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We seek to preserve Gullah Geechee history & culture by educating the public about how we shaped America. Open Mon. - Sat. 11 am - 4 pm. Closed Sundays. #BLM
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Jan 15 11 tweets 3 min read
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.
Nov 10, 2023 16 tweets 4 min read
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.
Jul 30, 2023 12 tweets 4 min read
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.
Jul 13, 2023 12 tweets 4 min read
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."
Jun 9, 2023 9 tweets 3 min read
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.
May 31, 2023 13 tweets 3 min read
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? "The Mutiny on the Ami... 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.
May 29, 2023 7 tweets 3 min read
What we now call Memorial Day was started by formerly enslaved and free Gullah Geechee people in Charleston, SC, to honor Black and White Union soldiers who died in the city during the Civil War. Their role creating the commemoration was lost until the 1990s. A photo illustration of a B... Less than a month after the Confederacy surrendered on April 9, 1865, a group of Gullah Geechee men in Charleston disintered the bodies of 257 bodies of Black and white Union soldiers who died while being held as prisoners of war. They wanted to give them a proper burial.
May 9, 2023 12 tweets 4 min read
In the spring of 1760, a ship carrying enslaved West Africans made its way into Winyah Bay on its way to Georgetown, S.C. The ship’s journey began at Elmina Castle in Ghana, the first European slave-trading post in all of sub-saharan Africa, several months earlier. Known as “The Door of No Return,” this is the door in the Elmira Castle that enslaved Africas walked through before they were put on slave ships headed to the Americas. 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.
Apr 21, 2023 13 tweets 3 min read
This evening, Muslims around the world will celebrate Eid al-Fitr--“the feast of breaking the fast." This marks the end of Ramadan and a month of fasting. Many are unaware that the first Muslims in America were enslaved Africans, including the ancestors of some Gullah Geechee. Restored and colorized ambr... Sylviane A. Diouf, PhD, an award-winning historian and author of "Servants of Allah: African Muslims Enslaved in the Americas," wrote that "Muslims are usually thought of as 20th-century immigrants to the U.S….”
Apr 6, 2023 7 tweets 2 min read
Before the plantation system became an economic engine in overdrive, evolving into massive slave labor camps through coastal South Carolina and Georgia, planters let enslaved Africans build homes similar to those found in Africa. Drawing of a African villag... Loosely organized and African in appearance, these homes were built employing African architectural styles and techniques. As the plantation economy expanded in scale and wealth, planters implemented a more formal landscape plan.
Mar 25, 2023 23 tweets 6 min read
How did Charleston native Septima Poinsette Clark become—as Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King called her—the “Mother of the Movement?” And how did this Gullah Geechee woman become teach generations of white and Black American grassroots organizers? Septima Poinsette Clark In a word—injustice. In 1929, the NAACP was working to equalize the pay of Black and white teachers in South Carolina. She experienced firsthand the discrepancies in teachers' pay between her school and the neighboring white school.
Mar 16, 2023 15 tweets 5 min read
Nearly 900 unionized Cigar Factory workers in Charleston—most of them Gullah Geechee women—walked off their jobs at American Tobacco Co. in 1945, demanding back pay, a 25-cent pay increase, non-discrimination clauses in hiring and firing practices, and paid medical benefits. ATC workers protesting outs... “It was rough,” recalled former factory worker Lillie Mae (Marsh) Doster, who was among the strikers and went on to become a leading union organizer in Charleston. (Listen in on this oral history interview with her.)
dc.lib.unc.edu/cdm/ref/collec…
Mar 11, 2023 10 tweets 3 min read
Mary Jackson was just a 4-year-old Gullah Geechee girl from Mt. Pleasant, SC, when grandmother and mother began teaching her how to sew baskets from sweetgrass, bulrush, and palmetto palm leaves. She is now one of the most celebrated basketmakers in U.S. history. Mary Jackson and some of her baskets. She received a MacArthur “Genius” Grant in 2008, National Heritage Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts in 2010, and a Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Museum for Women in the Arts in 1993, among the many other awards and honors.
