South Carolina Sea Islands Research Articles

Abstract P5-07-02: Potential differences in stromal patterns from breast cancer metastatic lymph between South Carolina sea islander black women and white women

Abstract Breast cancer is a leading cause of death among women. Among race/ethnicities, black women have similar incidence rates but higher mortality than other races/ethnicities. Black women are diagnosed at a younger age with higher stages, grades and higher rates of lethal triple negative breast cancer. Genetic ancestry, especially West African sub-Saharan ancestry, is known to contribute to aggressive breast cancer types. In South Carolina (SC), there is a disproportionate increase in female breast cancer death rates in black women compared to white women (30.1 and 21.2/100,000 respectively for years 2000-2019). Historical accounts of the slave trade into SC report that the majority of the enslaved African originated from the West African Coast with major distributions from the sub-Saharan regions. These Africans then remained in relative isolation within communities along the south eastern coastal islands, called Sea Islands (SIs) for nearly three centuries. The geographic isolation to the SIs along the SC coast resulted in a community with a unique language, folk telling, religious beliefs and a genetically distinctive subpopulation derived largely from West African populations with low European admixture. Reasons for higher breast cancer mortality in SC black women are not understood. Contemporary literature reports that stromal collagen differences are predictive of breast cancer survival. Cell signaling changes are influenced by post translational modifications to stromal collagen, specifically hydroxylation of proline (HYP).Here, we hypothesized that collagen stroma variations between black women and white women residing in a SI zip code could part be involved in the disproportionate increase in SC black female mortality. Newly diagnosed patients were considered SI origin if both parents were from a documented SI geographic region (BW n=10; WW n=21). The study specifically evaluated collagen stromal variations in breast cancer tumor, normal adjacent tissue, normal adjacent lymph, and metastatic lymph tissue. Breast tissue microarrays (TMAs) were analyzed by tissue imaging proteomics. The collagen peptide peak intensities were analyzed using Area Under the Receiving Operating Curve and Brown/Wilson T-test p-value <0.01. Six tumor peptides were determined to be significant between the Black and White populations. These peptides were not significantly altered in normal breast tissue. Intriguingly, the largest variation when comparing by race occurred in the lymph nodes. Normal lymph tissue showed 83 significantly different collagen peptides while the metastatic lymph tissue showed significant changes in 74 collagen peptides. In both normal and metastatic lymph tissue, two out of the three most significant peptides had a higher peak intensity in the white population compared to the black population, p-value ≤0.0005. Cluster Affinity Search Technique (CAST) heat maps were used to further evaluate all peak intensities in lymph tissue. For normal lymph, a cluster of 153 peptides was found, representing 84% of total peptides. Similarly, in metastatic lymph, a cluster of 36 peptides representing 40% of total genes was reported. Certain peptides were significant in both metastatic and normal lymph tissue, whereas others were only significant in either metastatic or normal lymph. This study suggests that there may be an ancestry-dependent immune involvement to metastatic breast cancer that may contribute to the higher breast cancer mortality rates in black women from SC SI regions. More studies are warranted to investigate the contribution of collagen stroma regulation within the immune system by metastatic breast cancer. Citation Format: Ashlyn Ivey, Sean Brown, Anand S. Mehta, Richard R. Drake, Elizabeth S. Yeh, Marvella E. Ford, Peggi M. Angel. Potential differences in stromal patterns from breast cancer metastatic lymph between South Carolina sea islander black women and white women [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the 2021 San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium; 2021 Dec 7-10; San Antonio, TX. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Res 2022;82(4 Suppl):Abstract nr P5-07-02.

Learning from emancipation: The Port Royal Experiment and transition theory

Over the last decade, transition studies has emerged as an intellectual field aimed at answering the question: How do we get to a more sustainable world? Emerging from a combination of science and technology studies, evolutionary economics, and studies of innovation, transition studies has become a widely used conceptual tool to frame pathways to a more sustainable future. However, its embrace of a systems approach to change, I will argue, transition studies remains unengaged with critical theories of change in sociology, history, and political economy. In addition, geographers have critiqued transition studies for its lack of attention to spatial relationships. Using a particular historical case study of transition in a particular place—the Port Royal “Free Labor” emancipation experiments in the South Carolina Sea Islands during the Civil War—this paper explores both the weaknesses and the strengths of transition studies as a conceptual tool, and how attention to critical and spatial approaches to change can improve our understanding of transitions. In particular, I will show how a political ecology, as a critical and spatial approach, can improve transition studies. I will use a historical case, the Port Royal emancipation experiments, to illustrate how the addition of political ecology to transition studies can improve one’s understanding of sustainable transition pathways.

