After the Civil War the longleaf pine forest products industry became the largest sector of Georgia’s industrial economy and the largest employer of African Americans along the coast. Workers cut timber in the coastal interior and raftsmen floated the logs to the sawmills at Darien or St. Simons Island. Skilled box cutters slashed pines, then turpentine dippers dipped the gum which was distilled into rosin and turpentine or naval products tar and pitch. On the docks the stevedores loaded the naval products and lumber that literally became the structural framework of the northern industrial age — from office buildings, factories, residential buildings and even the Brooklyn Bridge and cross ties for the Panama Canal.

Joe Armstrong and John Davis were one-time leaders of the stevedore crews at the Hilton Dodge Mills on St. Simons Island. Joe lived on the South End. John and his brother Peter were from Harrington. Henry Merchant and Floyd White from Retreat also worked the docks. These “strong husky men” handled large timbers with skill and loaded the ships carefully so the lumber “would not shift and cause damage to the vessel during the ocean voyage…In order that they might all pull together to move those timbers, they sang as they worked and, at the proper place in the song, gave a great pull ” wrote Margaret Davis Cate in Early Days of Coastal Georgia (1955). Joe and Floyd shared these work songs and stories with Lydia Parrish who published them in 1924 in her Slave Songs of the Georgia Sea Islands. They described to Mrs. Parrish loading terms such as “blockin timber,” “wing-tier,” “kelson knees,” “beam-dog,” “block and tickle,” and “narrow trunkin.’” They pointed out that “Short lumber went into the hatch” but for long lumber, they said, you had to “knock out the port” which was generally in the bow. “Pullin’ lumber” meant shoving it on a long greased skid, waist high, made up of a series of carpenter’s horses. A song “Call me Hangin’ Johnny” was used in loading lumber when six men on each side of the rope hauled on the block and tackle when putting a great “stick” in place on board a vessel. Joe said the “stick” was timber 16”x16” and 40’ long. Local tradition in Harrington says some “sticks” found floating offshore were retrieved and used in building the Harrington School. Joe’s wife Julia Armstrong told Mrs. Parrish that on one day there may have been as many as thirty-five vessels lined up at The Mills. Like earlier plantation songs “Pay me my money down” reflected the relationship between workers and the owners at the Mills.

In 1866 a correspondent from Brunswick to Debow’s, a widely circulated magazine of “agricultural, commercial, and industrial progress and resources” wrote that the lumber trade in south Georgia and north Florida was “assuming proportions almost incredible” and a fit enticement to an investor looking for a business with ‘so little risk and so certain remuneration.’” William E. Dodge, a New York importer-exporter of metals and timber from the Northeast, Midwest and Canada came to Georgia in the late nineteenth century with a plan: “as merchants, we want to see the South gain her normal position in the commerce of the country.” In other words, Dodge viewed timber as a source of “one-off cash returns” and as the timber was removed, he said, “at least two thirds of the Company can be sold ….for good average cotton land.” Dodge thought that once the timber was gone, the region could make an easy transition into more stable markets, primarily cotton, and regain its dominance in that agricultural market.

By 1911 the Hilton Dodge Company owned seven mills, 552,388 timber acres in Georgia and South Carolina estimated by financial analysts at Moody’s to contain 3.5 million and 4 billion feet of high-class timber, mostly cypress and long and short leaf yellow pine. The Darien mill was reported to be able to saw two million board timber in one week. The mill at Gascoigne Bluff on St. Simons Island, the third largest in the country at that time, was capable of handling 125,000 Ft per day. The Brunswick Advertiser in 1880 reported that 1000 persons “receive their sustenance directly or indirectly from the St. Simons Mills.” The Ceylon mill in Camden County employed 500 persons. Small company towns grew up near the mills with post offices, housing for mill workers, and a commissary.

The industry told itself and its clients that Georgia’s forests were inexhaustible. By 1917, Georgia’s timber industry collapsed. The rapid expansion of transportation by railroads and portable sawmills led to widespread logging of valuable pines. By the early twentieth century “Glynn County, near Brunswick, was said to be thoroughly milled, turpentined, and cross-tied.” The Hilton-Dodge Company shuttered in 1916.

