Hosted by Dr. Emory S. Campbell – Double Feature Finale on Monday, February 18, 2008, 7 p.m.
Remnants of Mitchelville
This documentary film produced by Jimmy Henderson of Columbia, South Carolina, focuses on the history and legacy of Mitchelville. Henderson tells through a variety of visual formats film, video tape, newspapers, photographs, and memorabilia…†At its peak, Mitchelville, South Carolina, one of the first settlements for freed men in the United States, was a bustling, energetic beach township, boasting almost 1500 residents.
Named in honor of General Ormsby Mitchel, who established the township in 1862 to house the area’s freed slaves, Mitchelville was Hilton Head’s very first planned community, featuring quarter-acre home lots divided by streets and interspersed
with stores. The people of the township elected their own officials, passed their own laws, founded the First African Baptist Church — the oldest continually operated Baptist church on the Island — and established South Carolina’s first compulsory education.
Family Across the Sea
This award-winning program is Roots – retold as an historical and linguistic detective story. It traces how scholars have uncovered the connection between the Gullah people of South Carolina’s Sea Islands and the people of Sierra Leone. Family Across the Sea demonstrates how African Americans kept their ties with their homeland over centuries of oppression through their speech, songs and customs. In the 1930s a pioneering black linguist, Lorenzo Turner, discovered over 3000 words of African origin in the Gullah dialect. The film’s conclusion, the moving return of a Gullah delegation to Sierra Leone and the African “family” they hadn’t realized they had, becomes a homecoming for all African American. This film won a Silver Apple Award, a National Educational Film and Video Festival Gold Award, First Place in the 24th Annual Houston International Film and Video Festival, and a SC Associated Press Broadcasters Award. Should be required viewing in every introduction to Black Studies and American Culture.” – Selase Williams, former chair, National Council for Black Studies.
Admission – Donation, Coligny Theater, Coligny Plaza
For more information, visit the website for the Gullah Celebration.