Hello I'm Beryl Dakers.

Welcome to another edition of Palmetto Scene.

Tonight's features are in celebration of African American history month.

And we are here at the site of the South Carolina African American history monument, the first of its kind on any of the nation's state house grounds, designed by sculptor Ed Dwight of Denver, Colorado.

This monument showcases the rich history of African Americans and their contributions to the state of South Carolina.

We'll learn more about the monument a little later in our program but first up, a visit with acclaimed photographer Cecil Williams.

His photographs have captured many of our states' most significant civil rights events.

♪ Cecil Williams is perhaps the most well known photographer of South Carolina civil rights.

His pictures which have been featured in books, magazines, newspapers and even movies have captured many of seminal events which helped to shape this history.

Although he has himself published books of photos documenting South Carolina's civil rights activities, this active octogenarian has a new mission, to create the sea Williams civil rights museum.

The mission of the museum is not only to display, collect, and preserve the memories of these years but also to re claim our rightful place in civil rights history.

So much about our history is unknown and not in the history books.

The subtitle is the south Carolina Events that Changed America.

I felt that this reflects the mission of this museum what we're trying to do to bring to South Carolina some of the events that really helped to make this country what it is.

We were involved in many things that are unknown.

And most history books don't recall them faithfully.

Most people don't know about them.

But we certainly did not want this era.

This great period of bravery on the part of South Carolinians to go unfinished and unrecognized.

The museum concept and it's beginning really was easy for me to do.

36 years ago the museum site which was at one time my residence and another time partially my residence and my studio came about as a result some really having nor the place and within my means an income to really put it.

But it seemed to be very ideal where in the structure for side and the room 3600 square feet was just really quite adequate.

It was almost as if it was just something laying there waiting to be done.

And it seemed just come all together.

The first station in the museum is really the entrance to the museum where when visitors come they will see that I have dedicated an entire room to the Briggs, Delaine and Pearson families of Clarendon county.

Some of the exhibits are biographical in nature.

Well I have a direct relationship with almost all the exhibits I have created.

I was very fortunate to at the age of 13 to 14 to be involved with the Briggs people in Clarendon County as the result of my mentor E.C.

Jones, a photographer from Sumter South Carolina, who owned the most prominent photography studio of those decades, Majestic Studio.

So I had early beginning there and reflected on again that pioneering that was done by that family in Clarendon County only 30 miles from where we are today.

And then the other events happened as results again my destiny.

At 14 years old I'd become a correspondent for JET magazine.

And then I covered just about every major civil rights event that happen in state South Carolina by virtue of that.

Even from the days when I was a high school student, those were some of the events that I covered.

You can imagine what the situation it was went as a correspondent for a national publication I had to sometimes come back down to earth and ask dad for the family car go do an assignment.

Matthew Perry, an attorney who worked with the NAACP was responsible for getting thousands of students out of jail.

Snd so this is called the Matthew Perry Media Center.

In my opinion, one of the bravest persons in South Carolina.

The most prominent exhibit in this area would be the 50 pictures that depict the most prominent people that played a part in the civil rights movement.

Everyone Thurgood Marshall of course again from the national standpoint plays a party in the pictures displayed here, but also a lesson on people that might be not not might not be known nationally or as well known as many of the people are.

But then of course as visitors come to the museum, it is in this room that we give them like a 15 minute preview of what the museum's all about, in case they don't have time to go through and no read each and every caption in the entire eight room museum.

Orangeburg really has also been left out of so much.

It was here that the students engaged in very early student activism.

For example, Greensboro, North Carolina mostly gets the attention recognition for the early sit-ins.

We did that in the 50s here in Orangeburg.

And so many other things that happened in Orangeburg that are not reflected in history books.

In addition to Williams's photos, the museum boasts several prized and some unexpected artifacts, a Confederate flag that actually flew over the state capitol, a gift from senator Brad Hutto, a bowling pen from the All star bowling alley, the site of the melee which preceded the Orangeburg Massacre.

