Shooting is ‘clarion call’ to Penn Center chief: ‘We need to take back our island’

The executive director of the 163-year-old Penn Center, the backbone of St. Helena Island where Martin Luther King Jr. once retreated to sharpen his anti-violence campaign against desegregation, says Beaufort County must “act decisively” in the wake of a deadly mass shooting Sunday at Willie’s Bar and Grill that’s rocked the community to its core.

“Sunday morning was a clarion call to us all there’s more work to be done,” Robert Adams said. “We haven’t sufficiently served these young people in Beaufort County.”

Adams’ prescient comments came a day before Beaufort County Sheriff P.J. Tanner held a press conference where Tanner spoke to some of the similar societal issues plaguing the county. Other civilian members of Beaufort and St. Helena also used the press conference to echo Adams’ sentiments.

Adams: Leaders must act

County leaders, says Adams, must tackle the root causes of gun violence. His comments came Tuesday at Penn Center’s 50-acre campus, where Martin Luther King Jr. and his staff met frequently in the late 1960s during the height of the Civil Rights movement.

After an assassin’s bullet killed King in Memphis in 1968, Penn Center built a retreat house in his memory that still stands today.

Four people were shot and killed in Sunday’s shooting at Willie’s Bar and Grill. Witnesses have described what they say sounded like bullets fired from a semi-automatic weapon.

The bar is located on Martin Luther King Jr. Drive, less than a mile north of Penn Center.

On Tuesday, gospel songs from a Christian radio station played outside at the scene of the deadly shooting at Willie’s Bar, while Jack Logan, with the nonprofit Put Down the Guns Now Young People, passed out information at the corner of Sea Island Parkway and Martin Luther King Jr. Drive.

As the investigation entered its third day, the Beaufort County Sheriff’s office had made no arrests but had scheduled a news conference for Wednesday morning.

King’s thoughts on violence remain relevant today, particularly in light of the recent shooting, Penn Center’s Adams said.

King often talked about creating a “Beloved Community”, or a society in which unconditional love would guide policies and replace hate and violence.

The question for local leaders, says Adams, is whether Beaufort County is doing everything possible to create a beloved community that offers enough support for young people to take their rightful spot in it.

“We can’t absolve the shooter or shooters from their responsibility. We’re not ignoring that fact,” Adams said. “But we have to take on the question, ‘What is our responsibility? What is our capacity to resolve these issues?”

Violence, Adams said, is a symptom and not the disease. Gun violence, he added, is an unacceptable means of conflict resolution.

Residents can’t stand by, Adams says, while violence continues to plague the community. “We need to take back our island from the people who are trying to displace us with violence,” Adams said.

Following the shooting, Penn Center is discussing hosting an anti-violence program as a first step in strengthening what Adams says are the county’s weak anti-violence muscles. The community needs to explore “structural failures” that are leading to a lack of support for young people at a critical time in their lives, he said.

One area of need, he says, is additional educational programs and recreational facilities, which Adams says were once more abundant across St. Helena.

Many of the roughly 10,000 residents of the 64-square-mile St. Helena, located about 10-miles east of Beaufort, are descended from Gullah-Geechee, or enslaved people from West Africa. Today, the Gullah communities still are intact and its marshes and streams make it one of the last remaining shrimping hubs in the state with its fertile soils also supporting vegetable farms.

Penn Center, a not-for-profit community service organization that promotes the history and culture of the sea islands, opened in 1951. But it began as a school for recently freed slaves in 1862 and played a central role in the South’s reconstruction after the Civil War.

Addressing community and even the nation’s problems “goes back to our beginning days” of Penn Center, says Adams, so leading a discussion on addressing the causes of gun violence is not unusual. The organization is urging the community members and area leaders to unite and pool resources and rally their collective strength to “guide us through these dark times.”

During the civil rights era, King saw the Penn Center as a place of retreat where he could rest, formulate his thoughts, and write his speeches on the non-violent struggle to end the brutality of segregation.

King’s last book, “Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?,” which was published in 1967, was based on a lecture that he gave at the Frissell Community House at Penn Center in 1966.

At the time, King talked about riots in urban areas as being the language of the unheard, Adams noted.

“He was saying, ‘What is that telling us?’ We have to ask the same thing with violence. What is our collective responsibility? What can we do as a like-minded community to solve this problem.

“These questions have a home right here in St. Helena, right here in Beaufort County. And it’s a lingering question,” Adams said.

This story was originally published October 15, 2025 at 1:55 PM.

Karl Puckett

The Island Packet

843-256-3420

Karl Puckett covers the city of Beaufort, town of Port Royal and other communities north of the Broad River for The Beaufort Gazette and Island Packet. The Minnesota native also has worked at newspapers in his home state, Alaska, Wisconsin and Montana.