Two Charlestonians at War: The Civil War Odysseys of a Lowcountry Aristocrat and a Black Abolitionist by Barbara L. Bellows

Reviewed by: Two Charlestonians at War: The Civil War Odysseys of a Lowcountry Aristocrat and a Black Abolitionist by Barbara L. Bellows Jeff Strickland (bio) Two Charlestonians at War: The Civil War Odysseys of a Lowcountry Aristocrat and a Black Abolitionist. By Barbara L. Bellows. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2018. Pp. 344. Cloth, $38.00.) Barbara L. Bellows has written an innovative dual biography that tells the story of two native Charlestonians, a free black abolitionist and a white planter aristocrat, who fought on opposite sides during the Civil War. Sergeant Joseph Humphries Barquet fought with the Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts Infantry, and Captain Thomas Pinckney served in the Fourth South Carolina Calvary. Barquet had left Charleston in 1848 and did not meet Pinckney until Barquet was stationed as a guard on Morris Island in 1864, when Pinckney was imprisoned on the island. The book is exceptionally well written, and Bellows clearly has a broad audience in mind. Bellows tells their stories in alternating chapters, beginning with Joseph Barquet. In 1823, Barquet was born to a French-speaking free black father, John Pierre Barquet, from St. Domingo and a mixed-race mother, Barbara Barquet, the daughter of a slave, Peggy, and Adam Tunno, a white Charleston merchant. The young Barquet trained as a brick mason, a familiar trade for free blacks in Charleston. In his youth, he identified as French, thereby taking advantage of Charleston’s moderate racial fluidity. In 1846, Barquet volunteered for service in the war with Mexico. In 1848, the Palmetto regiment disbanded and Barquet returned to Charleston, but he soon left for New York. In 1850, Barquet inherited money and moved to Cincinnati, Ohio, and he found work as a bricklayer that summer. By fall, he had relocated to Milwaukee, Wisconsin. During the 1850s, Barquet increasingly identified as black and began working as an abolitionist. In Wisconsin he gave a well-received antislavery speech that condemned the Fugitive Slave Act. In 1852, Barquet moved yet again, this time to Chicago, where he continued his antislavery activism. In 1855, Barquet moved his wife, Maria, and their first child to Galesburg, Illinois. In April 1863, he enlisted in the army and joined Company H of the Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts Infantry. In July, Barquet saw action in the South Carolina Sea Islands, including the assault on Battery Wagner. Bellows [End Page 481] offers a fantastic account of the battle. Next, Barquet participated in the Battle of Olustee, another Union defeat. On February 27, 1865, Barquet and the Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts received a hero’s welcome from black Charlestonians upon liberating their city from Confederate control—and slavery. Following the war, Barquet struggled with financial difficulties, some stemming from alcoholism exacerbated by his wartime experiences. All the while, he remained politically active on behalf of African Americans and the Republican Party. In 1877, Barquet moved to Davenport, Iowa, and he died of alcoholism in 1880. Thomas Pinckney was born in 1828 to C. Cotesworth Pinckney and Caroline Elliott Pinckney, both children of wealthy planter aristocrats. In 1832, Cotesworth Pinckney assumed the management of Eldorado Plantation when his half-brother Edward Rutledge died that year. The rice plantation sat on the South Santee River, forty miles north of Charleston. Thomas Pinckney enrolled in the University of Virginia in 1846. Two years later, he enrolled in the Medical College of South Carolina in Charleston, and he graduated by 1850. He then continued his training at the College of Physicians and Surgeons in New York City. Pinckney soon returned to Eldorado Plantation, where he learned plantation management from his father. Undoubtedly, slaves there were brutalized for any number of offenses, including low productivity, but Bellows ignores slave punishment. In January 1861, Pinckney began raising a company to protect his plantation district. Eventually, his company joined Major Edward Manigault’s regiment stationed at McClellanville. In late 1862, Pinckney’s Saint James Mounted Riflemen became Company D of the Fourth South Carolina Calvary commanded by Colonel Benjamin Huger Rutledge. Initially, Fourth South Carolina was stationed at Pocotaligo, near Port Royal. In March 1864, the regiment formed part of a new brigade in the Army of Northern Virginia. In May, Pinckney had made it to...