The prized Briggs family Bible which is well over 100 years old, a Klu Klux Klan vignette, depicting an incident in Elloree, South Carolina, and even a model train set representative up Thurgood Marshall's travels by train and his fascination with model trains.

The other fascination that Thurgood Marshall was caught in of course was that his like for model trains.

There's a picture from Life magazine that I have on exhibit showing him playing with his Lineil passenger trainset.

Hopefully, this is the one of the the exhibits that we hope that younger people will relate to when they come to visit the museum, we'll have this train depicting his fascination with trains in motion, smoking and blowing the whistle and so forth.

And we want students and young people to relate to things in the museum.

History books, people should remember really written by people.

Like you and I, they're not any super humans.

And a lot of times they really just include what has already been covered.

So much of South Carolina's history really just wasn't does not appear in books and hence it just keeps like dominoeing forward that we are not included.

I'm trying to change that.

We're here now with the Dr.

Bobby Donaldson a professor of history and Director of the Center for Civil Rights History and Research at the University of South Carolina.

Looking at this particular monument then, what do we see chronicled here that perhaps gives us the greatest overview of our civil rights legacy?

This is a panoramic interpretation of the experiences of voices of African Americans in South Carolina.

Most of the monuments here about a key person.

They're about a key event.

This is quite different, quite different.

It is a confluence of perspectives, a confluence of ideas that begin not only in South Carolina, remind visitors there's a longer story and a deeper story.

It's a story about those who on the middle passage.

There's a story about those who survived the middle passage.

But also it's also about the communities and the eras in Africa where these people came from.

And as a reminder the abba in the middle is reflective of the great pyramids, to remind visit there's a larger at the history of those who came here before they were shackled in bondage.

Dr.

Donaldson, thank you.

Thank you!

A significant part of the South Carolina's black history revolves around the rich Gullah culture of the low country.

Interestingly although many of the Gullah Geechi people adopted Christianity, for hundreds of years, the laws of the state prohibited them from learning to read.

Those laws obviously made it impossible for them to fully appreciate the word.

Today not only have the laws changed, but there's even a Gullah version of the Bible.

Jedus tell e ciple dem say, "Mus dohn leh ooona haat be hebby.

Mus trus God, an trus een me too.

Plenty room dey een me Fada house.

A gwine dey fa mek the place ready for oona.

Ef e ain been so, A been fa tel oona.

An atta A done mek the place ready fa oona, I gwine come back fa tek oona with me and go to that place so that oona too gwine be with A da.

You know the bible is just really the backbone of our people.

You know for we will raised on this.

Our fore-parents, those before us.

This is what they knew.

They really didn't know it.

They were they were just going on hearsay because they couldn't read.

But you know, just the little main parts is what they knew and they would just pass it on, and and now that we know it and we know that this is a language that they brought here from Africa.

And that this language, the one they brought from Africa and the American language that they met when they got here, they just had to put it together.

We started back in 78'.

And it took us 26 years to do the entire process.

And in 2005 we presented the Gullah Bible New Testament.

I was hiding from them.

(laugh) I didn't want anything to do with that project.

Because Gullah was not a language that was embraced by us at the time.

In fact, you know and Penn School was a school that was really started to transform Africans into mainstream Americans.

And so their language is one of the things that was not embraced by the teachers.

They tried to transform that speech pattern into to really perfect English.

And so you get to talk to Penn School graduates and and they have forgotten how to speak Gullah.

When I came as director, that was my role as director to really continue what Penn School had started.

Mister Campbell says he had an epiphany when he came to understand the relationship between Gullah and West African languages.

Translating the New Testament into Gullah was a grueling, time consuming process.

But for the translators the end result was more than worth all they sacrificed.

Oh my God!

Oh my God!

The day that we were at the Wycliffe Bible society and they presented us with this book, Oh my God!

All I could do was just hold it to my heart and just look, and just thank God for this 26 years.

I mean we did this thing.

