Here is all of Penn Center's rich past and present, as told through the experiences of its longtime Gullah inhabitants and visitors to St. Helena Island. It is the inspiring story behind the first school for former slaves, from the Civil War through the civil rights movement, illustrated in forty-two captivating photographs.
"For more than 150 years, the Penn Center, located on St. Helena Island, South Carolina, has been an epicenter of African American education, historic preservation, and social justice for tens of thousands of descendants of formerly enslaved West Africans living in the Sea Islands. Founded in 1862 in the midst of the Civil War after the island was secured by Union troops, the Penn School was established by two Northern missionaries, Laura M. Towne and Ellen Murray, to provide a formal education for former slaves who formed the nucleus of the coastal Gullah Geechee community. Burton and Cross examine the intricate history and evolution of the Penn Center over the past 150 years and place it in its modern context. In 1901, the Penn School expanded to become the Penn Normal, Agricultural and Industrial School after adopting the industrial arts curriculum taught at Hampton and Tuskegee Institutes. The educational training stood at the forefront of progressivism and reform as it helped to advance an entire generation and community into the Industrial Age after slavery. This project makes a tremendous contribution with its examination of Penn Center's role in the Civil Rights Movement: it was the only location in South Carolina where interracial groups, including Dr. King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the Peace Corps, could have safe sanctuary in an era of mandated segregation. During the Sea Island resort boom of the mid- to late-20th century, the Penn Center was instrumental in preserving land on St. Helena. Since 1974, the campus of seventeen historic structures and eight other sites has been designated a National Historic Landmark District, one of only four in the state of South Carolina, and the only African American historic district so named"--
Stunning in its breadth and conclusions, The Age of Lincoln is a fiercely original history of the five decades that pivoted around the presidency of Abraham Lincoln. Abolishing slavery, the age's most extraordinary accomplishment, was not its most profound. The enduring legacy of the age of Lincoln was inscribing personal liberty into the nation's millennial aspirations. America has always perceived providence in its progress, but in the 1840s and 1850s pessimism accompanied marked extremism, as Millerites predicted the Second Coming, utopianists planned perfection, Southerners made slavery an inviolable honor, and Northerners conflated Manifest Destiny with free-market opportunity. Even amid historic political compromises the middle ground collapsed. In a remarkable reappraisal of Lincoln, the distinguished historian Orville Vernon Burton shows how the president's authentic Southernness empowered him to conduct a civil war that redefined freedom as a personal right to be expanded to all Americans. In the violent decades to follow, the extent of that freedom would be contested but not its central place in what defined the country. Presenting a fresh conceptualization of the defining decades of modern America, The Age of Lincoln is narrative history of the highest order.
Just seven months into the Civil War, a Union fleet sailed into South Carolina’s Port Royal Sound, landed a ground force, and then made its way upriver to Beaufort. Planters and farmers fled before their attackers, allowing virtually all their major possessions, including ten thousand slaves, to fall into Union hands. Rehearsal for Reconstruction, winner of the Allan Nevins Prize, the Francis Parkman Prize, and the Charles S. Sydnor Prize, is historian Willie Lee Rose’s chronicle of change in this Sea Island region from its capture in 1861 through Reconstruction. With epic sweep, Rose demonstrates how Port Royal constituted a stage upon which a dress rehearsal for the South’s postwar era was acted out.
When Roots Die celebrates and preserves the venerable Gullah culture of the sea islands of the South Carolina and Georgia coast. Entering into communities long isolated from the world by a blazing sun and salt marshes, Patricia Jones-Jackson captures the cadence of the storyteller lost in the adventures of "Brer Rabbit," records voices lifted in song or prayer, and describes folkways and beliefs that have endured, through ocean voyage and human bondage, for more than two hundred years.
In eighteenth-century New Orleans, the legal testimony of some 150 enslaved women and men--like the testimony of free colonists--was meticulously recorded and preserved. Questioned in criminal trials as defendants, victims, and witnesses about attacks, murders, robberies, and escapes, they answered with stories about themselves, stories that rebutted the premise on which slavery was founded. Focusing on four especially dramatic court cases, Voices of the Enslaved draws us into Louisiana's courtrooms, prisons, courtyards, plantations, bayous, and convents to understand how the enslaved viewed and experienced their worlds. As they testified, these individuals charted their movement between West African, indigenous, and colonial cultures; they pronounced their moral and religious values; and they registered their responses to labor, to violence, and, above all, to the intimate romantic and familial bonds they sought to create and protect. Their words--punctuated by the cadences of Creole and rich with metaphor--produced riveting autobiographical narratives as they veered from the questions posed by interrogators. Carefully assessing what we can discover, what we might guess, and what has been lost forever, Sophie White offers both a richly textured account of slavery in French Louisiana and a powerful meditation on the limits and possibilities of the archive.
