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New Slave Museum Charleston Sc

Historical Significance Of Gadsdens Wharf

Construction on Charlestons African American museum underway

The museums roots reach much further back than the former mayors vision back to the 1780s at Charlestons Gadsdens Wharf, where historians estimate nearly half of all enslaved Africans who were brought to North America were funneled. Now, the very site will be a testament to the rich history of the African American history that began at Gadsdens Wharf along the Cooper River.

The museum will include exhibits tracing African American history from Africa to North America, from Gadsdens Wharf to plantations, from the earliest days of slavery up to today. Exhibits will highlight notable African Americans and their contributions to South Carolina and American history, and theyll explore the details of African American life and culture, including that of the Gullah and Geechee people. And because it is purposefully international in scope, the museum will also feature sections about the millions of descendants of slaves in Latin America and the Caribbean.

Between 1783 and 1808, the peak years of the transatlantic slave trade, an estimated 100,000 West African men, women, and children awaited sale at the wharf. According to information from the museum, its possible that all African Americans can identify at least one ancestor who passed through the South Carolina point of entry, which is often referred to as the Ellis Island of African Americans.

International African American Museum

Set to open in early 2022, The International African American Museum is a new museum of African American history and identity. It will communicate the often overlooked history of African Americans in the Lowcountry of South Carolina, and share the impacts of these people upon our nation. With an aim to re-center South Carolinas place in global history, illuminating its pivotal role in the development of the international slave trade and the Civil War, the museum will connect visitors to their ancestors, demonstrating how enslaved Africans and free blacks shaped economic, political, and cultural development in the nation and beyond.

International African American Museum Announces Opening Date

Charleston, S.C. After over 20 years of planning, the International African American Museum has announced that the museum will be welcoming visitors for opening the weekend of January 21, 2023. Built upon the former site of Gadsdens Wharf one of the nations most prolific slave trading ports the International African American Museum will create an opportunity for visitors to engage with authentic and lesser-known history through transformative storytelling, compelling artifacts and exhibitions, and its unique power of place. The mission of the museum is to honor the untold story of the African American journey at one of Americas most sacred sites, and the long-awaited institution is poised to take this next step in delivering on this promise.

I am proud to have worked with our incredible team to get this museum to opening day. This museum will be a must-see space of courageous curiosity and authentic engagement with our nations history with African American history, says Dr. Tonya Matthews, president and CEO of the International African American Museum. Committed reckoning with history is a necessary stop on the road to healing and reconciliation. Charleston is a port city, a global city, a historic city and there is no better place for our museum to steward these stories that have such national and international significance and impact.

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Naval Office Lists Public Records Office London

The Public Record Office in London contains two collections, Naval Office Lists, 1757-1764 and Naval Office Lists, 1764-1767, that document the arrivals and departure of ships for the port of Charleston. The lists contain the name of the ship, name of the ships owners, name of the captain, date of the arrival or departure, and the ships cargo. Be aware that ships carrying enslaved Africans would have arrived about ten days before they were cleared into the port of Charleston due to mandatory offshore quarantines for ships arriving from Africa. To access the collections, you can contact the Public Record Office in London.

Reckoning With Racism And Its Legacies

Old Slave Mart  Charleston, South Carolina

When the original Old Slave Mart Museum opened in 1938, it was the first, and for many decades the only, museum dedicated to the slave trade in the United States.

The museums founder, a white Ohioan named Miriam B. Wilson, filled the gallery with crafts like hand-sewn sheets and ironworks made by enslaved people. Even though the mart was a commercial epicenter for the buying and selling of human beings, the museums exhibits reflected Wilsons belief that the brutality of slavery had been overstated, and that it was primarily a civilizing institution.

Those kinds of views were not uncommon in Charleston at the time, and they permeated through the budding movement to protect its colonial-era architecture. Theres zero question that the history of the preservation movement in Charleston is a history of elite whites, says Winslow Hastie about the citys influential preservation movement that took root during Jim Crow. Hastie is a 13th-generation plantation owner and president and CEO of the nonprofit Historic Charleston Foundation .

The HCF is trying to change the course of a preservation movement thats neglected Black history and, simultaneously, displaced Black people through restoration projects that systematically gentrified parts of Charleston. Some of that course change is happening at the Foundations house museums.

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‘sacred Ground’ A Star Of Charleston’s New International African American Museum

His team also will soon acquire artifacts. The “bulk of that will start in a month or so,” Bartlett said, and they’re “quite close” to finalizing text for the exhibit areas.