When our language moved to Florida, we made trips to Florida, to North Carolina, to get this book done.

Though it premiered in the 1930s, the world famous opera Porgy and Bess did not receive its debut production in Charleston the city of of it's birth until 1970 due to segregation laws.

When Porgy came home, offers a glimpse at the people and the culture that inspired this show's author, Dubose Heyward.

Produced and directed by Lauren Waring Douglas, this soon to be released documentary shares the untold stories of the performers from the 1970s show.

It also features a look at its most recent rendition at the 2016 Spoleto Festival USA.

♪ When I originally started this project I thought I was going to be making a short film about Jonathan Green and the artwork and set design that he did for the 2016 production that took place for Spoleta Festival USA that year.

And so I was excited to work with Jonathan Green and I started reading the actual book Porgy.

And I went to this one last book that I was reading called, 'The Strange Career of Porgy and Bess' and I went to the epilogue.

This thick book and I went down to like here, the last pages.

And in the first eight sentences of the epilogue, I learned about the 1970 production of Porgy and Bess in Charleston, that it had played all over the world.

But it didn't play in this very city that it was about, because no one would agree to perform it before an integrated audience.

I've seen movies and I've heard stories from my parents about what it was like to integrate the schools for example.

I've seen you know the the classic Civil Rights footage of of protests.

But what floored me was just how tense things were in Charleston leading up to 1970, because you had the hospital workers strike.

You had the garbage workers strike.

It was such a big deal at the time that Sixty minutes, the LA Times The New Yorker, all the major national press and some international press had covered this event.

And that day were nationally credited with a moment of racial healing that they received Broadway caliber critical acclaim.

And I sat there in my in my living room and I was floored just reading these first eight sentences because I thought, 'Wait a second.

I remember sitting on some of these people's knees as a child.'

And if I didn't know about this then I know that my friends didn't know about it.

That I, I know that greater Charleston didn't know as much as I should about it.

And people who could have really benefited from learning about the hard work that our elders put in, just to perform art before an integrated audience, I I knew that not enough people knew about it.

And it's been over eighty years.

And not one person has bothered to ask, the people from the culture, 'Hey what do you think?'

Again, 'Hey what does this mean?'

So there was there was a lot of nervousness that you know that that I am doing this story I have the power to do this story.

I have the power to do in a way that voices are un-censored.

♪ Ella Gerber found out about the Coalese Music Club and chose us to be the choral core of the program.

So it was a coming together of us who really sang and knew music and could read music.

Porgy and Bess production involved a whole lot of singing and being the part that we loved to sing, we fit right in.

Here's a group from Charleston they didn't have to import folks into the low country.

The talent was already here.

Since it was local all of us were determined to make this a great thing.

And we wanted to make Charleston proud of us.

It was like a movie except it was real.

And when they started to sing, It was like I know that song and the crowd loved it and at the end the ovation just went on and on.

There was a great authenticity to this production that I have never seen elsewhere.

It just now melted out of Ella's heart.

She directed that Porgy and Bess many times.

And for the first time she sought real.

We say in music don't be sharp.

Don't be flat.

Be natural.

That's what I tried to do.

Summertime rings in my ear.

The reason they were able to give such a great production of Porgy and Bess is because of their experiences.

They had lived much of what Porgy and Bess existence was all about.

That's why I think they were the best.

I think for people who lived through the 60s, I think that sometimes they need somebody who's younger than younger than them to say, 'Hey!

What you did was a really big deal.

And what you went through was a really big deal.

A lot happened in that decade.'

And that's when I knew, I'm working on something bigger than myself.

I'm working on something really complex and I need to take my time and do it right.

♪ Freewood's Farm is a living history working farm located in the Burgess community near Myrtle Beach.

In this segment Oneal Smalls, the farm's founder and others discuss the importance of the preservation of land to African Americans.

Free Woods Farm is a living farm museum near Myrtle Beach, South Carolina that demonstrates how free people farmed in the early days of Reconstruction.