Black Autonomy, Red Cross Recovery, and White Backlash after the Great Sea Island Storm of 1893

Black Autonomy, Red Cross Recovery, and White Backlash after the Great Sea Island Storm of 1893 Caroline Grego (bio) President of the American Red Cross Clara Barton boarded the steamer Catherine to tour the storm-stricken sea islands of South Carolina at 4 a.m. on September 17, 1893.1 South Carolina’s governor, the infamous white supremacist and demagogue Benjamin R. Tillman, had invited Barton to investigate the situation and determine if her organization could assist the reeling state.2 Less than a month earlier, on the night of August 27–28, a massive hurricane with 125 mph winds struck the sea islands around Beaufort, taking an immense toll: between 1,500 and 5,000 people died, all but a couple dozen of whom were African American. The storm trailed destruction up the southern Atlantic shoreline. But the string of islands clinging to South Carolina’s coast bore the brunt of the death toll and the worst of the storm damage. The storm ruined the fall harvest and left 30,000 people in the Lowcountry [End Page 803] destitute.3 The Great Sea Island Storm of 1893 was one of the worst natural disasters in the nineteenth-century United States. Several historians have turned to the storm as a transformative and explanatory moment in Lowcountry history. They have explored the hurricane’s impact on rice cultivation and the region’s phosphate industry, and they have interpreted the storm as a flashpoint for memories of Reconstruction and for questions of responsibility in disaster recovery.4 This article draws on this rich, growing scholarship and focuses on a piece of that story, the hurricane recovery effort under the American Red Cross.5 What Barton saw and heard during that steamer trip convinced her that the Red Cross was obligated to lead the recovery effort. The steamer tracked north from Beaufort all the way to Charleston, winding up tidal waterways, passing the hurricane-wrecked dredge the Wimbee, navigating through treacherous waters into the Stono River, and landing at a wharf on the Cooper River. Along the way, the group stopped at several sea islands. At each place, an unofficial emissary, most of whom were African American, delivered news of the island’s plight. Barton listened to these reports, dispensed food from the hull of the steamer whenever possible, and considered the scope of the disaster. On September 29, 1893, she wrote in her diary that she had “decided to take charge of the [End Page 804] relief of the Sea Islands” after a nighttime meeting with her closest colleagues. Misgivings plagued her. She did not write of the nobility of charity work but instead commented on what “a great undertaking” it would be “to feed, clothe, work & doctor & nurse 30,000 human beings for eight months, and do it all upon charity gathered as one goes along.”6 To understand what the Red Cross’s recovery effort meant for the South Carolina sea islands at a crossroads moment, this article explores the Red Cross’s measures of relief, the role of black sea islanders in harnessing Red Cross relief to protect their autonomy, and the white supremacist backlash against the coalition of the Red Cross and black sea islanders. Above all, this article tracks how a uniquely independent black Lowcountry community, the white supremacists who resented the persistence of black autonomy on the coast, and a rare third-party intermediary, the Red Cross, all vied to implement their visions for recovery from the Great Sea Island Storm of 1893. Throughout the recovery process, the Red Cross attempted to nurture the long-term self-sufficiency of black sea islanders through short-term aid. The organization shared similar objectives with black sea islanders and accomplished a great deal of material good, but its attitude toward black sea islanders was laced with undeniable paternalism, demonstrated in its volunteers’ rhetoric and methods, that led the Red Cross to doubt the capabilities of black sea islanders. Some Red Cross volunteers even suggested that the deadly hurricane had been a strange kind of blessing: “They did not know how to live,” one said; “The Red Cross lifted those people and placed them...