Mar 5, 2023 14 tweets 5 min read
Before there was Lena Horne, there was Savannah’s own Fredi Washington. She was one of the first African-American actresses to gain recognition in films and challenge racism in Hollywood. A proud Black woman, she refused to pass for white. Actors Louise Beavers, left, and Fredi Washington, right, in Born in 1903, Frederika “Fredi” Washington excelled as a dancer, actress, journalist, and Civil Rights activist. She began her career as a dancer in the 1920s in “Shuffe Along,” the first Broadway show created, produced, and performed by African Americans.
Mar 2, 2023 13 tweets 4 min read
Every morning, Ruby Middleton Forsythe would stand outside Holy Cross-Faith Memorial Episcopal School and ring an old fashion brass hand bell to summon her students to the one-room schoolhouse on Pawleys Island, SC. It was the only one available to Black children during Jim Crow. A photo of Miss Ruby with s... No one called it by the fancy name. Everyone called it Miss Ruby’s School—from the president of the United States to the television networks that did stories about her to the families whose children she taught for more than a half century despite harassment from the Ku Klux Klan.
Feb 28, 2023 6 tweets 2 min read
For a generation of Americans, Ron & Natalie Daise’s “Gullah Gullah Island” introduced them to the Gullah Geechee people & Gullah culture. The multi-award winning children’s show (1994-1998) was unlike any series Nickelodeon—or any other American network—had ever produced. Cast of Gullah Gullah Island A generation of children learned “Africanisms” through the program. An Africanism is basically anything the descendants of the enslaved did and continue to do that is African in origin. This word was coined by the venerable Lorenzo Dow Turner, PhD, the “Father of Gullah Studies.”
Feb 26, 2023 18 tweets 4 min read
Enslaved Africans and their descendants—sometimes alone, sometimes with others—fled from forced labor, harsh punishment, torture, abuse, and the threat of family separation to create small, secret encampments in the Americas. Europeans called these freedom seekers “maroons.” Leonard Parkinson was the leader of the Maroons in Trelawny Maroon activities and uprisings were the most militant form of resistance to slavery. The history of maroons in the Caribbean and Latin America has been well documented. Yet, historians have paid little attention to their history in the U.S.
Feb 26, 2023 4 tweets 2 min read
The Long Bay Symphony will present a special From Gullah to Gospel program highlighting Gullah Geechee music and its subsequent influence on African American musical genres, such as spirituals, ragtime, Dixieland jazz styles, and gospel. longbaysymphony.com/event/gullah-t… Flyer for From Gullah to Gospel event. Joining the Long Bay Symphony on this musical journey through time and tradition will be renowned Gullah Geechee historians, storytellers, and singers Ron and Natalie Daise.
Feb 23, 2023 5 tweets 2 min read
The Gullah Geechee song “Kumbaya” is a plea to God for help. You may know it as “Kum Ba Yah,” “Come By Yuh,” or “Come By Here.” Once one of the most popular songs in the folk revival of the 20th century, it has more recently become the subject of misplaced scorn. Title: "Campmeeting" from the Lowcountry Gullah se In its heyday, from the 1950s through the 1990s, the song was recorded by a who’s who of folk singers from around the world, from Bob Dylan, Odetta, Pete Seeger, Joan Baez, the Seekers.
Feb 17, 2023 7 tweets 3 min read
Gullah Geechees created the dance The Charleston—the world famous song came later. But where did a guy from New Jersey get the idea, and how did the dance become a worldwide craze in the 1920s? ccpl.org/charleston-tim… Josephine Baker doing the dance The Charleston It all comes back to the boys of Charleston’s Jenkins Orphanage Band and the Great Migration, according to this great article by the Charleston County Public Library. jenkinsinstitute.org/index.php/our-… the boys of Charleston’s Jenkins Orphanage
Feb 16, 2023 11 tweets 2 min read
The coil basket on your left was made by a Gullah Geechee woman in the South Carolina Lowcountry. The one on your right was made in the Kongo Kingdom—which included parts of what is now Angola, Gabon, the Republic of the Congo, and the DRC. Modern sweetgrass basket on... These museum-quality baskets bear parallel coil techniques, proportions, & shapes. Though they are strikingly similar, their origins are separated by hundreds of years and thousands of miles.