Savannah Black History

12/10/2024

“Wormsloe’s first slave dwellings were rude huts near Noble Jones’s fortified house, probably the same structures that the fort’s marines had used in their watch for Spanish invaders. Noble Jones’s great-grandson, George Wymberley Jones, built eight frame slave houses during his agricultural improvement campaign of the 1850s. Jones arranged the new cabins in a double row roughly halfway between the mansion house and the historic fort, with an overseer’s house located at the northern end of the slave village. These slave houses existed at the edge of the plantation’s work and wild spaces. Wormsloe’s slaves lived next to the quarters field and in close proximity to the old fort field and the Jones mansion. Their homes also bordered the rich estuarial marsh of the Skidaway River and the mixed pine and hardwood forest that covered much of the southern end of the Isle of Hope peninsula. Each cabin was surrounded by a paling fence that enclosed a kitchen garden and a few chickens. Slaves labored in the cotton fields and farm buildings most mornings and early afternoons, and hunted, fished, and tended their own small gardens in the evenings and on Sundays. Following Emancipation, some of Wormsloe’s former slaves continued to live in the plantation’s cabins and farm the land, first as sharecroppers and then as renters and wage laborers. During the early twentieth century the De Renne family dismantled all of the cabins save one and used the salvaged materials in other construction projects. The family remodeled the remaining cabin for historical reenactments in the 1930s park, and the structure survives today.”
- Excerpt from the University of Georgia.

Slave Cabins on Wormsloe Plantation, ca. 1870s.
De Renne Family Papers, Stereograph, Hargrett Library, University of Georgia

12/10/2024

Pin Point is a small but vibrant community located a few miles south of Savannah. It was a place founded in 1896 by freed slaves after the American Civil War, They came from Ossabaw, Green, and Skidaway Islands. Oh the hopes, joy and dreams that must have been present at its beginning. They had nothing and yet they had one thing they had for so long prayed: freedom. Their sweat would now be for their families, fortune, and future. A church once named Hinder Me Not came to be founded in Pin Point. But they were freedmen now and the name did not seem appropriate anymore. So in 1897 they founded Sweetfield of Eden Baptist Church. The legendary Moon River runs by the community. The land is graced with beautiful oak trees and coastal marshes. Many a painter would ennoble their canvases of the lands found around the Sweetfields that grew the crops they ate. It was no longer a bitter land. It was a land that had the primal look of an Eden.
The church was used as the school. Where once in Savannah it was illegal to educate their ancestors and they had met in back room, they now taught their children in the open. In 1926, a Rosenwald School opened.These were schools Booker T. Washington of the Tuskegee Institute and Julius Rosenwald, philanthropist and president of Sears Roebuck built to improve the segregated school crumbs Jim Crow allowed. The Rosenwald were state-of-the art schools for African-American children across the South. The effort has been called the most important initiative to advance black education in the early 20th century. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, who was born and raised in Pin Point, would be one of the beneficiaries of this new school.
In 1925, a plot of land was purchased by the Brotherhood of Friendship Society to house a community center, named Pin Point Hall. Many residents still consider the center to be the glue that holds the community together. The Brotherhood itself continues to be an influential group in Pin Point.
Because they knew labor and were proud to work and earn a fair wage, industry came to Pin Point. Coastal Industries such as sh*****ng, crabbing, and oyster harvesting came. Seafood factories opened with the most prominent being A. S. Varn and Sons which operated from 1926 to 1985. They were the perfectors of ‘making do’ with what they had. So life was filled with good things and they had the satisfaction of knowing how to be self-sufficient.
The community of African Americans brought with them the heritage of the Gullah/Geechee cultures. For over 100 years they were isolated in their own world. Today, they are bearing witness to a simpler time and a heritage of the Gullah/Geechee culture that many say is the closest unvarnished lineage of their African ancestors. The Pin Point Heritage Museum, located in the old A.S. Varn & Son Oyster and Crab Factory. Next to the church is the area’s original cemetery, housing the remains of Pin Point’s founding African American owners. The history found in this one small community is astounding.
The Pin Point community is still owned by the ancestors of the original purchasers, making it the largest area of waterfront owned by African Americans in Georgia

12/09/2024

In 1870, the Georgia legislature enacted a statute requiring the railroads in the state to “furnish equal accommodations to all, without regard to race, color or previous condition, provided the same fare was charged.” (Georgia railroads had previously only charged half-fare for transportation of slaves.) Subsequently, similar civil rights legislation emerged in the Reconstruction legislatures in Texas, Louisiana, and Arkansas, and in some northern states. But in Georgia, this early civil rights movement was crushed by the end of 1870 as conservatives used terror, intimidation, and the Ku Klux Klan to “redeem” the state. One quarter of the black legislators were killed, threatened, beaten, or jailed.