Timber products industry did not die in Glynn County. In 1911 a new plant producing rosin and turpentine from pine stumps opened. This plant, later Hercules then Pinova, continued to produce chemicals until it closed in June 2023 after a fire. In 1936 Mead Corporation and Scott Paper formed a joint venture called Brunswick Pulp Paper, the first pulp mill located in the southeast U.S. and its success would be dependent on newly developed process for producing pulp from southern pine trees. When this plant, now Georgia Pacific Cellulose, celebrated its 75th anniversary in 2013, retired employee D.K. Boyd, said that his motivation for working at GP Cellulose was security. Sometimes an employer’s check would bounce, but at GP “No worrying about your check being good. You give them what they ask for and they give you what you ask for.” Today, forest products are still shipped out of the Port of Brunswick.

“Over the course of six decades, “wrote Isabel Wilkerson in her Pulitzer Prize book The Warmth of Other Suns, “some six million black southerners left the land of their forefathers and fanned out across the country for an uncertain existence in nearly every corner of America.” The Athens (GA) Daily Herald headline in May 1917 read “18,879 Negroes Leave Georgia in Eight Months.” In June 1917 The Douglas County (GA) Sentinel reported that investigations by the State Commissioner of Commerce and Labor revealed that 50,000 negroes had left in the last ten months. That same year the Brunswick (GA) News stated that the Commissioner of Agriculture saw the “exodus of southern negroes to the north as a state problem” to be solved by the state legislature passing “drastic laws against illegitimate operations of labor agents” who lured Negroes to work in northern factories.” The editor of the Macon (GA) newspaper in 1923 told fellow newspaper publishers to publish stories about Negro farmers in Georgia who have been “conspicuously successful” as one way to curb emigration “because if 40% of our population is enticed away, we shall shrivel and dwindle in greater ratio than is now the case.”

St. Simons Island native and editor of The Chicago Defender Robert Abbott Sengstacke used his newspaper to promote the “Great North Migration.” In her book Wilkerson described Abbott as “the agitator and unwitting chronicler of the movement.” She claimed that his newspaper “seduced” Negroes to come north. However, it may be said that the articles published in The Defender did less to “seduce” than to publish explicit articles that reported the obvious conditions that encouraged Negroes to leave the South: lynchings, labor disputes, sharecropper concerns, the boll weevil, poor pay, poor education >and the desire for better wages, better education and the lust for freedom. Between 1950 and 1960 the director of the U.S. Census Bureau told a House Committee that the South had lost 1.5 million Negroes mostly to large cities. Over 1 million alone went to New York City.

While African America parents on St. Simons Island found work in the local mills, industries, resorts, and private homes, their children saw their future off the island. Going north meant finding a job, finding a bit of freedom off the island, and even finding love. As one woman put it, “My mother said I couldn’t marry anyone of the island because everybody is related.”.

Alfred Sheppard recalled that in the 1970s, “as kids got older, you know they left. As more people left, you know, not a lot of people stayed, so therefore it kind of dwindled dowe…“ Departure came promptly for most youth. Sheppard said: “Like I said when I graduated from high school it was 1966. It was a Sunday. On Monday, my sister and I was on a bus going to New York.”

Where did they go? Usually to Chicago, New York, or Los Angeles wherever there lived an aunt, a brother, or a sister who had left earlier. Ella Sheppard Douglas said that she went to NYC at age 18 because “there were no jobs here that I could really get except house-keeping and I didn’t want to clean houses all the time.” Her aunt took her in in 1959, she said. She worked her “first job ever” in a hospital, then in a factory, and eventually she studied and became a registered nurse. She moved to California where she raised her family. Her siblings followed her to New York and then California. When her brother Alfred left the island in 1966 he got a job with 20th Century Fox in New York City as a messenger between data office and main office. “Free movies” were his perk. Then he was drafted into the Air Force and sent to bases in Texas and Oklahoma. When discharged he headed out to California where his sister had settled. He had a good job as a collections supervisor for a bank. Sociologist Stewart E. Tolnay, a leading expert on the Great Migration quoted in Wilkerson’s book pointed out that “Compared with Northern born blacks…Southern migrants had higher rates of participation in the labor force, lower levels of unemployment, higher income, lower levels of poverty and welfare dependency.”

