Lunch and Learn: Black Revolution on the Sea Islands

This virtual Lunch and Learn presentation by Frances O’Shaughnessy draws on military letters, treasury reports, and personal letters from the denoted “Port Royal Experiment,”  including a letter from the CMCH collection, to historicize Gullah Geechee people’s expressions of freedom during the Civil War, what Frances calls a Black Revolution for Freedom.

New England Regional Fellowship Consortium (NERFC) Fellow Frances O’Shaughnessy will draw on Gullah Geechee music and sermons, in particular, to demonstrate an alternative narrative to the Civil War, one that does not subsume Black practices of freedom under the U. S. Military, but rather considers their world-making practices on the plantation, even when their worlds proved provisional. They consider how the Black Revolution travelled across the Sea Islands, with planters fleeing plantations as smoke from cotton fires filled the air.

Frances narrates Gullah Geechee peoples’ destruction of planter property, within themselves and within the land, as the destruction of property itself – as an idea, as a thing, and as an essence – an anti-proprietary freedom, whose vision encouraged Black women to rip cotton from the soil and replace it with the seeds of potatoes, peas, squash, and corn. Frances creates a material history, drawn from the aesthetics and spirituals of Gullah Geechee life, to critically engage with alternative humanities present in the past, precisely because they permit us to imagine other possibilities to live and be together.

This virtual event is free and open to the public.  Click here to register through Yapsody. You’ll get a confirmation email and the Zoom link will be in the attached ticket. You’ll also receive a reminder email with the Zoom link the morning of the event.