“A GRIM MEMORIAL OF ITS THOROUGH WORK OF DEVASTATION AND DESOLATION”: RACE AND MEMORY IN THE AFTERMATH OF THE 1893 SEA ISLAND STORM

“‘A Grim Memorial of Its Thorough Work of Devastation and Desolation’: Race and Memory in the Aftermath of the 1893 Sea Island Storm” explores the political struggle that ensued in the aftermath of the August 1893 hurricane. The storm, which decimated the predominantly African American South Carolina Sea Islands, required a nine-month relief effort to assist the region's citizens in their time of need. Led by the American Red Cross, the relief effort became a new proxy for a long-standing debate over the legacy of Reconstruction and the meaning of black citizenship. This battle, waged by leaders in South Carolina's Democratic Party, Red Cross officials, writers in the national press, former abolitionists, and African Americans living in the South Carolina Sea Islands, exposed growing fissures in how Americans understood notions of charity and self-help. More than a battleground for still-nascent ideas of disaster relief, the political turmoil that followed the 1893 Sea Island Storm played a critical role in redefining the racial boundaries of the United States on the eve of the Jim Crow era.

The Radicals' Reconstruction: Jewett at Port Royal

The Radicals' Reconstruction:Jewett at Port Royal Holly Jackson (bio) I am grateful for Vesna Kuiken's recent essay ("'Fit to Be Free': From Race to Capacity . . .") on Sarah Orne Jewett's "The Mistress of Sydenham Plantation" (Fall 2017). The historical and conceptual framework Kuiken provides for reading this understudied text expands our approach to the literature of Reconstruction, a valuable contribution that I believe might be extended by exploring further the story's interest in the role of Northern reformers in the implementation of Southern Reconstruction. To wit, following Kuiken's generative focus on the key concept of capacity, we might look to Jewett's treatment of the Port Royal Experiment for what it reveals about the co-optation of social radicalism in this period. Reconstruction effectively began early in the war, when Union forces captured the South Carolina Sea Islands in 1861. White residents fled, abandoning vast plantation estates, a multimillion-dollar cotton crop, and ten thousand enslaved people. The federal government sought Northern teachers to instruct this black population not only in the usual schoolhouse subjects but also in "voluntary industry, self-reliance, frugality."1 The reformers from Boston and New York who answered the call became known as Gideonites or Gideon's Band, although Jewett's story alludes to them only as "de good ladies f'om de Norf."2 They were "a queer farrago" of "bearded and mustached and odd-looking men, with odder-looking women," who looked to one observer at the time like "the adjournment of a John Brown meeting or the fag end of a broken-down phalanstery!"3 In other words, the Port Royal Experiment was implemented by the kind of people previously associated with experiments [End Page 229] of a different kind—the socialist communes, gender bending, and antiracist direct actions that antebellum social protest movements had generated. But these ultras were now charged with the decidedly conservative project of installing a capitalist wage-labor economy and enforcing norms like marriage and military service. Jewett's story places these reformers in ambiguous and intriguing relation to a set of codependent Southern amnesiacs in a mutually constructed time warp that involves the persistence of slavery decades after Emancipation. Kuiken argues that Port Royal catalyzed a postbellum shift from a political and ethical discourse of rights to one hinging on economic and biological competence, as newly freed African Americans were tasked with proving that they could be functional capitalist subjects. In addition to the discourse of black capacity that Kuiken brings to light, Jewett's "Mistress" also raises questions for me about the frustrating incapacity of white Americans who took part in projects for black empowerment after Emancipation. Their new experiment turned out to replicate the old regime in many ways. The free people were paid for their work for the first time in their lives, but they were nevertheless forced to work, not by slave drivers but by Union soldiers and Northern cotton agents, their "new masters." The activist teacher Laura Towne, whom (as Kuiken notes) Jewett and Annie Fields visited in 1888, viewed this compulsory labor with apprehension, signaling the burden of complicity she felt as a member of the Port Royal Experiment even though her own motives were humanitarian and not commercial. She observed, "The danger now seems to be—not that we shall be called enthusiasts, abolitionists, philanthropists, but cotton agents, negro-drivers, oppressors." She noted with distress that the Gideonites were pressured to downplay their antislavery convictions and that some of her colleagues "do not even tell the slaves that they are free, and they lead them to suppose that if they do not do so and so, they may be returned to their masters," a form of psychological control that resonates profoundly with Jewett's story.4 Moreover, this troubling reversal hints at a broader shift in reform culture as many prominent activists turned from radical perfectionism to accommodationist expediency, overconfident in the state as a force of emancipation once the federal government nominally embraced this cause at long last. To name only one relevant example, the black radical Martin Delany, an agent of the Freedmen's Bureau on the Sea Islands, came to support the...