Despite prevailing conditions in Georgia, Jim Crow railroad laws seemed to be at an early end when Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1875 stating, “That all persons within the jurisdiction of the United States shall be entitled to the full and equal enjoyment of the accommodations, advantages, facilities, and privileges of inns, public conveyances on land or water, theaters, and other places of public amusement; subject only to the conditions established by law, and applicable alike to citizens of every race and color, regardless of any previous condition of servitude.” Many northern states enacted their own civil rights legislation, adopting or adapting the language of the federal act. However, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Civil Rights Cases (1883) that the public accommodation sections of the act were unconstitutional.

With little or no effective legislation regulating civil rights in public transportation, the railroads made their own rules for providing white-only transportation and segregating African-Americans in “Negro cars” or Jim Crow cars.

By the 1890s, many southern states enacted legislation called Separate Coach Laws specifically mandating the segregation of railroad cars, although the legislation “did scarcely more than legalize an existing and widespread custom.” An 1888 photograph of the wreck of the Savannah, Florida & Western Fast Mail Train appears to depict a Jim Crow Combine Car among the wreckage. Although the newspaper accounts of the wreck only mention the engine, tender, baggage car and smoker, one coach, the Pullman sleeper, and the private car of railroad president E. P. Wilbur, it seems unlikely that a Georgia train of this era would not include a “negro car” or Jim Crow car, especially since eight unidentified African-American men were among the victims of the wreck.

The SF&W route ran from Savannah through Valdosta, GA to Bainbridge, with connections to all points. The September 10, 1892, Albany Weekly Herald complimented the Savannah, Florida & Western Railroad for its segregated arrangement of cars:

The S.F.& W. passenger is one of the best arranged trains in the State. First comes the mail and express car, then the Negroes’ car, then the baggage car and smoker, and last of all the first class coach. All trains would do well to adopt this arrangement with a car between the Negro and white coaches.

White passengers usually rode in the sections furthest from the smoke and coal ash of the steam engine.

In 1896, the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in the case of Plessy v. Ferguson upheld the legality of the railroad “Jim Crow” laws and entrenched the discriminatory principle of “separate but equal” accommodations for whites and blacks.

The case of Plessy v. Ferguson, which supplied the occasion for the court’s landmark decision, had its origins in Louisiana. In 1890, Louisiana passed a law calling for “equal but separate” accommodations on railroads for “whites” and “coloreds.” Protesting this law was a group of Creoles and blacks who formed the Citizens Committee to Test the Constitutionality of the Separate Car Law. This group arranged a test case along with the railroad that opposed the law due to the expense of supplying another car. An “exceedingly light-skinned Negro” named Homer Plessy agreed to test the law. Plessy was subsequently arrested for sitting in the white car. In his defense, Plessy contended that the Louisiana statute requiring segregation was unconstitutional. On appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, Plessy’s attorneys argued that if the segregation law was upheld, states could “require separate cars for people with different colors of hair, aliens, or Catholics or Protestants or to require colored people to walk on one side of the street and white people on the other side, or to demand that white men’s homes be painted white and black men’s homes black.”

In 1896, the Supreme Court decided against Plessy. Justice Henry Billings Brown writing for the majority concluded that legislative bodies were “powerless to eradicate racial instincts,” and that “if one race be inferior to the other socially, the Constitution of the United States cannot put them on the same plane.” Equal rights did not necessitate the “enforced commingling of the two races.” In his lone and now famous dissent, Justice John Harlan offered that “Our Constitution is color blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens.” Thus the notion of “separate but equal” had been judicially sanctioned by the nation’s highest court and Jim Crow had been given a new birth–a new license to “jump up and down.” State laws mandating racial segregation quickly followed the Plessy ruling ensuring a Jim Crow system in the South. The most blacks could aspire for was equal accommodations.

