Penn Center, St. Helena Island, South Carolina
The Sea Islands host communities of African descendants whose Gullah/Geechee culture represents one of the oldest facets of African American culture in the U.S. Central to Gullah/Geechee communities is Penn Center, established in 1862 as one of the first academic schools in the South for providing formal education to previously enslaved West Africans. Established by northern missionaries, Charlotte Forten was one of the first teachers at the school. The school developed as a Normal, Industrial and Agricultural school aligned with educational perspectives of Hampton Institute and Tuskegee Institute. Lorenzo Dow Turner and then Patricia Jones Jackson (1946-1986) conducted field research on the Gullah language and culture in these communities, and community members Cornelia Bailey (1945-2017) and Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor (1937-2016) advocated for, wrote about, and illuminated the history and culture of Gullah/Geechee peoples.
Upon the school’s closing in 1948, Penn Center became an institution dedicated to sustaining, preserving, and researching the history and cultural knowledge of the region and a community center for organizing for civil rights and social justice. It is now recognized as part of a National Historic site.