In March 1997 journalist Herb Frazier traveled with Mary Moran of Harris Neck, Ga., and her family to a village in the Sierra Leone where they met Baindu Jabati. The two women sang their versions of an African funeral song. Listen to the story of how that song made its way from Sierra Leone to … Read more
Join author and journalist Herb Frazier for a conversation with historic preservationist Joseph McGill Jr., founder of the Slave Dwelling Project. Since May 2010, McGill has traveled to twenty-five states to sleep in more than 200 former slave dwellings to bring attention to a need to preserve these structures as important historic evidence of African … Read more
Follow author and newspaper journalist Herb Frazier to three sites where captured West Africans were held before they were shipped across the Atlantic Ocean to America. This forced migration of millions of Africans gave rise to Gullah Geechee culture along the coastal regions of North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia and northern Florida.
This is a 45-minute one-man show in which Donald Sweeper tells stories shared to him by his ancestors and the elderly people from the community in which he grew up. This performance also includes Gullah folklore and traditions, as well as rites of passages performed by many of the African American Churches from Reconstruction up … Read more
This is a Christmas season comedy based on Ebenezer Scrooge from the Charles Dickens’ classic A Christmas Carol. The stage performance features Donald Sweeper acting the part of Scrooge as if he is speaking in the Gullah Language.
The 1991 film Daughters of the Dust was the first to portray the Gullah culture on film to a national audience from St. Helena Island in South Carolina. Water in the film takes on the symbol of flight, migration, and separation of the Peazant family from its roots. This lecture explores how views of water in the … Read more
Julia Peterkin was a white woman who wrote about Gullah people living on her family’s plantation out of a desire to honor and preserve their culture. She was shunned by white Southerners for “betraying her race” but became accepted by Harlem Renaissance writers, such as Langston Hughes and W.E.B. DuBois. Regardless of criticism, she continued … Read more
