GullahMuseumSC
@GullahSc
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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
Georgetown, SC
Joined August 2020
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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.
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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."
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Eugenia Powell Deas, a Gullah Geechee woman from McClennenville, SC, was one of 600,000 African American ‘Rosies” who worked at ship yards around the U.S. during World War II. She was the only Black woman to work as a welder in the Charleston Naval Shipyard duringWWII.
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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.
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In 1931, Dr. Lorenzo Dow Turner recorded a 5-line song by a Gullah Geechee woman named Amelia Dawley of Harris Neck, GA. It was one of many recordings he made — little did he know it would become the most important find of his life and unite families in the U.S. and Africa.
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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.
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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.
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From okra and rice to fried okra to gumbo, Gullah Geechee have cooked with this fruit—yeah, it’s not a vegetable—since the ancestors brought it to these shores. But did you know it’s part of our folks medicine tradition too?
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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.
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Gullah Geechee master ornamental ironworker Philip Simmons was the “Keeper of the Gates.”Until his death in 2009, he fashioned more than 500 pieces of wrought-iron gates, fences, balconies and window grills that adorn many Charleston’s home—some historic and others not.
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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.
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Andrew J. Rodrigues, JD, Gullah Museum co-founder and historian, is now with the ancestors. He was 86. The museum will be closed from 8/3 through 8/17. August’s sweetgrass basket class will still be held on 8/12.
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Gullah Geechee elder and the matriarch of Edisto Island passed away today. She is with the ancestors.
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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.
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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.”
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The Gullah word of the day is “gumbo,” which means okra. The delicious stew has to contain the ingredient that it’s named after. The etymology for the word okra can be traced to the 1670s Nigerian Igbo word, “ọ́kụ̀rụ̀.”
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Carolina Gold, the Lowcountry's prized heirloom rice, could help folk live longer. Gullah Geechee been known that!
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Who was John Horse? Few Americans know his story, but the Gullah Geechee/Black Seminole warrior John Horse (1812-1882) was probably the most successful Black freedom fighter in U.S. history.
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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.
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In the early hours before day clean on May 13, 1862, an enslaved Gullah Geechee man named Robert Smalls and a crew composed of his fellow freedom seekers fired up a Confederate transport ship and slipped the vessel off the dock in Charleston harbor.
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The first “cow boys” in the United States were the enslaved African ancestors of the Gullah Geechee in coastal Sooth Carolina, the birthplace of our country’s cattle industry.
I’m from the same town as the Murdaughs. Before they became a big name, our town was basically unheard of. We’ve since gained national attention, but media coverage rarely captures the lighter side of our area: our entire county has a rich, rural culture that still thrives. I’m
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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.
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The Gullah Cameos are now posted to our Etsy page. I have earrings for two of them so holla if you want a jewelry set. Enjoy!
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This is Autumn Freeman Moultrie, our first daughter, niece, and grandchild and a fierce, smart, empathetic light in our lives. A mother of two, she lost the war with breast cancer Saturday. The Gullah Museum will be closed this week except for previously scheduled appointments.
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Before there underground parties, before there were raves, there were juke joints. Linguist Dr. Lorenzo Turner identifies the roots of the term in the Gullah Geechee word "juk," which means infamous and disorderly.
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Though Gullah is an English-based creole, its syntax and grammar are distinctly West and West Central African. Gullah also includes some 4,000 words from 32 languages spoken in West and West Central Africa. Here are a few of them:
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I hope you’re following master sweetgrass basket maker Corey Alston on the socials. He’s one of the young ones keeping this Gullah-Geechee art form alive. P.S.—men always made coil baskets too. Photo credit: Joel Caldwell via
#corey_alston_sweethrassbasket
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Africans enslaved in the British colony of South Carolina weren’t allowed to own or use drums because of its ability to “speak” in an unknown language and its potential to sow the seeds of rebellion. The colonials had good reason to fear the “talking drum.”
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How did the Gullah language shape African American English? Listen in to this
@lingopod
episode featuring Charleston’s own
@sunnmcheaux
, who teaches Gullah in the African Language Program at
@Harvard
.
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This photo pops up all over the interwebs. It’s has been used in documentaries, limited series, books, and by artists to depict enslaved people of African descent in the U.S. They thing is these Gullah Geechees were free when the photo was taken in 1895 near Georgetown, SC.
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Gullah Granny says, “Tenk Gawd fah letting’ me wake up dis mornin’ in my right mine.”
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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.
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Enslaved Africans & their descendants grew & harvested Carolina Gold Rice, indigo, & Sea Island cotton. Coupled with the slave trade, all of the above made South Carolina filthy rich before the Civil War. The entire economy hinged on slavery. The Civil War was about slavery & 💰.
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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.
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The first revolt of enslaved Africans in North America took place in 1526 and some believe it happen near what is now Georgetown, SC—the city where our museum is located.