But it was not all roses and sunshine. Migrants faced discrimination up north. They were teased for their accent and language difference – “pads” for “tablets” and “buckets” were “pails.” Co-workers in Texas always called Chip Wilson “Georgia.” Teresa Powell Malachi had a good job at the post office near her Chicago home. Then she was transferred 17 miles away and then 37 miles away. “I was so tired of slipping and sliding… all that snow and ice…I don’t miss it.” After 50 years she moved back to St. Simons Island even though her children, now adults, stayed in Chicago.

Relatives up north stayed in contact with family back home. Savannah children recalled boarding the train in the summer to visit relatives in New York City with a box of fried chicken and biscuits on their laps and the motherly order to behave. Those who lived up north came back to the island whenever they could, but as Alfred Sheppard put it, “you can’t run back and forth you know.”

After 30 years or so, many moved back to the island to care for family. “Well, Mom was getting kinda old.” A widowed uncle was disabled. A younger sister or older brother needed help. Josephine Follin Porter returned to care for her grandfather. Phoebe Abbott-Johnson moved to NYC to live with her aunt. She finished high school in NY, worked for the Dept of Corrections and then a children’s group home. “My great grandfather was still living in SSI,” she recalled, but then my grandma died and “Aunt Amy was here doing it by herself” so “I decided to pack up my husband and I came home.” Teresa Powell Malachi came back to care for her mother. Asked if she planned to spend the rest of her life on the island, Malachi answered, “Yes. Yes.” Best friend cousins Rosalind Sheppard and Amy Lotson Roberts both left St. Simons Island after high school Ros to New York and Amy to New York and Miami. They attended colleges, had jobs, got married and drew apart. Then, without communication, “we both moved back home on the same day. Our paths came back together.

“At the start of the Great Migration, the Chicago Defender wrote, “If all of their dream does not come true, enough will come to pass to justify their actions.” Some, like Emory Rooks or Natalie Moore Dixon, returned to St. Simons Island as veterans after their military service. They enjoyed being back in their parents’ house and their neighborhood. They were happy to breathe salt air and feel the sea breezes again. Yet they saw how things had changed. Natalie’s mother Elouise had a sign “Don’t Ask Won’t Sell” prominently tacked to a large live oak tree on her property near the marsh. Despite more development, higher taxes, and fewer jobs, St. Simons Island was home. They founded the St. Simons African American Heritage Coalition (SSAAHC) to restore the historic Harrington School and to open a cultural center where their African American heritage is saved and shared. As Mercer University student JoAnna Renzi asked SSAAHC Executive Director Amy Roberts,

Field hand was the preeminent job on coastal Georgia plantations when cotton, rice, and sugar were grown. But there were many other jobs performed by the “taskable hands” – cart drivers, nurses, cooks, carpenters, gardeners, house servants, stock minders, and boatmen or oarsmen. When freedom came, many freedpersons and their descendants used their knowledge and skills to provide for their community and for cash outside the community.

“You made money with what you know and what is needed, or the work was not done,” stated one family member. The 1870 census for Georgia Sea Islands recorded the occupation for most of the men in Harrington as “Farm Laborer.” The women were listed as “Keeping House.” By 1900 the men in Harrington described their jobs as Farmer, Fishermen, Carpenter and Butcher. Those who worked in the sawmills or Brunswick factories lived closer to the mills in Jewtown or in Brunswick.

By the 1920 census when the tourism economy started growing, Harrington residents listed their occupations as Butler, Maid, Cook; Laundry Ironer, “Clean Up Woman” “Clothes Runner” and “Shirt Ironer;” Truck Driver for Grocery Store; Caretaker on House Boat; Butcher or Gardener at the Hotel; Lawn Worker for Private Home, Helper at Skeet Club, Painter at Public Buildings, Crabber at Crabbing Factory, Helper at Florist, Chauffeur, Fisher in Fishing Industry. “You could either work for old money or new money; new money don’t know how to treat help, old money know,” they recalled. Many worked for private families such as the Reynolds family at Musgrove, or “down the drive” at The Cloister. The “foundation of genuine warmth and hospitality” at Sea island and the King and Prince may be rooted in the Negro staff who welcomed visitors at the main entrance, maintained the grounds and caddied at the golf courses, cooked and served the food, tended bars, babysat the children, provided music for evenings outs, and took adults hunting and fishing. Many of these employees retired after 30+ years. In the summer, their teenagers earned “money for my little dresses” by doing domestic work, cooking, or cleaning at the Beach House, or as a lifeguard at the Beach Club

