped them to Havana, Cuba. When they arrived in Cuba, two sugar plantation owners purchased them.

These actions violated all treaties then in existence but the slavers didn’t care and neither did the planters, who loaded the Africans—49 adults and four children —aboard the Cuban schooner Amistad, which ironically means “Friendship” in Spanish.

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