National Geographic Traveller (UK)
Why I love Charleston
DR BERNARD POWERS, A HISTORY PROFESSOR AND BOARD MEMBER OF CHARLOTTE’S INTERNATIONAL AFRICAN AMERICAN MUSEUM, SHARES HIS PASSION FOR THE HISTORIC SOUTHERN CITY AND ITS UNIQUE CULTURAL MELTING-POT
I first came to Charleston in 1975, as a graduate student, and I immediately fell in love with virtually every aspect of the place. The city has a unique flavour, created by its rich mix of people, including the African influence of course. The Gullah Geechee culture, which came over with the enslaved people, is alive and well today. You see it in everything from the food in our restaurants to the sweetgrass baskets in our market.
Charleston is arguably the most important city in the US in terms of African-American history. Here, and in the Lowcountry as a whole, you can still find elements of traditional African culture that you can’t find anywhere else in North America. The sheer number of enslaved people that passed through here — over 40% of the continent’s total — means an enormous number of African-Americans today will be able to trace their ancestry back to the Port of Charleston.
Culture has always been an important part of this city. It had one of the earliest lending libraries in the country, one of the first theatres and one of its first museums.
The International African American Museum is continuing a deep, rich tradition of knowledge-sharing and historical preservation in the city.
Our new museum has been a long time coming; a true labour of love. And now we have a museum that looks out onto the harbour and tells the full story. We’re able to take the blinkers off and dispel some myths. And we’re going to do it not only through the exhibits themselves, but also through a series events held in and around the building, around the building and under the building among the pillars that raise it up above what was this country’s final major slave trading wharf.
It’s called the International African American Museum for a reason. This isn’t just the story of the Black experience in Charleston, or even in South Carolina. We use that as a jumping-off point to explore the
Black experience in the world as a whole; to show how everything is interlinked. The African-American story is a world story. The civil rights movement in this country, for example, had an international impact, influencing liberation efforts from South Africa to the former East Germany. In many ways, this is everyone’s story — and now we have the opportunity to tell it properly. iaamuseum.org explorecharleston.com