Their names were Tahro, Pucha Geata, and Cilucängy when they arrived in coastal Georgia in 1858 on the Wanderer—an opulent racing yacht with a sinister underside: a hidden deck where hundreds of enslaved Africans were held captive and illegally trafficked into the United States. The trans-Atlantic slave trade was a massive system of forced migration from the African continent to the Americas that had lasted for three centuries. Charleston, S.C., was the center of the trade in the U.S. until a ban went into effect in 1808.

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. 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.

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.

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.

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.

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."

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.

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.

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. 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.

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. 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.

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. 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….”

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. 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.

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? 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.

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. “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…

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. 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.

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. 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.

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. 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.

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. 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.”

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.” 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.

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… 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.

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. 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.