Plessy v. Ferguson is widely regarded as one of the worst decisions in U.S. Supreme Court history.



https://raycityhistory.wordpress.com/2018/02/17/jim-crow-cars-on-the-georgia-florida-railroad/

12/09/2024

Post-civil war African-Americans developed communities in Georgia where traditional fishing practices created family fleets, processing plants, and other self-sustaining fisheries work. The decline in African-American fishermen since that period has been attributed to increased fishing costs, little access to capital, and a reluctance to have children work in labor-intensive fisheries professions.
Additionally, fluctuations in commercial landings may have had a negative influence. This study tested these hypotheses by comparing first-hand accounts from current and former African-American fishermen and their families with trends in Georgia fisheries data (1950-2015). Analyses of the histories and landings data indicated that African-Americans fished the most abundant species during the years described by the participants (1950-1985) and that reasons for fishing or not fishing could be classified into 8 major themes related to work experience, Gullah Geechee values, and generational shifts.

Traditional fisheries were once ubiquitous in coastal areas where seafood collection, processing, and consumption all occurred in the same place. In coastal African-American communities along the Gullah Geechee Corridor, subsistence fishing and the connection to fisheries careers predates options for occupational choice for African-Americans. It predates emancipation when owners allowed enslaved Africans to fish, hunt, and farm to supplement the rations owners were legally required to provide.
Post-emancipation, fishing as a means of subsistence and trade among African-Americans was related to coastal living and early access to sea occupations through the Merchant Marine.
Independent African-American communities that developed in coastal Georgia after the Civil War formed vibrant, fishery-driven Gullah Geechee enclaves like Pin Point, Sandfly, Harris Neck, and Eulonia until the middle of the 20th century. The fishing, crabbing, and sh*****ng skills that developed in the slave economy fostered self-employment for African-Americans during Reconstruction and contributed heavily to sustaining families with little other means of support, particularly after the economic collapse of the South. These unincorporated areas grew into self-sufficient coastal communities where traditional fishing skills and practices were passed down through generations. In these communities, families fished and ate local catch, and the traditions performed between these tasks represented the larger culture. The proceeds of fishery work supported family fleets, processing plants, and other self-sustaining fisheries employment.

City records in Savannah evince the role of African-Americans in the fisheries profession; eight of the seventeen registered fish sellers in the 1880 Savannah city directory in were listed as colored. African-American fishery participation was higher in the early part of the 20th century than it is now and matched a national increase in the number of persons claiming fishing as an occupation until 1920.

An example of this trend was Mr. John Anderson, an African-American native of Pin Point (Georgia) who opened and operated an oyster house there until his death in 1929. Though his building burned down after his death, his enterprise preceded the A.S. Varn factory, a European-American owned crab and oyster processing center built near the same site in 1950. Even as Georgia’s fisheries became less artisanal and more industrialized, African-Americans comprised the majority of the workforce in seafood processing in some areas, including McIntosh County, Savannah, and Thunderbolt, Georgia. On the nearby Thunderbolt riverfront, many African-American shrimpers also captained vessels operating out of the docks but African-Americans also took the less favorable jobs in the canning and seafood processing factories. In fact, these roles were commonly assumed by women as is consistent in the post harvesting activities of many fisheries. Industrialization in fishing marginalized women's participation to low pay processing like heading or heading, filleting, or canning and across cultures processing is consistently documented their contribution to the fishing enterprise.

By 1923, shore fisheries in South Carolina and Georgia were largely confined to Savannah and Charleston where the market demand was located.
Prior to the 1930s, more African-Americans worked in the Georgia oyster fishery than in any other. In the early 1900s, many African-American families in the Savannah area relied on the lucrative oyster for their primary income. However, overharvesting, degrading water quality, and changes in consumer demand redirected the African-American fishing community to shrimps, blue crab, menhaden, and other species.