Children born in the 1930s and 1940s recalled that their parents “didn’t have the knowledge from school because they didn’t have the opportunity. But they had skills.” They could take a pattern from newspaper and “She could sure made a dress,” Harriett Sheppard remembered. Mrs. Elouise Spears recalled “Now my mother could cook, she could take some flour and make you slap somebody. She didn’t measure nothing, a handful of this, she could do that and they could take a piece of cloth and make clothing.” Mrs. Isadora Hunter, agreed: “This is a gifted community, we didn’t starve.” The older men were fisherman and her father, she described, was “a fisherman of the community.” Men and women on the island did whatever jobs they could just to make ends meet. On the Brown family farm, the children canned and put food up for the winter. In the summer, Mar Alice Brown said the girls went to the pier and, as tourists came in, they sold them figs, pears, and kumquats grown on their property or the smoked fish prepared at home.

While residents worked outside the community, many small business owners filled a need in the community. Maurice Wilson, Sr. opened a barbershop. Ben Sullivan, Jr. had a filling station where neighborhood children purchased ice cream. He and his family also owned Sullivan’s Lawn Business. Many men worked at Bennie’s Red Barn. Alphonzo Ramsey opened the Old Plantation Supper Club. The Follins and Proctors had groceries and small shops. On the South End, Mrs. Sheppard rented out rooms for workers at mills or at the resorts. If a task was needed, there was someone in the community who could provide it. Emory Rooks’ grandmother was a midwife and grew medicinal herbs in their garden. Mrs. Spears was the only registered nurse on the island’s north end. Her daughter recalled that her mom would always have her medical bag ready and often set up at church to measure parishioners’ blood pressure. Emilio Wilson made soap. The Wings, the Baisdens and the Wilsons were skilled carpenters, plumbers, and brick masons who built the family homes, “brick by brick” often after they got off their day jobs at the paper mill or other industries. Chauffeurs to rich people were also drivers for neighbors and friends who did not own cars. Farmers sold produce from their gardens. Fishermen shared their catch. Charlie King “knitted the drag,” nets for catching shrimp. Charles Lee had a fish house with a huge frying pan. Annie Davis cooked up “mush” to go with the fish. Henry Morrison also had a fish camp with a juke joint on the dock. Fisherman Cusie Sullivan would hang his catch on porch for neighbors to get some. Mr. Charles Wilson “made everything” — utensils, eye glasses, fish nets, and even his own tobacco pipes. And there were school teachers, preachers, and public employees who helped their neighbors navigate government paperwork.

One South End resident remembered that “the only time white people came in this area was to get cheap labor because they thought all of us were lazy and we would work for practically nothing.” Not so, Amy Roberts, pointed out,

Note: This article offers a valuable yet small and limited look at the jobs of African Americans who lived and worked on St. Simons Island over the years. We appreciate the individuals who shared their memories (see Sources below). We encourage you to help expand our knowledge and improve our archives by sharing your family stories. Go to SSAAHC at email harringtonschool@ssiheritagecoalition.org or call 912-634-0330. Pastor Leggett, Sr. a pastor at Emmanuel Baptist Church for over 50 years, instructed his son, a new minister, to make sermons that “Keep it simple, take it deep.” With your help, we can follow his guidance by sharing and saving more stories which reveal the depth of our island’s African American heritage.

This month we look at the economics that affected island African Americans and the small businesses and jobs that independent islanders created.

On March 3, 1865 Congress chartered the Freedman’s Savings Bank. This “benevolent” banking institution would provide black soldiers with a safe place to deposit their Union Army back pay and bounty payments and to encourage “thrift and industry” in the African American community. In short it was a simple savings institution created primarily for former slaves and their descendants who previously lacked business experience.

