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Aug 11, 2020 3 tweets 2 min read Read on X
Some of the African ancestors of the Gullah Geechees were Muslim. The “ring shout”—a form of religious dance where worshipers turn counterclockwise while singing, clapping, and shuffling their feet—was directly inherited from enslaved Muslim slaves brought to the Sea Islands. Image
Research done by Lorenzo Dow Turner, the father of #Gullah studies, shows the worshipers recreated the circumambulation (the act of moving around a sacred object) or tawaf of #Muslim pilgrims around the Ka ́bah in Mecca. This brings to mind the #hajj, which just ended last week.
Learn more about Africanism in Gullah Geechee culture from this 2010 @SmithsonianACM exhibit on Turner’s life and work. anacostia.si.edu/resources/turn…

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More from @GullahSc

May 28
There were many “Doors of No Return” in West Africa—this is one in the Elmina Castle on the coast of Ghana. Few know of the direct connection between this fortress and Georgetown, S.C. Let’s get into it. Door of no return in Elmina Castle in Ghana.
In the spring of 1760, a ship carrying enslaved West Africans made its way into Winyah Bay off Georgetown, S.C. The ship had left the Elmina Castle in Ghana several months earlier. Elmina was the first European slave-trading post in all of sub-saharan Africa.
The ship docked in Georgetown, unloaded its human cargo—at least those who survived the horrors of the Middle Passage, and then sorted them like cattle. They were separated into groups of men and women, healthy and unhealthy.
Read 13 tweets
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. Dr. King singing at the Penn Center.
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.
Read 11 tweets
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. Depiction of the first peoples of the South Carolina Lowcountry.
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…
Read 16 tweets
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. Aerial photo of the marsh grasses of costal SC. The grasses are in the footprint of the massive rice fields.
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.
Read 12 tweets
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.

Traditional Yorùbán architecture
Inside a Yorùbán courtyard
Page on African influences in American architecture from Vlach’s book “The Afro-American Tradition in Decorative Arts.”
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.
Read 12 tweets
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. The Old Plantation was pain...
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.
Read 9 tweets

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