Observations at any commercial or recreational dock today will show that fishing is no longer a prominent vocational pursuit in the African-American community, and those who continue to fish relegate the activity to recreation or subsistence. Popular hypotheses of the cause for this migration away from fishing-related professions by African-Americans in Georgia have been largely derived from research.
The absence of cultural and gender-specific influences also neglects the unique presence of Gullah Geechee culture in the area. Further, no research has compared the decline in fishing to changes in fisheries productivity over time.
African-Americans had less access to capital and were unable to invest in technology that would have allowed them to compete with other fishermen and larger companies.



Tales of Landings and Legacies: African Americans in Georgia's Coastal Fisheries
D.L. Hoskins-Brown
National oceanic and Atmospheric Administration

12/08/2024

12/08/2024

12/08/2024

Pilgrim Congregational Church, in Savannah, GA, late nineteenth century.
From 1878 to 1889, Chicago Defender founder Robert Sengstacke Abbott lived in its parsonage, while his stepfather, John H. H. Sengstacke, was the minister.



https://www.gettyimages.co.uk/search/2/image?page=8&phrase=savannah%20georgia%20church&sort=mostpopular&license=rf%2Crm

12/06/2024

The Columbia Museum of Art launched its latest exhibit this weekend capturing Gullah culture on Daufuskie Island, which stood as the last South Carolina sea island untouched by the outside

12/06/2024

Opening at the Whitney Museum of American Art on December 5, the focused presentation Jeanne Moutoussamy-Ashe and the Last Gullah Islands features 13 black-and-white photographs and two publications documenting the insular Gullah Geechee community of Daufuskie Island and the other surrounding South Carolina Sea Islands.
Presented for the first time in a New York museum, this moving body of work, drawn from the Whitney’s collection, serves as a testimony to the complex history and rich culture of Daufuskie
Island, which has experienced rapid change since the mid-1900s. Portraits of children and elders, images of homes and the shoreline, people at work and at rest, and church services together form an impression of a community on the cusp of great change.
Since the early 1970s, artist, activist, and scholar Jeanne Moutoussamy-Ashe has made photographs that testify to the beauty and complexity of Black life, honoring the rhythms of the everyday and marking important rites of passage for the people who appear in them. After studying with street photographer Garry
Winogrand at the Art Institute of Chicago, Moutoussamy-Ashe was admitted to the Cooper Union in New York and got her professional start as a photojournalist for the television station
WNBC, while also contributing to popular magazines including Ebony, Essence, and Life.
In 1977, following an earlier six-month independent study in West Africa, Moutoussamy-Ashe traveled back across the Atlantic Ocean to Daufuskie Island, which sits between Hilton Head, South Carolina, and Savannah, Georgia. There and on the other surrounding Sea Islands, she began making photographs among the Gullah Geechee—many of them descendants of the
formerly enslaved people who acquired land from white plantation owners when they fled at the conclusion of the Civil War.
For Moutoussamy-Ashe, these places, separated by the Atlantic, were inextricably linked, with the Sea Islands representing connective tissue within the Black diaspora; a place shaped by
violent centuries of slavery and a community steadfast in the protection and nourishment of its unique culture and people. The Daufuskie Island photographs honor these entwined histories
and the artist’s personal perspective. How images are made, cared for, and consumed are enduring concerns for the artist, who maintains, “Photography should force us to question ourselves and to question the environment in which we live.” Jeanne Moutoussamy-Ashe and the Last Gullah Islands is organized by Kelly Long, Senior Curatorial Assistant at the Whitney Museum.
“Jeanne’s photography is part of a larger practice rooted in a serious sense of responsibility to other people—to the affirmation of lives and legacies that might otherwise exist only in memory,”
Long said. “This is evident in her essential scholarship on the history of Black women photographers, and in her AIDS activism, in memory of her late husband, Arthur Ashe. But nowhere is it more poignantly or poetically expressed than in her pictures of Daufuskie Island and in her connections to its people, which she nurtures to this day.”
The photographs in the exhibition span the late 1970s and early 1980s and include a group portrait of a wedding party depicting roughly half of the just 80 permanent residents left on Daufuskie Island at that time. The destruction of Daufuskie’s cotton crop by the insect the boll weevil in the early 1900s had a long-lasting impact on the island’s economy and infrastructure, and local jobs disappeared as pollution from the Savannah River contaminated its once-thriving oyster beds. By the 1970s, real estate developers were circling, emboldened by neighboring Hilton Head Island’s burgeoning reputation as a profitable tourist destination. Though an outsider, Moutoussamy-Ashe’s respect and gentle curiosity earned her the Daufuskie community’s trust, and allowed them to build, together, this important archive of images.
The exhibition also presents two publications featuring a selection of Moutoussamy-Ashe’s photographs of Daufuskie Island, first published as a book in 1982 with a foreword by Alex Haley, author of Roots: The Saga of an American Family. For the book’s 25th anniversary edition, the artist returned to her original contact sheets and expanded upon her earlier selection, organizing the images into four categories: “The People,” “Place,” “Everyday Life,”
and “Spiritual Grace.” This commitment to protecting and amplifying legacy also led to Moutoussamy-Ashe’s 1986 historical survey, Viewfinders: Black Women Photographers, and Daddy and Me, a 1993 picture book documenting the relationship between the artist’s husband, tennis legend Arthur Ashe, and their daughter, during Arthur’s decline from AIDS.
Jeanne Moutoussamy-Ashe and the Last Gullah Islands is the second installment of a new initiative at the Whitney to rotate rarely seen works from the Museum's collection in a dedicated
area on the seventh floor.