“Lots of doctoring, with great success”: Healthcare within the Port Royal Experiment and the Work of Laura M. Towne

In 1862, Laura M. Towne – abolitionist, teacher, educator, and trained homeopath – joined the Port Royal Experiment, a project initiated by Northern benevolent societies to provide education and relief for former slaves on the South Carolina Sea Islands, which had been occupied by Union troops in late 1861. On the Sea Islands as well as in broader Northern culture, healthcare for freedpeople – and freedpeople’s health – soon became controversial topics. This article traces how Towne as homeopathic practitioner uses medical tropes in autobiographic documents intended for publication or circulation in the North to increase her own authority within a wartime discourse and how, at the same time, she avoids reflection about medical crises.

Cardiovascular risk in Gullah African Americans with high familial risk of type 2 diabetes mellitus: project SuGAR.

To determine the prevalence of cardiovascular disease, levels of cardiovascular risk factors, and extent of preventive care in Gullah African Americans with a high familial risk of type 2 diabetes mellitus. Between 1995 and 2003, 1321 Gullah African Americans with a high prevalence of diabetes mellitus from the South Carolina Sea Islands consented to and enrolled in the Sea Islands Genetic African American Registry (Project SuGAR). A cross-sectional analysis of cardiometabolic risk, preventive care, and self-reported cardiovascular disease was conducted. Cardiometabolic risk factor levels were high and vascular disease was prevalent. Among the subjects with diabetes mellitus, the mean disease duration was 10.5 years; approximately one-third reported reduced vision or blindness; and >80% reported numbness, pain, or burning in their feet. Preventive diabetes care was limited, with <60%, <25%, and <40% seeing an ophthalmologist, podiatrist, and dentist, respectively, within the past year. Only 54.4% of women and 39.3% of men reported daily glucose monitoring. As the largest existing study of Gullah individuals, our study offers insight into not only the level of cardiovascular risk in this population but also the pathophysiological mechanisms central to ancestral differences in cardiometabolic risk in the broader African American population.

To Free a Family: The Journey of Mary Walker (review)

