Editor’s note: Gullah people are descendants of enslaved Africans brought to plantations along the lower Atlantic Coast who have long shaped the cultural and spiritual tides of South Carolina. This is part of Gullah Keepers, an occasional series from The Post and Courier that highlights Gullah communities and those who advocate, preserve and lead in an ever-changing environment.
CHARLESTON — Michael Allen has found there’s a certain superpower that comes with being a life-long historian: He sees fragments of the past everywhere he goes.
As he sets up his vendor stand in Charleston’s historic City Market, Allen can picture the Gullah basket weavers and vegetable sellers who occupied the blocks-long space through the 19th century. When he gets a glimpse of Charleston Harbor, he envisions the massive ships that carried hundreds of thousands of enslaved Africans to the largest slave port in North America.
And when he drives past Emanuel AME Church on Calhoun Street, the 64-year-old recalls a meeting that launched a yearslong mission to redefine a region. On a spring evening in 2000, Allen and a handful of community members gathered in the church basement to chart a future for the Gullah-Geechee culture and people.
“Twenty-five years ago, we were having this conversation of ‘what is Gullah?’ ” Allen said. “What are the threats to (Gullah)? What are the opportunities? How does the future look?”
Allen asked those questions up and down the Southeast coast. His findings, combined with nearly five years of research and outreach, were crucial in establishing the Gullah Geechee Cultural Heritage Corridor in 2006.
Creation of the federally-recognized region for the first time widely acknowledged and aimed to preserve the history and legacy of the enslaved West Africans who economically, spiritually and geographically shaped the Lowcountry of today.
Two decades later, Allen reflects on his work as an architect of the corridor while pondering what the future may hold for the Gullah people who call it home.
Defining Gullah-Geechee
There is no Lowcountry without Gullah-Geechee.
The term refers to a culture built around West and Central African traditions carried on by the descendants of enslaved Africans who lived in the coastal region of the southeastern United States, roughly between Wilmington, N.C., and Jacksonville, Fla.
That culture survives today. Farming techniques, spiritual traditions, cooking practices and dialects live on in descendants. Hand-dug rice fields, now defunct, still shape the coastal waterways; basket weavers still sell their goods; and tabby structures once part of plantations stand as ruins within popular tourist destinations.
At the height of the transatlantic slave trade, Charleston was North America’s largest port of entry. More than 40 percent of all enslaved Africans trafficked to the continent arrived through Charleston Harbor.
Through the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the region’s economy boomed, propped up by the forced labor of West African rice growers. When the first shots of the American Revolution were fired, Charleston was home to nine of America’s 10 wealthiest people. By that time, enslaved Black people made up more than 70 percent of the city’s population.
In 1861, upwards of 10,000 people enslaved on the South Carolina sea islands near Beaufort were freed by the Union Army. As a result of the Port Royal Experiment, many acquired land that previously had been part of plantations. Many more did so at the conclusion of the Civil War in 1865, building tight-knit, independent Gullah communities that for generations lived off the land and sea.
More than a century later, in 1966, a young Michael Allen was lifted onto his grandfather’s shoulders in the pouring rain to watch Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. deliver a speech in Kingstree. Allen calls the moment a “benchmark” event, one of many that shaped his professional and personal life.
The corridor
Allen spent a significant amount of time traversing Lowcountry communities over the course of his nearly 40-year career with the National Park Service.
In 1999, he was tasked with developing the National Park Service’s Gullah Geechee Special Resource Study, an extensive document that played a pivotal role in the creation of the Gullah Geechee Corridor. It helped convey the national significance of Gullah culture and explored the possibility of adding Gullah references to the National Park System’s materials and presentations.
When Allen began his community outreach, there “was no blueprint, no roadmap.”
“This wasn’t a normal Park Service journey,” Allen said. “We were dealing with the lives and history of people that have been challenged, pushed aside, ignored, that often is hidden in plain view.”
Four years into the study, the National Trust for Historic Preservation added Gullah-Geechee culture, coastline and sea islands to its list of 11 most endangered historic sites.
The designation described threats from new bridges and roads that “opened the area to intensive development, tourism and sprawling resorts. Family cemeteries, archaeological sites and fishing grounds are being paved over,” the group wrote, “and familiar landmarks — stores, churches, schools and houses — are being demolished or replaced with new structures.”
The resource study led by Allen was completed in 2005 and passed along to U.S. Rep. James Clyburn. The Democratic congressman from South Carolina authored legislation to create the corridor.
“(Clyburn) could pull together legislation that met the needs, hopes and aspirations of those whom we had been speaking with for the previous five years, and those who would be represented from the past 400 years,” Allen said.
In 2006, Allen was in the Atlanta airport on his way home from a conference when his phone rang. It was a staff member of Clyburn’s. He asked Allen, “Are you sitting down?” The legislation had passed.
“To be honest, I just cried,” Allen recalled.
A year later, the National Park Service announced a 15-member Gullah Geechee Cultural Heritage Corridor Commission. The group was charged with overseeing the implementation of the newly-designated corridor from Jacksonville to Wilmington. Clyburn spoke of the gravity of the moment.
“The story of the Gullah-Geechee people and their contributions to this country began in 1619 when the first Africans arrived at the Jamestown settlement,” Clyburn said at the time. “Today marks the first day of the hard work this commission will undertake to preserve and share that nearly 400-year history that is the core purpose of this initiative.”
As Allen worked to implement his vision, he reached out to Clyburn’s fraternity brother, Tony Hill, a then-Florida state senator. In Hill, he found a kindred history buff who latched onto Allen’s vision.
Hill became an advocate, meeting with local politicians, educating about Gullah-Geechee’s place in the Sunshine State and ensuring that signs marked the corridor.
“It would have never happened had he not came in and built coalitions he has built to put the Gullah-Geechee on the map,” Hill said of Allen in an interview.
The creation of the corridor he said spurred economic development, cultural celebrations and allowed “us to realize that we are somebody.”
The historian
Allen retired from the National Park Service in 2017 after 37 years. Much of his time now is spent at farmers markets with his wife, Latanya Allen. The Allens sell Gullah-inspired foods and products through their company Tastee Treats.
“During my park service days, I was busy helping and supporting people in the communities,” Allen said. “When I retired, my wife said, you’ve done all this for them, for the public, why don’t you do something for the house?”
Allen’s time with NPS can be seen in monuments and historic sites across the Lowcountry.
He played a significant role in establishing the African Importation Historic Marker on Sullivan’s Island.
In 2008, he assisted the Toni Morrison Society and College of Charleston in erecting a commemorative “Bench by the Road” at Fort Moultrie to memorialize the island’s participation in the African slave trade.
His work on a special resource landmark study exploring the history and legacy of the Reconstruction era contributed to the development of a new National Park Service site, the Reconstruction Era National Monument in Beaufort.
After decades of work to inform and protect pieces of Lowcountry history, Allen worries that new federal initiatives put historic sites and exhibits at risk.
President Donald Trump in May instructed the National Park Service to scrub any language considered negative, unpatriotic or of “improper partisan ideology” from signs and presentations at national parks and historic sites.
His administration ordered signs be posted encouraging visitors to report “signs or other information that are negative about either past or living Americans.”
The move causes Allen “serious heartburn.” He feels removals would erase the hard-won progress made to tell the full story of the Lowcountry.
“This is wrong, this is dangerous and this has bad implications,” Allen said. “We have to be careful when we make arbitrary decisions over whose history is good, whose history is bad, whose should be told, and whose should not.”