The vast majority of the deposits were “poignantly small” ranging from $5 and $50 but these small deposits were “emblematic of the historic rise of the class of black property owners.” Soldiers deposited back pay and bounties. Schoolchildren were encouraged to make deposits and were routinely preached to about importance of work and saving. African American churches, private businesses, and benevolent societies also maintained accounts at the Freedman’s Bank. These institutions often took the lead in making deposits and were the driving force behind getting many individual depositors to open accounts.

A board of fifty trustees was authorized to manage the assets which were to be invested in stocks, bonds, Treasury notes or other securities of the United States. Between 1865 and 1871 the Freedman’s Bank opened 37 branches in 17 states and the District of Columbia. In less than a decade an estimated 70,000 depositors had opened and closed accounts with bank deposits totaling more than $57 million dollars.

A preliminary look at the accounts at the Savannah branch reveal details about many coastal island Georgia residents who opened accounts. Rev. Tunis Campbell, “Missionary and formally agent of Freedman’s Bureau” opened an account on July 24, 1866. Several St. Catherine Island residents followed his lead. Anthony Bell who worked for Thomas Spalding on Sapelo and Abrahm Bell opened accounts. Darien residents James Bailey, Samuel Hazard, and Edward Gerard age 14 who lived “on the Ridge 5 miles from Darien,” opened accounts. Rev. Andrew Nagle deposited the funds from St. Simons Island Baptist Church in July 1873. On May, 19,1873 Rev. Nagle also signed deposits for St. Simons Island residents Polly Shepard age 50 and Samuel Shepard age 30. On the same day Rev. Nagle signed up six depositors who worked for Mr. Corbin-Mr. Couper Agent at Altama, Glynn County – James B. Fraser, Morris Johnson, Jacob Berrian, Gabriel Palmer, Scott Denegal, and Sukie Maxwell. St. Simons Island residents Susan Abbott (at Frederica) and SSI resident James Proctor age 17 who “works for Mrs. Stephens” opened accounts. Lena Quarterman, cook, who worked for Brunswick City Treasurer John Johnson opened her account in August 1873.

Less than ten years later, in June 1874, the bank closed, leaving over 61,000 depositors with losses over $3 million. The financial panic of 1873, inexperienced branch workers, and, in some cases, officers using their financial cunning to use bank assets for personal use led ultimately to liabilities outpacing assets. Over the years, some depositors were able to get a small percentage of their deposits but confidence and trust in the central bank system was never recovered.

“Brown was turned against us. We lost our schools,” says Elias Black Jr., who graduated in 1947 from Risley High School in Brunswick Ga and credits it with transforming him from an indifferent student with sights set no higher than a job at a local hotel, into someone who became valedictorian of his college class, and ultimately President of Clark College in Atlanta. (Tilove)

Risley alumna Thomas summarized it in her interview with Dr. Montford: 

These were schools of unstinting discipline, order and respect. Of committed teachers and the most keen and caring mentorship. Of high and unyielding expectations… “People assumed you were first rate.” And then the schools closed.

Historically, the pervasive opinion in the white community was that black schools were inferior, black teachers lacked training, and black students could only learn the most basic subjects. Time and again white political leaders did not comprehend the setting and missed the easy answers: “The answers are straightforward”, Jonathon Tilove wrote in his article In Black Schools Before Brown, Keys to Success: “Dedicated teachers. Strong principals. Order. Discipline. High expectations. Community and parental support.”

Elias Blake, Jr. Risley High School graduate and President of Clark Atlanta College recalls how Risley High School students built their own gymnasium. It was an act of self-help, he says, but also cunning. What the white superintendent and school board would see in that handmade gym were young blacks bring trained for manual labor. But, Blake says, ‘They were never brought into the main building where the laboratories were and where Mrs. Mollette was teaching Shakespeare, Thoreau, Emerson, Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen.” Risley High School teachers, Blake says, were “doing college prep undercover.”

