Herb Frazier
Herb Frazier is a Charleston, South Carolina-based writer. He’s the special projects editor for the Charleston City Paper, and the former marketing director at Magnolia Plantation and Gardens in Charleston. Before he joined Magnolia, Frazier edited and reported for five daily newspapers in the South, including his hometown paper, The Post and Courier.
In 1990, the South Carolina Press Association named him Journalist of the Year. He has taught newswriting as a visiting lecturer at Rhodes University in South Africa. He is a former Michigan Journalism Fellow at the University of Michigan. He studied journalism at the University of South Carolina. After leaving daily journalism in 2006, Frazier led journalism workshops in Sierra Leone, Zambia, Ghana, Suriname, Guyana and The Gambia for the U.S. government and a Washington-based journalism foundation.
His international reporting experience includes West Germany during the fall of the Berlin Wall, humanitarian relief efforts in Bosnia and Rwanda during its post-genocide. He also reported on the civil war in Sierra Leone. Frazier has written about the historical and cultural ties between West Africa and the Gullah Geechee people of coastal South Carolina and Georgia. He has also reported from Cuba, Barbados, South Korea and Japan.
He is a former member from South Carolina on the Gullah Geechee Cultural Heritage Corridor Commission, created by the U.S. Congress in 2006.
He is the author of “Behind God’s Back: Gullah Memories.” He is a co-author of “We Are Charleston: Tragedy and Triumph at Mother Emanuel” with Marjory Wentworth and Dr. Bernard Powers Jr. Frazier is also the co-editor of “Ukweli: Searching for Healing Truth, South Carolina Writers and Poets Examine American Racism” with the late Horace Mungin.
Frazier’s forthcoming book is “Sleeping with the Ancestors: How I Followed the Footprints of Slavery.” This book is co-written with Joseph McGill, founder of the Slave Dwelling Project. Frazier is also the author of the unpublished “Crossing the Sea on a Sacred Song,” the story of an ancient funeral song from Sierra Leone that links a Mende woman in Sierra Leone with a woman in coastal Georgia.