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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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We unveiled the Harriet Tubman Story Quilt last week. It was months in the making, tears were shed, needles drew blood but it’s finally done and on display at the Gullah Museum here in historic Georgetown, SC.
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Rest in Power, Miss Josephine. I can’t help but think the stress she’s been under—from the developer who tried to run her off her land—played a part in her death. Stress kills.
BREAKING: Hilton Head's Josephine Wright, whose fight for land caught national attention, dies at 94 via
@JLeonardNews
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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.
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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?
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When Lorenzo Dow Turner, PhD, interviewed Gullah Geechees in coastal South Carolina and Georgia the 1930s to learn our language and culture, he also took photos of some of those he recorded. Here are a few portraits I found online.
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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.
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“Are there any Black farmers who grow Carolina Gold rice?” That’s one of the top 5 questions we’re asked at the Gullah Museum. We can now proudly tell them about GullahGeechee farmer Rollen Chalmers & his wife Frances, who live in Hardeeville, SC.
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“It makes you rethink that idea that the generation that grew up after the Civil War really wanted to distance themselves from slavery, wanted to forget about it, when these ads are running in these newspapers 50 years after," historian Judith Giesberg told NPR.
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Open-range cattle ranching in the U.S. started in the South Carolina lowcountry during the Colonial period. The first “cow boys” were the enslaved ancestors of the Gullah Geechee, who brought this African style of raising cattle here.
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American hero, Gullah-Geechee hero.
On February 23, 1915, Congressman Robert Smalls passed away at his home on Prince Street in Beaufort - a house in which he was born enslaved, and died free after buying the property during Reconstruction. He now rests just a few blocks away in Tabernacle Baptist Church cemetery.
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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.
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The five line song sung by Amelia Dawley’s family is the longest African language text ever found in the U.S. And Dr. Lorenzo Dow Turner went on to creat a new field of study by his work and an appreciation for a unique element of African-American culture.
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She told Dr. Opala that “it’s the oldest song we know.” It turns out that the song was one only sung by women of the tribe at funerals. You can watch the documentary on YouTube.
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Cousin Vera Manigault’s family has made sweetgrass baskets for 8 generations. These hands have made a couple of thousand baskets in her lifetime—so far.
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Today, a lot of y’all will be all about the mashed potatoes. We Gullah Geechee love our rice. My late mother said the only time they ate potatoes, instead of rice, was during World War II when rice was hard to come by. Thanksgiving dinner will include at least 3 rice dishes.
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Janice Burgess, the creator of ‘The Backyardigans’ has sadly passed away at the age of 72. She was Gullah Geechee. Rest in Purpose.
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Fish and grits, shrimp and grits, gumbo and rice dishes like perloo (think Popyee’s dirty rice) where all brought to America by the ancestors of the Gullah Geechee. You can call it soul food if you like but now you now from whence it came.
#HiddenHistory
#HiddenCulture
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Did you know that Africans arriving in the U.S. continued to give their children names in their native languages well into the 19th century? Yes, this is among the Africanisms Dr. Lorenzo Dow Turner, father of Gullah Studies, inclined in his seminal work.
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Although there is no way to know exactly how many of the 1,000s of ads resulted in reunion, the Last Seen: Finding Family After Slavery database includes almost 100 ads announcing successful searches and reunions.
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Happy Freedom’s Eve! Also know as Watch Night, this holiday heralded emancipation for Black folk living in Confederate states. At one time it was as popular as Juneteenth is now. Pass the collards and let’s get into it.
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@AfricanArchives
And some of them were Black Seminoles whose African and Gullah Geechee ancestors escaped from the rice plantations of South Carolina. They spoke/speak a Gullah dialect. Learn about their journey to Mexico here.
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Recording of Zora Neale Hurston singing a song she learned from a Gullah Geechee woman in Florida. She referred to it as a dance song in the Charleston rhythm from the Geechee country in South Carolina.
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This is the first known recording of the song "Kumbaya" being sung in Gullah or as it was known then “Sea Islands Creole Dialect” by a Gullah Geechee man identified only as H. Wylie.
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Read this article to learn how “Kumbaya” became musically thought of as a children’s campfire song, and ultimately shorthand for the touchy-feely, the consensus seeking, the wishy-washy, and the meek. Let’s reclaim this Gullah Geechee song!
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I’m prepping for a talk on the Black Seminoles, aka the Gullah Geechee Seminole. I put together a comparison of words in African languages, Afro-Seminole creole (Old Gullah) & Gullah. It includes info showing how the Black Seminoles’ creole shaped Spanish words.
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Working on a post tomorrow about okra—you’ll never see it the same way again.
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In the mid-1800s, enslaved African pottery makers, working in the Edgefield District of the South Carolina Upstate, began producing stoneware vessels with fearsome faces, bulging eyes, and gaping mouths.
