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A South Carolina Historical Legacy; An American Cultural Treasure

1862

First school for freed slaves established on

St. Helena Island, South Carolina; classes held

at The Brick Church, 80 pupils enrolled.

1864

School buys land from Hasting Gantt, a freedman.

PENN

CENTERest. 1862

by Diane McMahon

1865-1877

School supported by private charity; primarily

Quaker abolitionists in Philadelphia.

1877

Beaufort County school board (appointed, not elected) forbade St. Helena residents to raise money or levy school tax for local schools. Penn School solely dependent on privatedonations.

New three-room building becomes first school in South created for the instruction of former slaves; officially named Penn School. (Thirteenth Amendment added to the U.S.

Constitution; slavery legally abolished.)

1865

African Americans majority of registered voters in South Carolina; won election as lieutenant governor, secretary of state, state treasurer; controlled majority of seats in lower house. Penn Center received tax money for books and school operations.

1867

Penn School financially

burdened.

1877-1901

Penn Center has championed education and civil rights for African Americans since the Civil War. In 1862, the U.S. Navy declared victory at Port Royal Sound, South Carolina and freed 32,530 slaves from plantations in the Beaufort District. White inhabitants fled the Lowcountry. Northern abolitionists recognized the need to educate the freed slaves, and the Philadelphia-based Port Royal Relief Committee sent funds and a progressive young woman named Laura Towne to teach former plantation slaves “habits of self-support” and to “elevate their moral and social condition.”

Towne was joined by Ellen Murray, a Northern Quaker. They settled on St. Helena Island, one of South Carolina’s largest sea islands. Their first class was held at Oaks Plantation with nine scholars. It soon expanded to The Brick Baptist Church, which survives today. Swelling enrollment and northern support enabled them to purchase land and build a separate three room school, the first in the South specifically created to teach freed slaves. The school was officially named Penn School, in tribute to the revered Quaker William Penn. It’s legacy continues today as Penn Center.

Penn Center, with its 16 historic buildings—all registered with the National Trust for Historic Preservation—sits quietly on a rural side street on St. Helena Island. A carved post and sign commemorating the center’s 150 year anniversary, stands like a sentry at the entrance to the dusty grounds. There are cars in the gravel lot, but no other signs of people or activity. The first impression suggests an institution both venerable and gently wilted by time and financial struggle.

Dr. Rodell Lawrence, Penn Center’s newly arrived executive director, may have the right formula of personal passion and corporate fund-raising expertise to infuse new vitality into the center’s grounds and physical structures and reinvigorate the Center’s purpose and future—a dose of human “miracle grow.” After a prestigious career with Xerox, Dr. Lawrence—who has Gullah roots in the Lowcountry—came out of

retirement to be the eighth director of Penn Center. He has concrete plans for physically beautifying and modernizing the Center and strategic plans for fundraising. He describes his vision of brick walks, flower beds and architectural lighting to illuminate the ground’s massive oak trees at night with the same fervor as he talks about sustaining Penn Center as a living community center, offering adult literacy, child care and other services to the citizens of St. Helena. For over a decade, Penn Center has been a leader in the preservation, promotion and study of the Gullah culture in America and beyond. Dr. Lawrence intends to creatively finance the Center’s future through community support, major gift programs and endowments from corporations and foundations.

For the first 40 years of Penn School’s existence, Laura Towne and Ellen Murray taught according to the New England model of education, in which students in elementary school learned reading, writing, arithmetic, history, geography and music. In the early 1900s two other northern white women—Rossa Cooley and Grace House—revised the schools curriculum and followed the Hampton or Tuskegee idea of “industrial education.” Classical studies, like algebra and Latin, were no longer offered.

From the beginning, these well-intentioned white abolitionists, tried to “socialize” their African American students in accordance with euro-centric cultural values. Their devotion to the native islanders of St. Helena was unquestioned; still it reflected a paternalism that characterized the school’s white leadership until 1950.

“Industrial education” didn’t mean learning to work in a factory, but prepared students to be “industrious” in practical endeavors. At Penn School it meant learning about farming, homemaking, health, finances and debt avoidance. Women were taught domestic skills, presumably with the assumption that employment opportunities were primarily in domestic service.

July 2015 29

Completion of bridge from town of Beaufort

to Lady’s Island, gave St. Helena access to

the mainland.