Reviewed by: To Free a Family: The Journey of Mary Walker Kabria Baumgartner (bio) Keywords Slavery, Mary Walker, Slave families, Free African Americans, Fugitive slaves To Free a Family: The Journey of Mary Walker. By Sydney Nathans. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012. Pp. 330. Cloth, $29.95.) Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, Harriet Jacobs, and Mary Walker: For most readers familiar with American history, the first three names are recognizable. Tubman, Truth, and Jacobs were enslaved African American women who escaped slavery and fought for black emancipation and civil rights in nineteenth-century America. Mary Walker did too, but until now her story went untold. In To Free a Family, distinguished historian Sydney Nathans recovers the lived experiences of Mary Walker, from her upbringing as an enslaved servant on the Cameron plantation in North Carolina to her work as a freedwoman supporting her family in Massachusetts. Nathans suggests that Mary Walker’s experiences were “a more wrenching, more protracted, and probably more representative struggle than that of the trio of ex-slave women whose defiance made them heroines” (3). He raises a valid point. Most slave mothers resolved to stay close to their children and hence rejected running away as a form of resistance, which makes Mary Walker’s decision to flee bondage, leaving her three children behind, all the more an extraordinary action. Thus Mary’s abiding quest to reunite her family, Nathans argues, reveals the “hidden epic of emancipation” (4). Born on August 18, 1818 to Priscilla, an enslaved servant, and an unknown, white father, Mary Walker grew up on the Fairntosh Plantation in central North Carolina. Described as “fair skinned,” Mary served the Cameron family and, while doing so, learned to read, write, and sew (2). At the age of thirteen or fourteen, she bore her first child, Frank, in 1832. She had three more children: Agnes, born in 1837; Edward, born in 1840 and died in 1848; and Bryant, born in 1844. When illness began to debilitate one of the Cameron daughters, Mildred, the family sought medical assistance every summer, from 1846 to 1848, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. During that period of time, Mary accompanied the family as caregiver and faithful servant. While she was most certainly a slave in North Carolina, an 1847 Pennsylvania law opened the possibility for her to claim legal freedom. Ten days before her thirtieth birthday, she [End Page 177] escaped. Nathans speculates that she feared being removed to a new Cameron plantation in Alabama for some apparent transgression. For two years, she lived in the relatively safe haven of Philadelphia. The passage of the Fugitive Slave Law in 1850, which compelled citizens to assist in the recapture of fugitive slaves, precipitated Mary’s move from Philadelphia to Boston that November. She eventually resided with Peter and Susan Lesley where she worked as a seamstress; later on she became a caregiver to Anne Jean Lyman, Susan Lesley’s mother, in nearby Cambridge. Upon learning of patriarch Duncan Cameron’s death, she embarked upon her journey to free her enslaved children. Unbeknownst to her, Frank, her oldest son, had escaped in 1852. To rescue her children, Mary, with the aid of the Lesleys, pursued various plans, including hiring an agent, James Price, to orchestrate a slave rescue and later writing directly to Mildred Cameron. None of these plans worked. Mary thought often of her children, but as major events related to the expansion of slavery gripped the nation, her plans were thwarted. She committed herself instead to helping freed people, traveling to the South Carolina Sea Islands to provide aid. As the Civil War came to an end in 1865, she returned to Cambridge and finally her two children, now adults with their own families, joined her. Seven years later, she passed away. Prior to Mary’s reunion with her children, the Lesleys had been Mary’s adoptive family, but the Lesley–Walker friendship was an unlikely one. Peter Lesley expressed antislavery sympathies but had not joined the radical abolition movement. When he learned of Mary Walker’s plight from his cousin James Lesley, Peter became an ardent abolitionist, declaring in front of his congregation, “Harbor, and protect the oppressed wherever you behold...

Building an Athletic Brand: The University of South Carolina Beaufort Crafts a New Image

In 2002, the state of South Carolina authorized the University of South Carolina Beaufort (USCB) to alter its role and mission from a two-year college to a four-year, baccalaureate-granting institution. As part of its desire to become a “full-service” university, USCB planned to begin intercollegiate athletic competition by 2007. In addition to launching the athletic department, USCB needed to select a mascot and logo that would be appropriate not only for the new athletic department, but also for the two-campus institution that was located in the beautiful South Carolina Sea Islands. Rather than simply have the chancellor or the new athletic director select the mascot and color scheme, USCB formed a mascot selection committee comprised of various on and off-campus stakeholders who utilized survey research to solicit a wide variety of potential mascot choices before undertaking its evaluations and making its final recommendation. This case provides details regarding USCB’s mascot selection process and poses a variety of questions for students to contemplate when making athletic branding decisions.

