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St. Helena Island, South Carolina holds an often-forgotten history that Althea Sumpter loves bringing to light.
Stories of formerly enslaved people who ran public schools and city administration; tilled their own land; conducted business; married interracially and voted freely—all during the years of the Civil War.
Sumpter, the featured speaker for the Susan Thomas Lectureship will bring those stories and others to life in a multimedia presentation in the Cole Auditorium at 11:30 a.m. Tuesday, March 7.
A researcher and scholar who focuses on ethnographic documentation and cultural preservation of the Southern story in the United States, her talk will cover the preservation of culture using multimedia 360-degree technology to capture family histories.
But it was her own history that captured her imagination.
As a member of the Clark Atlanta University faculty in the 1990s, she received research funding from the Georgia Center for Advanced Telecommunications Technology—a division of the Georgia Research Alliance – to design a multimedia and interactive courseware development laboratory. The aim of the lab was to tell stories using multimedia while incorporating history and culture, she said.
As part of her project, she began chronicling the lives of her family’s elders creating an interactive multimedia project that combines oral histories, still photography and video in St. Helena.
Sumpter was amazed at what she learned.
“I grew up not knowing where I was—not knowing this was my heritage,” she said.
While the Sea Island area was well-known for its Gullah Geechee heritage, she found that the place where she grew up was also the model site for post-war Reconstruction. It surprised her, she said. “After all, the island sits practically next door to Charleston, S.C., where the Civil War began,” she said.
“The whole idea of Reconstruction began in 1862— and it was called the Port Royal Experiment,” Sumpter said. “Beaufort District was taken over by the Union and remained that way through the end of the Civil War. As the North held that territory, they started implementing this in terms of (anticipating) what would happen post-war throughout the South, getting freed men and woman on their feet, with programs, education, land ownership and voting rights,” she said.
Penn Center, located in the Beaufort District, was established as the first school in the South for formerly enslaved West Africans and became a model of education.
By the beginning of the 1900s, Reconstruction was dismantled by the ‘Southern Redeemers,’ and the narrative of the Lost Cause began, she said. The remnants of the Reconstruction Era are still on St. Helena Island to this day, and Beaufort County was named by Presidential Proclamation in 2017 as a Reconstruction Era National Historic Park. Penn Center still stands.
Sumpter hopes that her talk will inspire others to delve into their hidden family histories and create their own multimedia stories.