What stories do we tell about America’s once-great industries at a time when they are fading from the landscape? Pennsylvania in Public Memory attempts to answer that question, exploring the emergence of a heritage culture of industry and its loss through the lens of its most representative industrial state. Based on news coverage, interviews, and more than two hundred heritage sites, this book traces the narrative themes that shape modern public memory of coal, steel, railroading, lumber, oil, and agriculture, and that collectively tell a story about national as well as local identity in a changing social and economic world.
Featured in the New Yorker's "Page-Turner" One of Mashable's "17 books every activist should read in 2019" "This is an expression not of people who are suddenly freed of something, but people who have been free all along." —Ralph Ellison, speaking with Robert Penn Warren A stunning collection of previously unpublished interviews with key figures of the black freedom struggle by the Pulitzer Prize–winning author In 1964, in the height of the civil rights movement of the 1960s, Pulitzer Prize–winning author and poet Robert Penn Warren set out with a tape recorder to interview leaders of the black freedom struggle. He spoke at length with luminaries such as James Baldwin, Martin Luther King Jr., Stokely Carmichael, Ralph Ellison, and Roy Wilkins, eliciting reflections and frank assessments of race in America and the possibilities for meaningful change. In Harlem, a fifteen-minute appointment with Malcolm X unwound into several hours of vivid conversation. A year later, Penn Warren would publish Who Speaks for the Negro?, a probing narrative account of these conversations that blended his own reflections with brief excerpts and quotations from his interviews. Astonishingly, the full extent of the interviews remained in the background and were never published. The audiotapes stayed largely unknown until recent years. Free All Along brings to life the vital historic voices of America's civil rights generation, including writers, political activists, religious leaders, and intellectuals. A major contribution to our understanding of the struggle for justice and equality, these remarkable long-form interviews are presented here as original documents that have pressing relevance today.
To help the reader understand the African-American family in its broad historical, social, and cultural context, the author traces the rich history of the black family from its roots in Africa, through slavery, Reconstruction, the Depression, the Civil Rights Movement, and up to the present.
Born in 1920 in Greensboro, North Carolina, Junius Scales, whose great-uncle had been governor of the state, grew up in the privileged environment of his family’s estate. The only black people he knew were the servants. Wanting to improve the lot of workers, mainly African-American, he joined the Communist Party in 1939 while at the University of North Carolina, seeing in the Party an opportunity to right the wrongs done to blacks and poor working people. Scales rose quickly within the Party to coordinate civil rights and labor organizing activities in several Southern states. He went underground when Party leaders were trailed and harassed by federal authorities. In 1954, FBI agents arrested Scales in Memphis for violation of the Smith Act of 1940. The only American convicted solely for being a member of the Communist Party, Scales would serve 15 months in prison before his 6-year sentence was commuted by President Kennedy in 1962. Cause at Heart follows Scales from his privileged southern upbringing through the awakening of his social conscience, his civil- and labor-rights work for the Party across the South, his arrest and trials, his disillusionment with the Party, and his time in prison. In a new afterword, Barbara Scales, who was 10 years old when her father went to prison, recounts what it was like to be Junius Scales’ daughter. “It is the calm, even voice of Junius Scales we hear in Cause at Heart... this moving and memorable document... It is the voice of a decent, idealistic man who spent 18 years of his life in the Communist Party... And we don’t hear a false note: he is telling us the truth, as he reveals his illusions and delusions, his weaknesses and his strengths, his passionate belief in his party and the Soviet Union, and all the nagging doubts as well. He spares us nothing... Cause at Heart is an intelligent, rock honest... memoir, an interesting document that helps to explain in no small measure the tragic attraction the strange and hydra-headed American Communist Party held for the many decent human beings who passed through its revolving doors.” — William Herrick, The New York Times “Scales’s political life... is beautifully described in this well written book. His scenes of prison life alone — where he won respect from his fellow inmates and jailers alike — make remarkable reading.” — Monthly Review “Compelling reading, especially the discussions of Scales’s arrest, trials, and prison experience, interwoven, as they are, with his reevaluation of the Party.” — Journal of American History “An important and often moving account of the Communist Party’s role in labor organizing and civil rights activities in the South during the 1940s... [Scales’] memoir succeeds in capturing the hope and enthusiastic dedication that motivated him and many of his compatriots... the story of one individual’s unending quest on behalf of human decency and justice.” — Patricia Sullivan, Southern Changes “An engrossing saga.” — Michal R. Belknap, The Georgia Historical Quarterly “A book of unique perception and value. It is must reading for anyone interested in the era of Joseph McCarthy.” — Choice