Southern Folk Singers

Southern Folk Singers Charles Joyner (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Guy Carawan (here, in 2007), came to Tennessee’s Highlander Folk School in the 1950s and soon became its music director. He helped spread two freedom songs from the South Carolina Sea Islands—“We Shall Overcome” and “Eyes on the Prize”—to Civil Rights workers across the South. Photography by Heather Carawan, courtesy of a Creative Commons License 2.5. [End Page 73] Folk singers is an ambiguous term. To folklorists it means those whose repertoires have been passed down orally from generation to generation within the family and community. To others it often means professional singers, regardless of background, who learned most of their songs from recordings and offered them to the general public as folk songs. I shall call the former traditional singers and the latter singers of folk songs. Traditional Singers The Wallin Family of Madison County, North Carolina, is tenth. British folklorists Cecil Sharp and Maud Karpeles recorded members of the family in 1916, and John Cohen (filmmaker and member of the New Lost City Ramblers) recorded and filmed the family extensively in the 1960s. They sang, in the traditional unaccompanied style, the old English and Scottish ballads of love, betrayal, and revenge. Perhaps the most memorable of their songs is Berzilla Wallin’s heart-stopping “Conversation with Death.” Horton Barker, the blind ballad singer from Chilhowie, Virginia, is ninth. The clarity of his unaccompanied tenor, his sly wit, and his extraordinary repertoire of songs, hymns, and such rare ballads as “Lord Thomas and Fair Ellender,” “Bow and Balance,” and “The Turkish Rebilee” were unforgettable to those who heard him from Virginia’s White Top Folk Festival in the thirties to the Chicago Folk Festival in the sixties. Eighth is Vera Hall of Livingston, Alabama. Her rich contralto, recorded for the Library of Congress by John Lomax and Ruby Pickens Tartt, was nationally recognized from the late 1930s to the 1960s for such songs as “Trouble So Hard,” and “Boll Weevil Holler.” Emma Dusenberry of Mena, Arkansas, is seventh. Born in 1862, and blind since her early twenties, she is the earliest singer on this list. According to John Lomax, who recorded her for the Library of Congress in the 1930s, her repertoire of traditional ballads was the largest ever recorded from a single person. Janey Hunter and the Moving Star Hall Singers of Johns Island, South Carolina, are tied with Bessie Jones and the Georgia Sea Island Singers of St. Simons Island, Georgia, for fifth and sixth. Their virtuoso voices, accompanied only by hand-clapping and foot-stomping, evoke an incredibly spiritual response as close to its African roots as any in America. Jean Ritchie of Viper, Kentucky, is number four. From the 1940s to the present she has sung the songs, ballads, and hymns from her family’s repertoire in her authentically Appalachian voice, sometimes a capella, sometimes accompanying herself on the Appalachian dulcimer. Almeda Riddle of Heber Springs, Arkansas, is third. She learned ballads and [End Page 74] other traditional songs from her parents and her mother’s brother growing up in the Ozarks. Known by her friends and fans as “Granny Riddle,” she preferred to sing rare old ballads in the traditional a capella style, always keeping the haunting ambience of her voice behind the song, but embellishing it with unique vocal decorations punctuated by leaps into the falsetto at the end of lines. Click for larger view View full resolution South Carolinian Josh White (here, in 1945) became a protégé of Eleanor Roosevelt and a frequent guest in the White House. His “One Meatball” was the first million-selling record by an African American male singer. Photograph courtesy of The Estate of Josh White (Sr.) and the Josh White Archives. Tying for first place are North Carolina’s Frank Proffitt and Louisiana’s Huddie “Lead Belly” Ledbetter. Ledbetter is remembered as much for his powerful accompaniment on the twelve-string guitar as for his high sweet voice and unabridged repertoire of work songs, love songs, ballads, and blues, such as “Rock Island Line,” “Midnight Special,” “Take this Hammer,” and “Goodnight Irene.” Frank Proffitt learned most of his...

Mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) haplotypes reveal maternal population genetic affinities of Sea Island Gullah-speaking African Americans

To better understand the population substructure of African Americans living in coastal South Carolina, we used restriction site polymorphisms and an insertion/deletion in mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) to construct seven-position haplotypes across 1,395 individuals from Sierra Leone, Africa, from U.S. European Americans, and from the New World African-derived populations of Jamaica, Gullah-speaking African Americans of the South Carolina Sea Islands (Gullahs), African Americans living in Charleston, South Carolina, and West Coast African Americans. Analyses showed a high degree of similarity within the New World African-derived populations, where haplotype frequencies and diversities were similar. Phi-statistics indicated that very little genetic differentiation has occurred within New World African-derived populations, but that there has been significant differentiation of these populations from Sierra Leoneans. Genetic distance estimates indicated a close relationship of Gullahs and Jamaicans with Sierra Leoneans, while African Americans living in Charleston and the West Coast were progressively more distantly related to the Sierra Leoneans. We observed low maternal European American admixture in the Jamaican and Gullah samples (m = 0.020 and 0.064, respectively) that increased sharply in a clinal pattern from Charleston African Americans to West Coast African Americans (m = 0.099 and 0.205, respectively). The appreciably reduced maternal European American admixture noted in the Gullah indicates that the Gullah may be uniquely situated to allow genetic epidemiology studies of complex diseases in African Americans with low European American admixture.

