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@GullahSc

Feb 6

How did the African trickster folktales using animals like Br’er Rabbit and Br’er Fox told by the Gullah Geechee influence the creation of characters in popular culture like Bugs Bunny and Peter Rabbit? I’ll start at the beginning.

Gullah Geechees have a strong tradition of oral storytelling their ancestors brought with them from West and Central Africa. We possess a rich collection of animal fables with such stock characters as Br’er Rabbit, Br’er Fox, Br’er Bear, and Br’er Snake.

The plots of these stories always involve competition among the animals, which have distinctly human personalities. These tales were used not just to entertain but to teach life lessons.

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@GullahSc

Feb 4

@drjohnaeharris

“The Last Slave Ships: New York & the End of the Middle Passage” by @drjohnaeharris just arrived in the mail. It documents how NYC became the epicenter of illegal human trafficking in the 1800s long after the Transatlantic Slave Trade was outlawed in the western hemisphere.

Long after the transatlantic slave trade was officially outlawed in the early nineteenth century by every major slave trading nation, merchants based in the United States were still sending hundreds of illegal slave ships from American ports to the African coast.

The key instigators were slave traders who moved to New York City after the shuttering of the massive illegal slave trade to Brazil in 1850. These traffickers were determined to make lower Manhattan a key hub in the illegal slave trade to Cuba.

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@GullahSc

Feb 1

In South Carolina, we call ourselves Gullah. In Georgia, we be Geechee. The exact derivation of the word “Gullah” has been lost to time. Many historians believe that the word "Gullah" comes from Angola in Central Africa.

Some 40% of the African arrivals in Charleston were from Angola at the beginning of the Transatlantic Slave Trade. That changed when rice became the dominant cash crop. Then 35.8% of the ancestors of the Gullah Geechee came from the Rice Coast—Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Guinea.

Another idea is that "Gullah" is from the Gola, a tribe found near the border of Liberia and Sierra Leone. Other researchers speculate that Gullah and Geechee are borrowed words from any number of ethnic groups in West Africa.

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@GullahSc

Jan 29

Sometimes, I think that we Americans are under the mistaken belief that the West Africa was a tabula rasa—a blank slate—before the Transatlantic Slave Trade began around the year 1500. It’s because we aren’t taught about the history of Africa.
caravans.library.northwestern.edu/tour/

We don’t learn about it’s role in the global economy of that time. In world history, the medieval period lasted more than a thousand years from 500 CE to 1500 CE—or AD if you’re old like me.

Africa experienced a widespread renaissance during this period. Contrary to common belief, the Nile valley civilizations such as Egypt and Nubia weren’t the only sophisticated realms Africa had around that time. Look up the nation of Songhai or the city of Timbuktu.

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@GullahSc

Jan 26

So I had heard that Alvah Roebuck of Sears, Roebuck and Co. was Black. He wasn’t. So why would someone(s) start a rumor that both he and his partner were African American? It all has to to with Jim Crow, customer service Ans the Sears Roebuck catalog.

By the late 19th century, slavery was over, but the U.S., especially the American South, was still rife with discrimination and injustice for African Americans. For instance, Black sharecroppers could only shop at one store—and prices were hella expensive.

The person who owned the land the sharecroppers worked also often owned the store, and the farmers’ lives were ruled by credit. They basically could only shop at that store because their accounts would not be reconciled until the crop came in. (Slavers by another name.)

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@GullahSc

Jan 12

Formerly enslaved African-Americans would place ads in newspapers around the country in their quest to find the loved ones taken away from them—or who they were stolen from. This is something that began in the 1830s. The ads usually started with "Information Wanted."

The number of these notices exploded after the Civil War as Black folk attempted to reunite with family members separated by war, slavery and emancipation. The ads ran into the early 1900s and appeared in newspapers from around the country.

In her book, "Help Me To Find My People: The African-American Search for Family Lost in Slavery," historian Heather Williams writes that advertisements like these were made necessary because the federal government was largely unprepared to help separated families reunite.

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