In the 1950s black teachers were better educated than white teachers because Southern states paid for the graduate education of black students who went north to school, rather than admit them to their state universities. Many black educators returned home with Ivy League degrees. In the profiles published in Benjamin Allen’s book Black America Series: Glynn County Georgia Glynn teachers at Risley had advanced degrees from over 25 national universities. Five Risley graduates went on to be Presidents of leading Historic Black Colleges (years served):

Cornelius V. Troup, Ft. Valley State College (1945-1965)
Elias Baker, Jr., Clark College Atlanta (1977-1987)
William H. Dennis, Jr. Morehouse College (1953-1965)
Rufus Patterson Perry, Johnson C Small University (1957-1968)
Timothy C. Meyers, Savannah State (Interim President, 1949).

Risley alumni Richard Perry and Marie Broadsdale pointed out that today students who attended Risley are well informed on black history because in the 9^th grade “we had a course on Negro history [based on a] book written by Carter G. Woodson. Taught by the late CV Troup.”

Did the teachers make Risley what it was? “Of course!” answered alumnus CA Lee.

Alumni recalled, “We really knew our teachers and they knew us. Teachers were part of our culture. We saw them at church, we saw them at the grocery store. Our parents knew them.” One alumna recalled that “It was a must that the teachers had to visit each student’s home before the year was out.” When Risley’s principal Mr. Wilkerson visited homes in Dixville, he sat on a front porch, chatted with parents, and acknowledged the student who rode by on their bikes. At school “When he walked down the hall, you knew his presence. He wasn’t cruel or unkind and sometimes he didn’t have to say word. You knew you better be ready to account for your whereabouts, especially if you did have a hall pass.“

There was a mantra the Risley alumni repeated, “This is our school, these are our kids, they’re going to learn above and beyond what that book says and they are going to learn what that books doesn’t say.” In other words, “We are a community and everybody is going to get the benefits of what we have to teach you.” (CA Lee, Montford)

Two one room schoolhouses on St. Simons Island provided educational foundation for African American children from the mid 1920s until 1954 when Glynn County consolidated the public schools and forced the island’s black students to go to segregated schools on the mainland. Emory Rooks recalls that the students at his new school thought the island children were “rich kids.” We weren’t, he replied. However, they were more well-off academically thanks to their teachers: Mr. and Mrs. Johnson at Harrington and Mr. Baisden at South End.

Adrian Johnson and Louetta Johnson lived in the South End. Both had graduated from Claflin College in SC. and took jobs as teachers at the Harrington School. Mrs. Johnson taught the younger students; Mr. Johnson taught the older students. Lessons included English, reading, writing, diagramming sentences, cursive writing, math, and current affairs. “Our teachers always made sure we were aware of what was going on outside our small island. They really worked hard to actually expose their students to an education that was going to help them in the future.“ So anytime, anything would happen, nationally [Pearl Harbor] or President dying or big event politically he [Mr. Johnson] would expose us to it. Because we were small and isolated didn’t mean we were not exposed to things of the world… They tried to bring the best in of us. They really did.” Harrington students went on to be nurses, air force colonels, teachers and principals, and small business owners. In whatever profession, Mrs. Gibson pointed out Harrington students tried to be good citizens because “we were taught, to be good citizens.“

Ralph Baisden, Senior, and his wife Alethia Buckley Baisden both taught at the South End School, now demolished, near Lotson Avenue and Mallory Street. Ralph Baisden Senior was a man of many trades – a carpenter, a house painter, and a notary public, but “if someone had asked, why did God create Ralph Baisden…it would be to be an educator “said his son Ralph Jr. Born in 1894 in Townsend, GA Baisden Senior attended school in McIntosh County, then college in Savannah, and graduate school at Columbia University in New York. He was a WWI veteran. His son described his father as “diligent and persistent.” Mr. Baisden taught it all – reading, writing, arithmetic and social. At this time period, South End student Rosalind Sheppard, observed,

Mr. Baisden was the first person to start an oratorical contest for black students. His son proudly described the course:

Mr. Baisden viewed each of his students as he viewed his own five children. Sharing a photo with the Mercer U interviewer, his son emphasized “look at the way he is looking at his students…He’s just not some distant person. These (38) are his students. Those are his family. Just as his own five children are his family. He would have kept up with each one of them as they progressed throughout lives.”

