Gullah Geechee Cultural Conservation

About this Project

The Gullah Geechee people are descendants of enslaved West and Central Africans, who were forcibly brought to the southeastern coastal plain regions of the United States. The area in which Gullah Geechee influence is most concentrated is between Wilmington, North Carolina to St. Augustine, Florida—otherwise known as the Gullah Geechee Corridor. While tourism and economic centers recognize the commercial potential of Gullah Geechee cultural artifacts and tours, few digital resources exist to highlight the substantive contributions of Gullah Geechee people to the fabric of American democracy and culture.

The Gullah Geechee Cultural Conservation (GGCC) seeks to create an open-access digital collection of Negro spirituals, oral histories, and historic documents that increases the visibility of an engagement of Gullah Geechee people. The GGCC will utilize the in-house digitization facilities of each institution, allowing each of the project partners to have significant control over the quality and output of the digitized files.

The GGCC has three main goals:

1. To enhance engagement of collections by university students, cultural experts, and academics alike.
2. Introduce the collections to the public and K-12 curriculum.
3. Repatriate the collections to the communities’ origins