A gentleman of color: the life of James Forten

In A Gentleman of Color, Julie Winch provides a vividly written, full-length biography of James Forten, one of the most remarkable men in 19th-century America. Forten was born in 1766 into a free black family. As a teenager he served in the Revolution and was captured by the British. Rejecting an attractive offer to change sides, he insisted he was a loyal American. By 1810 he was the leading sailmaker in Philadelphia, where he became well known as an innovative craftsman, a successful manager of black and white employees, and a shrewd businessman. He emerged as a leader in Philadelphia's black community and was active in a wide range of reform activities. He was especially prominent in national and international antislavery movements, served as vice-president of the American Anti-Slavery Society, and became close friends with William Lloyd Garrison, to whom he lent money to start up the Liberator. Forten was also the founder of a remarkable dynasty. His children and his son-in-law were all active abolitionists and a granddaughter, Charlotte Forten, published a famous diary of her experiences teaching ex-slaves in South Carolina's Sea Islands during the Civil War. When James Forten died in 1842, five thousand mourners, black and white, turned out to honor a man who had earned the respect of society across the racial divide. This is the first serious biography of Forten, who stands beside Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, and Martin Luther King, Jr. in the pantheon of African-Americans who fundamentally shaped American history.

Developing freedom songs: Guy Carawan and the African-American traditions of the South Carolina Sea Islands

Developing freedom songs: Guy Carawan and the African-American traditions of the South Carolina Sea Islands

Blacks on the South Carolina sea islands: Planning for tourist and land development: June Sheralyn Manning Thomas, Ph.D. University of Michigan, 1977 [September 1977:1703

Blacks on the South Carolina sea islands: Planning for tourist and land development: June Sheralyn Manning Thomas, Ph.D. University of Michigan, 1977 [September 1977:1703

Changing Agricultural Patterns On The South Carolina Sea Islands

Changing Agricultural Patterns On The South Carolina Sea Islands

William F. Allen: Classical Scholar among the Slaves

It was a cool, blustery, but beautiful, clear November 4, 1863, when the Union Steamer Arago lifted anchor and headed south out of New York Harbor. The deck was crowded with Yankee soldiers and some civilians, departing for the South Carolina Sea Islands, where the Union, two years earlier, had established the Department of the South. Listed among the passengers were William Francis Alien and his wife Mary, both teachers, hired to educate the abandoned sea island slaves. After graduating from Harvard in 1851, Alien served as a tutor in New York for three years, then journeyed to Europe where he studied language and the classics at Gottingen, Berlin, Rome, Naples, and Greece. In 1856 William returned to Boston where he accepted the position of associate principal at the English and Classical School at West Newton, Massachusetts. While working in this capacity, Alien met, courted, and married Mary Lambert and remained on at West Newton during the war's early years. Hoping to do something for the war effort, William and his wife hired on as instructors and were part of a new teachers group heading for the islands to do their part.1

English in the West Indies, or the West Indies in English?

The English of the West Indies, like the other languages of the area, shows many resemblances to the language patterns of Negroes in other parts of the New World. There have been many controversies over this matter, with many linguists, especially dialect geographers, inclined to deny West African influence upon anything inside continental North America except for Gullah(Georgia and South Carolina sea islands) and the French Creole of Louisiana. Others, like Lorenzo Turner, who conclusively disproved the widely held belief that Gullah was an amalgam of archaic features from the British Isles,have substantiated the thesis of the anthropologist Melville J. Herskovits that the culture, including the language, of Negroes from Suriname to Michigan retains many traces of African patterns. And, since the recent death of the Haitian philologist Jules Faine, no one has seriously denied resemblances among the Caribbean dialects.