Earlier this month, the historic Penn Center, a 50-acre site in St Helena Island, South Carolina, that served as one of the nation’s first schools for formerly enslaved people of African descent in the 1860s, joined a Unesco network. It was named one of 22 places around the world that holds significance for its preservation of enslaved people’s history by the Unesco Network of Places of History and Memory.
The network is part of the organization’s Routes of Enslaved Peoples: Resistance, Liberty and Heritage program that was launched in 1994 to recognize the history of slavery and its impact on the world. Over the course of the five-year initiative, the institutions’ staffs will share sustainability practices and create shared activities through the international network.
“The legacy of the transatlantic slave trade still scars our societies. We must remember the places which bear witness to one of humanity’s greatest crimes,” Audrey Azoulay, Unesco’s director general, said in a statement. “Preserving and visiting these places will help us honour the memory of its millions of victims, advance scientific knowledge and educate new generations.”
Founded in 1862 by northern abolitionists, the Penn Center, formerly known as the Penn School, was one of the first schools for formerly enslaved people of African descent in the southern US. After the school’s closing in 1948, the center became a hub for social justice organizing and the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 60s. Dr Martin Luther King Jr and the staff of the civil rights group the Southern Christian Leadership Council used the center as a safe haven for interracial dialogue during segregation. Designated a national historic landmark in 1974, the Penn Center now serves to preserve the history and culture of the Gullah Geechee community and to promote social justice.
The Unesco network designation underscores the significance of the Penn Center’s role in the global story of enslavement, of which historians have only captured “the tip of the iceberg”, said the center’s executive director, Robert Adams. “We’ve inherited the story of enslavement as a fragmented story,” he said. “It has a wholeness that has, here to date, eluded us, and this is that whole process of putting those pieces back together and doing it in a collective way.”
Along with the Penn Center, Abraham Lincoln’s cottage in Washington DC, the Black History Museum and Cultural Center of Virginia and the International African American Museum in Charleston, South Carolina, are other US sites listed in the network. Institutions in Brazil, Canada, Colombia, Ghana, Haiti, the Netherlands, Mexico and Nigeria are also included.
By sharing resources and brainstorming ideas, Adams hopes that the network will uncover overlapping histories and form a roadmap for later generations. The collaboration could help the institutions, he said, “ask those fundamental questions: how can we project into the future and tell these stories for today and tomorrow?”
For instance, network partners may discuss the global threat of sea level rise and how that affects the African diaspora in the south-east US as well as communities along the west African coast. “We can come together and think through both preserving the past in the face of climate change,” Adams said, “but also to think about how people can overcome the challenges that were created by enslavement and by colonialism.”