In conjunction with Jeanne Moutoussamy-Ashe and the Last Gullah Islands, the Whitney will present a public program featuring Jeanne Moutoussamy-Ashe in conversation with Gullah scholar Emory Shaw Campbell on February 26, 2025. Born on Hilton Head Island, Shaw Campbell is an educator and keeper of cultural heritage across the South Carolina Sea Islands.
More information about this program and how to register will be available on the Museum’s website as details are confirmed.



https://whitneymedia.org/assets/generic_file/4177/Jeanne_Moutoussamy-Ashe_-_Press_Release__1_.pdf

12/05/2024

West Broad Street - The Savannah Tire and
Rubber Company, headed by H. Remshart Roux, and a store operate by David Udinsky, owner of the Champion Shoe Shop. The corner store was a grocery operated by Alex Kaplan.

12/05/2024

Joseph Butler Tire repair located at 520 West Broad street. He opened his business on October 1, 1922 and stayed in operation for 24 years.

12/05/2024

12/05/2024

Garvin Temple Missionary Baptist Church on Poplar Street in Yamacraw. The congregation is now called the Temple of Glory and is located in Carver Village.



http://savannahga.pastperfectonline.com/Search?search_criteria=frogtown&onlyimages=false

12/05/2024

April 12, 1945…

Millard Wheeler, well known young business man, has acquired another West Broad street business.
Last week he bought the Top Hat grill, pop-Star theatre, and will operate the shop located next door to the Star thatre, and will operate It in conjunction with Rooks' billiard parlor across the street, which he also owns.
The Top Hat grill is one of the most popular businesses on the westside and carries a complete line of beers, wines and soft d***s in addition to its cafetria service.
Before taking over Rooks' billiard parlor, Mr. Wheeler was one of the top flight agents of the North Carolina Mutual Life Insurince company with which company he was connected for eight years.
He plans much improvement to the Top Hat grill which will greatly increase its service.

12/05/2024

African-American workers dig a sewer down the middle of a street in Savannah, Georgia, 1895



Photo by Hulton Archive

12/05/2024

The original Frank Callen Boys Club, located at 330 Price street. It was torn down, to make room for the new building to be called; The Frank Callen Boys Center.



-Savannah tribune

12/05/2024

In 1940, the Layman’s League of St. Augustine’s Episcopal church sponsored the contest for the “Bronze Mayor of West Broad Street”. The winner, along with his supporting Aldermen, were expected to “control” the activities of “Savannah’s leading Negro Thoroughfare”.
The winner would be determined by the largest amount of votes “sold”… each five cents reported would represent five votes.
The Progressives sponsored John “Gapy” Wiley, while Independents supported the popular Carl H Pugh.
The election culminated with a grand ball that was held at the Hollywood Casino.
It wasn’t until 2am the next morning that it was announced that Mr. John “Capy” Wiley had won the position. He won the vote by more than 5,000 votes.



Out of Yamacraw and beyond: Discovering Black Savannah 2002.