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Just passed the site of the Combahee Ferry Raid on our way to Savannah. On June 2, 1863, Harriet Tubman became the first woman to lead a major military operation in the U.S. when she and 150 Black Union soldiers rescued more than 700 enslaved Gullah Geechee during the Civil War.
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After a long day of working in the sea Island cotton fields on Kingsley Plantation on Fort George Island, FL, the enslaved ancestors of the Gullah Geechee would return to the tabby cabins in the slave quarters. But what is this building material called tabby?
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Have any of you ever seen “The Young Basket Maker” by Winold Reiss? It’s a drawing of a Gullah Geechee boy making a coiled bullrush basket on St. Helena Island, SC. It was one of 16 portraits he did of island residents in 1927 for the Penn School.
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We may no longer grow rice for the world in South Carolina, but the fields an infrastructure built by the ancestors of the Gullah Geechee changed the southeast coast of the United States—these are the remnants of the former rice plantations from above.
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The story of the song is told in the1998 documentary “The Language You Cry In.” The film follows Amelia Dawley’s then 69-year old daughter, Mary Moran, as she is reunited with the Baindu Jabati tribe in a remote in Mende village in the country of Sierra Leone in West Africa.
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Gullah Grandma say, “Ef you hol’ you mad, e’ kill you glad.”
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Sources: Slate magazine:
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Some call this hardy, fragrant wildflower “rabbit tobacco,” but I like the Gullah Geechee way. We call it “life everlasting.” The name refers to the herb’s indefinite shelf life once it dries out. But the elders say it prolongs life. With the way it tastes—nasty—it better!
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African-American gunners laid down cover fire, sacrificing, themselves to defend fleeing U.S. infantry during the Battle of the Bulge in Belgium during World War II. Some of them were murdered by the Waffen SS, and then forgotten by the U.S. government.
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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.
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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?
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Turner learned a decade after he recorded Amelia Dawley singing that the song lyrics were actually in Mende, one of the major languages in Sierra Leone, West Africa. The song proved that the Gullah language was a cultural connection between Africans and Black Americans.
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Sweetgrass baskets are vessels of memory. This traditional Gullah Geechees craft has been handed down from generation to generation for more than 300 years--the functional baskets made here for use in the field and home are virtually indistinguishable from those made in Africa.
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It’s been 123 years since a white mob descended on the offices of The Daily Record, a Black-owned newspaper in Wilmington, N.C. The armed men then moved into the streets and opened fire on Black men as they fled for their lives.
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Source: NPR's Code Switch blog:
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Dr. Opala wrote years later: “I played it in one Mende village after another in Sierra Leone. Many people told me they recognized their language in the song, but not the song itself. Then, in the village of Senehun Ngola a woman named Bendu Jabati began singing along.”
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Happy to let all y’all know the Gullah Museum reopens this Friday at 11 am! The new ceiling is in, we passed inspection, and now the sisters and our friends are putting things to right. That’s museum co-founder and the Gullah O’oman herself—the late Bunny Smith Rodrigues.
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The last remaining enslaved Gullah Geechee people in Georgetown, SC, learned they were finally free from generational slavery.
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One of the most significant contributions by an enslaved African in the construction of the U.S. Capitol was made by Gullah Geechee artisan Philip Reid.
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And so it continues.
This is awful. You can’t have narratives of people who were enslaved on plantations at a plantation site?
Books on Slavery Were Removed From Texas Plantation Gift Shops
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Now what I didn’t know was the tomfoolery around who wrote the song. Y’all some jumped up white evangelical music composer claimed he wrote it. This is a grave marker near his home in — wait for it — upstate New York.
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Happy Red Rice Day! I tell Gullah Museum visiting that it’s Jollof Rice’s baby sister. Red Rice has sustained Gullah Geechee people since the ancestors stepped foot on this land. Every family has its own recipe. Here’s mine!
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Purchased this beautiful watermelon—grown by a Gullah Geechee farming family—at the farmers market we have here in Georgetown on Saturdays. It’s open from 9am-1pm on US 17 and Front Street.
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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.
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Miss Ruby’s stand at the Sweetgrass Festival in Mt. pleasant, SC.
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A linguist, Dr. Turner went to the Sea Islands of coastal South Carolina and Georgia to study the speech of the residents of African descendant. He had a theory that the “broken English” the Gullah Geechees spoke was more than it seemed. That’s him in the photo.
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Gullah Grandaddy say: “All duh people wut come frum Africa aw obuhseas wuz call Golla and dey talk wuz call Golla talk.”
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You hear the phrase “40 acres and a mule” said in different context—seriously, jokingly, ironically. But what are its origins? And why did the plan only pertain to the Gullah Geechee people living from Charleston, SC, to Jacksonville, FL.
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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.
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A friend visiting from South Africa shared this evocative illustration with me. It reminded me that I haven’t done a thread about “How Europe Underdeveloped Africa” by Guyanese historian, political activist and academic Walter Rodney.
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