Traces of Africa Lecture

Traces of Africa in America: the Gullah Geechee People of South Carolina and Georgia

Gullah is a language spoken by slaves and their descendants in the southeastern coastal region of the United States. Slaves from so many different ethnic groups speaking so many different languages ended up in the coastal region in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that they developed a method to communicate, the Gullah language.  The language served as not only a way of communicating but a method of resistance because whites dismissed Gullah as pidgin English or slave talk. 

The language endured long after slavery’s demise, becoming a mark of inferiority for those blacks, who spoke it.  The historian Lorenzo Dow Turner was one of the first scholars to study the Gullah language.  His work with the Gullah people culminated in the publication of his Africanisms in the Gullah Dialect (University of Chicago Press 1949).  Turner’s research showed that blacks in America retained to a significant degree their African heritage.  Many historians during the early twentieth century incorrectly argued that blacks retained little of their African ways of life in America.

Many Gullah people embrace their Gullah background today, seeing their culture as unique, one that draws deeply on the African experience of the slaves from which they are descended.

Jim Humphreys is a professor of United States history at Murray State University, where he is in his seventeenth year of teaching.  He teaches courses inWorld Civilizations, United States history, the history of the American South, and the Civil War and Reconstruction.  He is the author of a biography of the southern historian Francis Butler Simkins, entitled Francis Butler Simkins: A Life (2008), published by the University Press of Florida, and he is the editor of Interpreting American History: The New South (2018), published by the Kent State University Press.  He also served as the editor of the Journal of the Jackson Purchase Historical Society for seven years.  

The lecture is presented free of charge, and all interested community members are invited to attend.  

*Entry to the lecture will be through CCPL’s North Side Doors. For more information, please email contactccpl@callowaycountylibrary.org.

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