What happens inside the building is just a part of the whole, Powers added. The museum is working with landscape architect and MacArthur fellow Walter Hood on an evocative outdoor space that will include gardens, a memorial to the anonymous African, contemplative space and signage containing information about the site and its historical importance.

UNESCO has identified the former Gadsdens Wharf as one of 50 locations related to the slave trade worthy of a marker, Powers said.

We want people to visit the museum even when its closed, he said. They can have a good experience on the outside, and they can learn on the outside.

The International African American Museum will feature indoor exhibitions and a Center for Family History as well as outdoor memorial gardens. Gavin McIntyre/Staff

Tying communities together

John White, dean of libraries at the College of Charleston, said he hopes the museums narrative will echo that of the latest academic scholarship, which tells an inclusive and nuanced story about the African American experience. And here he sees potential for direct collaboration.

The Avery, as well as the colleges Special Collections, can lend materials for display at the museum, provide student interns, and welcome as adjunct faculty qualified museum staffers, he suggested.

Purchase Of The Building

In 1938 Miriam B. Wilson purchased the building and established a museum featuring African and African American arts and crafts. Judith Wragg Chase and Louise Wragg Graves took over the Old Slave Mart Museum in 1964. It was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1973.

Recognizing the significant importance to the African American story, the City of Charleston acquired the property in 1988. The site opened again as a historic site and museum in 2007.

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Coast Guard Station Charleston

Coast Guard Station Charleston responds to search and rescue emergencies, conducts maritime law enforcement activities, and Ports, Waterways, and Coastal Security missions. Personnel from Station Charleston are highly trained professionals, composed of federal law enforcement officers, boat crewmen, and coxswains who are capable of completing a wide range of missions. In 2020, the Coast Guard announced plans to construct a 2,800-acre “superbase” on the former complex to consolidate all its Charleston-area facilities and become the homeport for five Security cutters and additional offshore cutters.

Coast Guard Sector Charleston

  • Coast Guard Station Charleston

Public Treasurer Journals South Carolina Department Of Archives And History

Damon Fordham tells of the Slave Market Museum in Charleston SC

The South Carolina Department of Archives and History holds journals of the Public Treasurer for South Carolina. The volume Public Treasurer, Journal B: Duties records the amount of duties Charleston and South Carolina merchants paid on their sales of enslaved Africans. These journals reveal the names of merchants participating in the Atlantic Slave Trade and the amount of duties paid for individual sales of cargoes of enslaved Africans. The journals may be accessed at SCDAH in Columbia, South Carolina. You can also order copies of SCDAHs holdings.

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You Have A Phd In Biomedical Engineering And Worked At The Fda Before Moving To The Museum World What Inspired Your Shift To Public Education

Even as a graduate student and then as a career professional in engineering and technology, I always gravitated toward work-force development, education or helping folks engage with technology they did not understand. I would use curiosity to inspire folks to push themselves just enough to get through the science, the math and the engineering. And I find the same thing in history: Sometimes history requires a little courage. So I use curiosity and storytelling to help folks get that extra inspiration to push through the tough stuff.

Boeing Pledges To Hire More Black Employees Ups Charleston Museum Gift To $1m

Museum officials also are striving to establish a $15 million endowment, about $8 million of which already has been raised. That puts the museum in an above-average position, financially. The median endowment of a special-interest museum is about $2.5 million, and it’s generally lower for history museums, about $500,000, Deerin said.

Fundraising for IAAM continues. The museums leaders are looking to raise another $3 million, in part to help attract top talent, including a permanent CEO and a chief curator, Heyward said. Those funds also would help pay consultants who help develop programming.

Having financial security and being an institution with a substantial endowment matters to visitors, Deerin said, because that stability “puts you in a position to be bold and be innovative, maybe more so than you could without it.”

Telling the story

Charleston is central to the African American experience. It was the main entryway to North America for the transatlantic slave trade, and its coastal landscape became one of the nascent countrys supreme economic engines thanks to rice cultivation and the agricultural expertise of enslaved West Africans.

Workers continue construction on the International African American Museum on Oct. 15, 2020, in Charleston. Gavin McIntyre/Staff

And now Charleston is getting a museum where this story can be told. But how will it be told? And how much of it?

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The Fine Arts & Exhibits Special Section

I reached Dr. Matthews via a video call at her office in Charleston. Over the course of the interview, she talked about the link between curiosity and courage, and the relationship between struggle, triumph and joy.

Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Id Love To Hear About The Museum Building Itself Which I Know Is The Work Of A Very Well

80 years after first opening, Charleston

Mr. Henry Cobb is the architect who designed the building. When we explained to him what the museum was about and where we were located, he took on the language himself of the site being hallowed. He said that it was going to be one of the greatest challenges of his career to design a building where the ground that the building stands on is more important than the building itself. And so out of that understanding, he decided to raise the museum up onto 13-foot pillars, so that even the museum would not touch the ground. That created space underneath, where we have our African Ancestors Memorial Garden, which is open to the public.

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Filling In The Gaps Of Public History

When Michael Allen joined the National Park Service in June 1980, he noticed that something was missing from the historical narratives at the Charleston properties. At forts Moultrie and Sumter, there was no mention of slavery, even though the forts were built by enslaved laborers. The pest houses where captive Africans were left to quarantine after being hauled across the Atlantic Ocean were absent from information about Sullivans Island.

Instead, the focus narrowed in on military history: the defeat of the Royal Navy in 1776, and the first shots of the Civil Wara war that, according to the official narrative, was fought over tariffs and states rights. Either I was out of place or the Park Service was out of touch, Allen says, and I didnt believe I was out of place.

Through numerous projects over the course of four decades, Allen helped the Park Service improve its interpretation of Black history. One of those projects included the creation of the Gullah Geechee Heritage Cultural Corridor, which runs along the coast from Pender County, North Carolina to St. Johns County, Florida. The Gullah Geechee people are descendants of West Africans whodue to their isolation on sea and barrier islands during enslavementretained many of their African traditions and developed distinctive foodways, crafts, spiritual practices, and language. The corridor highlights their vast contribution to the history and culture of the Lowcountry.

Annual Cultural Events And Fairs

Charleston annually hosts founded by Gian Carlo Menotti, a 17-day art festival featuring over 100 performances by individual artists in a variety of disciplines. The annual Piccolo Spoleto festival takes place at the same time and features local performers and artists, with hundreds of performances throughout the city. Other festivals and events include Historic Charleston Foundation’s Festival of Houses and Gardens and Charleston Antiques Show, the Taste of Charleston, The Lowcountry Oyster Festival, the , The Charleston Marathon, Southeastern Wildlife Exposition , Charleston Food and Wine Festival, Charleston Fashion Week, the MOJA Arts Festival, and the Holiday Festival of Lights , and the Charleston International Film Festival. The is a major library industry event, held in the city center since 1980.

The community has had a tremendous influence on music in Charleston, especially when it comes to the early development of music. In turn, the music of Charleston has had an influence on that of the rest of the country. The dances that accompanied the music of the dock workers in Charleston followed a rhythm that inspired ‘s “Charleston Rag” and later ‘s “”, as well as the that defined a nation in the 1920s. “”, which was a popular dance in the years before “Charleston”, was written by native Charlestonian .

To this day, Charleston is home to many musicians in all genres.

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Merchants Account Books Us And Uk Archives

Account books of merchants involved in the Atlantic Slave Trade may be held at archives in the United States and the United Kingdom. You can search ArchiveGrid to find collections related to the Atlantic Slave Trade and specific merchants who participated in the trade. The Account Book of Henry Laurens, 1750 April 1758 December has been digitized by Yale University Special Collections and is free to access online. You can download individual pages of research interest. There are some accounts of merchants sales of enslaved Africans in the Public Record Office in Kew, U.K., but only a handful are held there. You can order copies of those records on the Public Records Office website.

Note that the Austin and Laurens account book recorded only the gender of those who were imported and sold and does not include names of the enslaved. Information recorded in the journal includes the name of the purchaser, how many men, women, boys or girls they purchased, and the credit terms for the sale.

Documents Illustrative Of The Slave Trade

South Carolina Slave Home to become centerpiece for Smithsonian’s new Museum

The four volumes of Documents Illustrative of the History of the Slave Trade to America edited by Elizabeth Donnan contain numerous examples of documents concerning the trade to Charleston. All four volumes have been digitized and are freely available online. Volume IV contains an extensive list of documents for the trade to South Carolina between 1706 and 1807. There you will find personal correspondence, newspaper advertisements, accounts of sales and more.

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The Papers Of Henry Laurens

Henry Laurens was one of the most active Charleston merchants who sold cargoes of enslaved Africans in Charleston. The sixteen volumes of The Papers of Henry Laurens contain correspondence, newspaper advertisements and other documents that chronicle Henry Laurens life and his participation in the Atlantic Slave Trade. Although the volumes are not digitized, they are available in many public and university libraries.

Many of the items included in the sixteen volumes of this serial set were taken from The Henry Laurens Papers, which can be viewed at the South Carolina Historical Society. You can view the finding aid for this collection here.

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