Finally, Hilton Head Island’s story by people who actually lived it, for generations
Where were you the day Booker T. Washington visited Hilton Head Island?
He arrived as a famous man who had visited the White House, written a best-selling autobiography and made the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama a household name.
He had just been the celebrated keynote speaker at the 1908 Memorial Day celebration at the Beaufort National Cemetery.
He had grand hopes for Hilton Head and its people, the Gullah.
His “uplift” project on Hilton Head, underwritten by shipping magnate William P. Clyde who owned 9,000 acres on the island, offered a school, property ownership for farming, and whitewashed homes complete with an outhouse and a deep well.
This “colony” would help the descendants of slavery — whom he labeled as “primitive” and “backwards” — rise to the mainstream from sea island isolation.
But the great Booker T. Washington did not even spend the night on Hilton Head during his long-forgotten visit.
He did not eat the fine meal of a local turkey prepared for him with great anticipation. He ate lunch instead with a white store owner.
And his grand plan failed here. His one-size-fits-all solution did not work for islanders. They distrusted outsiders, they clung to ways that had sustained them for generations, they protected their independence at all costs. And, besides, they felt it was a top-down approach without their input.
This story is told in a new book that represents an important milestone for Hilton Head.
“Gullah Days: Hilton Head Islanders Before the Bridge 1861-1956” is the story of Hilton Head Islanders, told by Hilton Head Islanders.
“A lot of people have tried to tell it, but they have not really lived it,” said co-author Carolyn Grant.
Anyone who wants to understand Hilton Head, or try to appreciate it, has to read this book.
Like Booker T. Washington, a lot of people have not bothered to listen to the locals as the island has mushroomed into a resort city with 2.5 million visitors per year.
We hear all the time about “early islanders” and “pioneers” and “firsts” that are not really firsts on Hilton Head, but new to the newcomers following the first bridge in 1956.
Now we have stories, a history, with names and places, telling the hopes, dreams and foundational building blocks of a people whose “pioneers” are those who scraped together cash to buy land long before Booker T. Washington arrived, and for whom the term “early islanders” means those brought into enslavement from Africa in the 18th century.
Its description of Booker T. Washington’s experience is as true today as it was in the poverty of a century ago.
“He did not see that the very quality he sought to ignite in black rural Southerners lay behind Gullah stubbornness: self-reliance,” the book says.
“Even though blacks wanted and needed an economic boost, they were determined to control their own lives.”
They would not be subservient.
First African Baptist
Grant is quick to point out that 1861-1956 “doesn’t include me.”
She was born in the new era after the bridge was built, a daughter of Abe and Charliemae Grant. They are entrepreneurs who trace their roots on the island to those who came seeking freedom shortly after Union troops took over the island in 1861 at the outset of the Civil War.
Grant is a Spelman College graduate, who also holds master’s and doctorate degrees. She is a former Island Packet reporter and now communications director for the Town of Hilton Head Island.
For more than 20 years, Grant has worked on the book with co-authors Thomas C. Barnwell Jr. and Emory S. Campbell, elder statesmen in the Gullah community and members of the Hilton Head Island Hall of Fame.
Christena Bledsoe brought writing and research skills to the project “and helped us to take it to another level,” Grant said.
The book is published by Blair in North Carolina.
Louise Cohen, founder of the Gullah Museum of Hilton Head Island, calls it “a great moment in time for the Gullah-Geechie people on Hilton Head Island.”
The book was launched on Feb. 8 at the First African Baptist Church, the island’s oldest institution, in an upbeat event with the Voices of El Shaddai singing the spiritual “Down by the Riverside” and Natasha Aiken singing a capella the spiritual “I Want Jesus to Walk With Me.”
That location was no accident.
“This is home for us,” Grant said to a full house. “This is sort of really where it all begins.”
Land and taxes
The church is rock with many roles in the “Gullah days” story.
The others are land ownership, education, and family.
And some of the old stories sound like today’s news.
The book tells about challenges to the Stoney community that started even before the bridge was finished.
And that gateway to Hilton Head is controversial again as the state prepares to widen U.S. 278. It will further urbanize a community that once was home to the island’s first brick school, the post office, health office, magistrate’s court, a thriving oyster factory and a number of businesses.
Land ownership also remains a fight.
“We were resilient people because we worked to get that land,” Grant said.
It was then, and still is, a challenge to pay taxes on the land. In the old days, pecan trees in the yard provided a product that could be sold to raise money to pay taxes.
When the first bridge was dedicated, the Charleston newspapers reported that Hilton Head was primarily inhabited by about 1,000 black farmers who were given their land after the Civil War.
Like Booker T. Washington, they didn’t ask the locals.
“Few outsiders knew how Gullah families had scraped and pinched to buy and hold onto land for close to a century,” the book says.
And then this, which is the book’s gift to the ages:
“Few outsiders knew anything of the numerous accomplishments made by Gullah men and women of Hilton Head. Most knew nothing about the Gullah history of Hilton Head.”
Where to get the book
Among places the book is available:
Pearls Market at the Sonesta Resort; Coastal Discovery Museum; Barnes and Noble; Harbour Town Lighthouse shop; online at Blairpub.com or Amazon.com.