Penn School ceased to function as a school;

changed to community agency; renamed Penn

Community Services, Inc.

Sponsored and hosted interracial conferences on

Civil Rights; Penn Center a retreat site for Dr. Martin

Luther King, Jr. and human rights activists.

Penn Center established Land Use and Environmental

Program to promote sustainability and economic

development; creation of Penn School for Preservation.

Penn Center placed on “most endangered historic places” list

by National Trust for Historic Preservation; mission focused on

promoting and preserving Gullah cultural assets. Dr. Rodell Lawrence named Executive Director.

Hampton Institute in Virginia asked to sponsor

Penn School; Center’s new leadership modeled

education on Hampton-Tuskegee model.

Great Depression created further financial hardship; Enrollment at

Penn school drops from 600 to 262.

Penn School becomes Penn Center: trained midwives, opened first daycare center for African Americans, started Teen Canteen for local teenagers, developed community health care clinic. Hired first African American as professional manager at Penn

Center—Thomas Barnwell.

Penn Center used for church and organizational retreats; training

center for Peace Corps overseas agricultural workers, educational site for study of black history and

culture.

Sierra Leone’s President Joseph Momoh visited Penn Center. Next year took group

from Gullah Community to Sierra Leone for reunion with

ancestral families.

Congress created The Gullah Geechee Cultural

Heritage Corridor along coastal areas from Florida

into North Carolina.

1927 1948 1960S 1980S 19902015

1970S1988

2006

1901-1917 1931 1950

In the mid 20th century, Penn Center again shifted focus. St. Helena’s cohesive and largely isolated population was changing. Two World Wars, bridges, electricity and migration of rural populations into American cities, altered the cultural isolation of the Sea Islands. Penn School, beleaguered by financial hardship, turned over its educational function to the public schools, which were substandard. In 1948 Penn School was redefined as Penn Community Services. The Penn Center Board of Trustees also changed, taken over by southern liberals interested in working with African Americans for racial equality.

Penn Center became a center and meeting place for interracial social activists—the only place in the south where segregated meetings were held without excessive legal and violent harassment. It was a safe haven and retreat for Martin Luther King, Jr. until his death in 1968.

In recent decades, Penn Center took on a leadership position in land management and environmental sustainability on St. Helena. Starting in the late 1970s and 1980s corporate hotel chains and private developers bought huge tracks of ocean front and beach property on neighboring sea islands to build resorts (particularly Hilton Head) for thousands of northern retirees migrating south. Penn Center was instrumental in giving legal help and tax relief to native islanders in order to keep their land and retain free access to the beach areas.

Today Penn Center continues its leadership position in cultural preservation. For over a half-century, the Center has recognized that African Americans on St. Helena and along the Gullah Geechee Cultural Heritage Corridor—established by Congress in 2006—have managed to keep their special identity, language, religious customs and African cultural heritage more than any other group of Black Americans. The York W. Bailey Museum, located in one of the historical buildings on the Penn Center grounds, and curated by Victoria Smalls, is a rich trove of artifacts and photographs that

depict the history of Penn Center, as well as the Gullah Geechee history and the strong African cultural influences they’ve maintained.

Karen Ward and Delores McBride, both St. Helena natives and employees at Penn Center, described growing up with community elders who only spoke Gullah. They knew adults who lived their entire lives without ever leaving St. Helena and they personally remember an old Gullah woman who lived near Penn Center and was known as “the storyteller.” There is still a street named Storyteller Road. Karen Ward recalled an occasion when Marine officers from Parris Island brought visiting African military dignitaries to Penn Center. A longtime caretaker at Penn Center—a man who’d never left St. Helena—was in deep conversation with a military officer from Kenya. He spoke Gullah, the officer spoke his native Kenyan dialect. They understood each other perfectly. “Nothing could have been a more powerful reminder of our people’s direct link to Africa,” she said.

Penn Center has a long and distinguished history; it’s story and significance will continue into a far-reaching future.

For the most compelling and comprehensive history of Penn Center read: Penn Center: A History Preserved, by Orville Vernon Burton with Wilbur Cross

York W. Bailey Museum and Penn Center Gift Shop open 9-4 p.m. Monday through Saturday

For more information visit: www.penncenter.com Dr. Rodell Lawrence