Mrs. Baisden, also a native of McIntosh County, used to take very young Ralph (“in swaddling clothes” he joked) to school when she taught. She was “A very strong mother, a very strong reader at a time where women would tend to be in the background. She was out front in teaching school…being a leader in church. I was blessed to have two parents of that caliber.” Baisden remembers family tradition of dinner table together when parents and children discuss their day. When presidential elections were broadcast on the radio, “we knew all the candidates. We knew all the positions.“

Finding trained teachers for Negro schools was difficult in late 1880s – 1930s. A “normal” school offered training to be teachers and skills to have jobs.

As early as 1892 the Blacks of Brunswick, Georgia were discussing the need for a normal school.  Through the efforts of Miss Carrie E. Bemus, a white teacher from Pennsylvania, and Reverend H. L. Bleach, the school became a reality.  Its aim, according to an ad in the Macon Telegraph, was to prepare students “not only to teach successfully, but to become true leaders among their race.”  Classes opened on October 6, 1903.   The school later became Selden Normal and Industrial Institute, named for Dr. Charles Selden.  After the death of Miss Bemus in 1909, Selden Institute came under the care of the Presbyterian Church.

Among the courses of study were cooking, domestic science, sewing, millenary, farming, gardening, carpentry, and shoemaking.  Later Selden added nurse training, teacher training, and business. The school published a paper called “The Work,” and did print jobs in the Black community. Even with the industrial bias, Selden had a school choral society, a dramatics club, and a school quartet that toured in 1917 to raise funds. In 1933 Selden merged with a similar Presbyterian school, the Gillespie Normal Institute in Cordele, Georgia. The Gillespie-Selden Institute continued in Cordele until 1956 when a city-wide school reorganization ended the school. (Source:www.lostcolleges.com)

Several RIsley High School teachers attended Selden Institute.

Clandestine schools taught by free coloreds; humane masters “who winked at the violation of the law and permitted their children to instruct a favorite slave to read and sometimes to write”; ministers such as Rev. C.C. Jones who dispensed Christian instruction, or “some aged impecunious white lady {who} would agree to teach the children of free colored people and the children of such slaves as had hired their time.” While on Butler Island in 1838-1839 Fanny Kemble taught her husband Pierce Butler’s personal household slave Aleck to read. Aleck’s daughter Anna would go on to teach at St. Cyprian in Darien, St. Athanasius in Brunswick, and the Church of the Good Shepherd in Pennick. Anna Alexander became the first and only African American consecrated deaconess in the Episcopal Church. With Union troops on St. Simons Island In 1862 Susie Taylor King taught forty children, adults and soldiers of Company E “all of them so eager to learn.” After emancipation the army, the Freedman’s Bureau, the Freedman’s Aid Society, and Christian associations such as the American Missionary Association, the Baptist Home Mission Society, and the African Methodist Episcopal Church Missionary set out to help educate colored families.

Census records on Georgia’s sea islands in the early 1900s noted parents who could not read or write but their children were “At School.” Their parents expected them to learn. Parents built the schools. Teachers made sure their students achieved the best education they could provide. Both parents and teachers expected the best from the students because Education meant Freedom.

This month we look at the role of teachers and community in schools before Brown v. Board of Education. Appreciation goes to Dr. Melanie Pavich (Mercer U) and Dr. Hector Montford (College of Coastal Ga) and their students for oral history interviews used for these articles. See Sources for more details. SSAAHC welcomes your education memories – contact us at harringtonschool@ssiheritagecoalition.org, or call 912-634-0330.

Adults today in their 70s and 80s recall that there was no need for a PTA. “The teachers knew us and they knew our parents.“ Mr. and Mrs. Johnson at Harrington were neighbors and members of the local church. Mr. Baisden at South End was also a neighbor. Mr. Wilkerson, principal at Risley regularly visited students’ homes and sat on the front porch with their parents. Parents expected students to learn and to be respectful of their teachers. If not, alumni recalled, the teachers reminded them with Big Boy or Big Patty straps and “a whooping when we got home.” As one student put it, “Every night was parent teacher night because if you did something wrong…the teachers would tell your parents. They would sure tell.”