What we try to do here at Free Woods farm is to farm essentially the way they did with mules and plows and holes and rakes.

We plant essentially the same thing they planted.

Free Woods Farm was created by members of the Free Woods community.

Descendants of free people who were able to buy their own land.

Some newly freed slaves from Long Woods plantation and Richmond Hill plantations were able to obtain land in this community because of three white persons who made small tracts of land available.

Right along the Waccamaw river we know where they were located my great grandfather owned one of them.

They were to pay for these tracts of land over a period of time with rice.

Here you have formerly enslaved people who have the opportunity to to actually own property.

Right.

And that's significant because for all of their lives prior to eighteen sixty five they were considered chattel property or movable property in so now they have the ability to act as citizens.

The original settlers, those newly freed slaves called it free woods, the woods that was free and that name sort of caught on and became the name of their new community the Free Woods community.

To name the space Free Woods community I think is just a powerful symbol of black people's endurance after centuries of bondage to be able to come into the woods and be free and to develop it into a successful community.

My family members all live along here.

My brother lives over here Geneva lives right up here and this is my home right on the left here.

Then of course when I was growing up all of this was farmland.

(sound of an engine starting) James Smalls is a descendant of the founders of the Free Woods community he still farms his grandfather's land.

My grandparents raised me and of course where we were at was on a farm.

So everything that I did was around that farming life.

I followed step by step right behind my grandfather or in front of him, beside him, where ever he went.

We had that we own I believe was right nineteen twenty acres and I feel that we should keep it as long as we can just to to have something of value.

(Narrator) But as the Myrtle Beach area grows the owners of this historic land are under increasing pressure to sell to developers.

This is where Henry Smalls grew corn.

This is what's happening to that corn field right now.

It is hurtful to ride by and see I remember five years ago I was plowing that field but now there's ten houses there.

You know, so it doesn't take long for it to be developed.

It's all around me but we not ready to part of it yet.

This this is Hattie Smalls property.

This is a one hundred acre tract and Ms.

Hattie tried very desperately during her latter years to clear up the title to this property but was unsuccessful.

So far as I can determine she did not get one penny for this property.

Whenever you don't have any place for you grands great great grands to put a house we don't have any dirt for them to put a house on you're in trouble.

You can't go to the store and get it for three dollars.

They would have to live wherever they can but not where your family roots were.

This is about the historic preservation of really exceptional communities in the southern states and we need to preserve these as much as we preserve Civil War battlefields.

Right.

There's not been the same kind of efforts to preserve the land spaces that housed black people right after the civil war ended.

For more stories about our state and more details on those stories you've just seen, please visit our website at palmettoscene.org.

Don't forget to follow us on social media, Facebook Twitter and Instagram at SCETV #palmettoscene.

We leave you with tonight's Palmetto Postcard from our online digital series, Our Town.

For Palmetto Scene, I'm Beryl Dakers.

Good night and thanks for watching.

♪ Bluffton is a community that is a part of our history of whom we are and where we've come from.

It started out as a small town, a square mile back in 1852.

It's really grown a lot because of our quality of life.

People are moving to this area for the weather, but mostly for the southern hospitality and the business friendly atmosphere that we offer.

We put a lot of emphasis on the square mile as we expanded and annexed in over the years.

This was the hustle and bustle.

This was just center on economic development even back as far as 1850.

That's why we are the heart of the low country.

The biggest attraction to people is definitely the May River.

It's opened into the Calibogue Sound, which is about eight miles from here.

The entire river I would say is about 12 miles long.

Once people go out and see people fishing and crabbing and skiing and doing all the other fun things that we do on the river it's like the salt water gets on them and it won't wash off.

Bluffton is a community of families.

It's about relationships.

It's a place where when people come here, they may leave for a week or a month or maybe a year.

But they always want to come back.

So if you lived here all your life or you just moved here yesterday, I can promise you asked the question and everyone's going to say this is our town.

Bluffton, South Carolina.

♪