But going to school wasn’t a fearful thing. Studies in reading, writing, and math were interspersed with music and outside recess playing ball, tag, or dodgeball. Isadora Hunter loved school when she attended Harrington in 1928. She always regretted having to drop out to tend to her younger siblings when her mother died. Many, like Berthenia Gibson, went on to be teachers themselves emulating her teachers Mr. and Mrs. Johnson. “Our teachers wanted us to succeed, too. They prepared us for the outside world.”

Up until the 1960s black children only attended schools for black students. There were some benefits to segregated schools – they were located in your neighborhood so you could walk or bike to school and you attended with your friends. There was a sense of community, and growing pride for students, family and community. There were plenty of downsides too. “Five times“ hand-me down books, dusty interiors, poor lighting and outside toilets. Public school officials believed you were not as well educated as white students. But when island black students were bused to Brunswick or enrolled in private African American schools, they often skipped a grade or two because in their one room schoolhouses separated by a partition, they had heard and learned the older students’ lessons too.

The Harrington School celebrates its hundredth anniversary this year, and the St. Simons African American Heritage Coalition celebrates its twenty-fourth! The Coalition was founded in October 2000 at the First African Baptist Church of St. Simons Island, bringing together property owners and citizens who wished to protect St. Simons’s African American history and community from new development on the island. Today, the Coalition continues with a related mission “to educate, preserve, and revitalize African American history and culture” through three goals: land loss prevention, historic preservation, and economic development.

The SSAAHC preserves African American history on St. Simons through a variety of initiatives, including programming like the annual Taste of Gullah event and historic tours of the island’s communities. Through this programming and other outreach, the SSAAHC serves an important function as both a resource for members of the existing community and a gateway for others to learn about its importance to St. Simons Island. The Mercer University Coastal Georgia Research Initiative specifically states that its work “effectively showcases the efforts of students and faculty focused on aiding the St. Simons African American Heritage Coalition in preserving African-American history and historic sites on the Georgia coast.”

All of the previous elements discussed in this month’s weekly facts—oral histories, photos of structures from the Harrington Project, and Amy Roberts’s collection of African American funeral programs—contribute to the success of the St. Simons African American Heritage Coalition. The SSAAHC has hosted researchers and their students, restored the Harrington School, and continues to serve as a vital resource for the promotion of our community’s African American history. To learn how you can become more involved with the work of the Coalition, visit this page to find information on becoming a member, volunteering, or donating.

While photographs preserve a visual window into our past, oral histories have an almost magical quality: they transport listeners not only into a specific time and place, but also into the individual life and of the person recounting their own experience. In recent years, local historians have placed special importance upon oral histories as sources for African American history in coastal Georgia. Several initiatives, like the Gullah Geechee Cultural Heritage Center at Georgia Southern, highlight storytelling and oral tradition’s importance among Gullah Geechee people. Oral history interviews present a chance to carry on that tradition and to learn about events and changes in our community from those who lived them.

Dr. Melanie Pavich serves as the Project Director for the Coastal Georgia Research Initiative at Mercer University. This initiative, run through the University’s College of Professional Advancement, allows students to learn about historical and cultural issues in coastal Georgia “by interviewing members of African-American communities in the coastal Georgia region.” After conducting interviews, students create public presentations and digital stories that are archived for later access. Recently, the Initiative has received grants from Georgia Humanities and has presented public programs including a 2019 presentation “based on oral history interviews of African American residents of [St. Simons Island] whose families date back to the time of enslavement.”

The Coastal Georgia Research Initiative is not the only organization collecting oral histories in Glynn County. Dr. Hector Montford at the College of Coastal Georgia leads the Historic Risley School Archives Digitization Project, aided by students and faculty from the College’s American Studies and Interdisciplinary Studies programs. Their online collections include photographs, scrapbooks, and PTA materials from the Risley School, as well as valuable oral histories from former Risley students and faculty, recorded as part of a Brunswick African American Cultural Center project. Oral histories are also integral to the presentation of history in museums on both St. Simons and Jekyll islands. Mosaic, the Jekyll Island Museum, has recorded oral history interviews with individuals including Sandra Martin Mungin, the daughter of Genoa Martin, the former manager of Brunswick’s Selden Park. At the World War II Home Front Museum on St. Simons, visitors can listen to oral histories that illuminate Glynn County’s wartime efforts, including interviews with members of the Mungin family, several of whom served in World War II.