How Did the Penn Center Become a Civil Rights Sanctuary?

Situated between rich salt marshes and the Atlantic Coast and shaded by moss Leyden Live Oaks, The Penn Center, located for over one hundred and fifty years on Saint Helena Island in Beaufort County, is a historic site of African American education, culture, social justice, and community development that continues

its work today. In eighteen sixty two, six months before President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation and three years before the Thirteenth Amendment legally abolished slavery, a group of Pennsylvania Quaker and Unitarian missionaries and abolitionists founded the Pennsi School on Saint Helena. This was part of what's called the Port Royal Experiment. In South Carolina. Plantation owners had

built an economic empire on enslaved labor. It was the first state to seed from the Union, as sparking the Civil War and becoming an immediate target of Union forces. In eighteen sixty one, the US Navy seized the Port Royal Sound from Confederate troops. The following year, the plantation owners fled the Sea islands, reluctantly, abandoning their prized crop of world renowned cotton and liberating somewhere from ten thousand

to thirty two thousand enslaved people. Seeing a need and an opportunity, the US opened the area to a number of public and private programs aiming to figure out how to reform a social and economic structure based on enslavement into a free society. It was an early and less restricted form of reconstruction. Northern abolitionists and humanitarians donated funds to help freed people by former plantation land at reasonable

rates and establish farms, hospitals, and schools. The Penn School, and named after Quaker activist William Penn, was the first school founded in a Confederate state for the sole purpose of educating freed people. It began in the living room of the abandoned Oaks Plantation before the first schoolhouse was built, and eventually grew to become a fifty acre campus, including nineteen now historic buildings. The land was donated by a

freed entrepreneur by the name of Hasting Gant. The first classes were taught by white abolitionists Laura Town and Ellen Murray, and briefly by Charlotte Forton, who was the first African American teacher at Penn. The earliest curriculum followed the New England eurocentric model of socialized education that included reading, writing, arithmetic, geography, history, and music. Sixty seven, South Carolina had a majority of

black registered voters. Black candidates were winning elections, and the Penn School received public funding, but the post war reconstruction era in the state was rocky, and a decade later Jim Crow laws had suffused the South. The school struggled but stayed afloat thanks to private donations. In the early

nineteen hundreds, RASA. B. Cooley and Grace House, two other northern white women, revised the curriculum to follow Booker T. Washington's Hampton tuscg model of industrial education, including various trades

and agricultural sciences. They excised some classical studies like algebra and Latin, and added courses such as masonry, carpentry, and the domestic arts up to the end of World War II, the state of South Carolina only required that education for Black Americans go through the seventh grade level, but Penn provided schooling through the twelfth grade of plus adult education classes as well. However, by the late nineteen forties, the

population of Saint Helena had dwindled significantly. Many Islanders and young people in particular, were leaving isolated Beeford County to seek opportunities in larger cities. In response, the board of trustees at Penn redefined the purpose of the school and launched the Penn Community Service Center in nineteen forty eight, including services like daycare, a hangout space for tines, and

health clinic. They also offered midwife training beyond that, Throughout the nineteen fifties and sixties, Penn Center became a nexus for civil rights activism and social justice, not just for South Carolina but for the entire nation. Being isolated out among the marshes, it was one of the few places in the Jim Crow South where interracial groups of activists could convene in integrated facilities, including overnight, without the threat

of legal consequences or outside violence. Penn Center hosted human rights conference with groups including the NAACP, the World Peace Foundation, the Congress of Racial Equality, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the Student Non Violent Coordinating Committee, and the Peace Corps, just to name a few. It was a place to

organize and strategize. A former Atlanta Mayor Andrew Young, in his role as leader of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, introduced doctor Martin Luther King Junior to the serenity and security of Penn Center. Between nineteen sixty four and nineteen sixty seven, King visited Penn five times, along with other luminaries of the civil rights movement and countless unnamed activists. It became a sort of refuge for King outside of the pressure of being a civil rights leader on the

national stage. King composed many of his speeches at Penn, including his I Have a Dream speech, which he wrote while staying in the Hasting Gant Cottage. He also spoke there about his broader concerns outside of the civil rights movement, which included capitalism and the economic and equality of these some forty million Americans living in poverty, and his then

unpopular anti war stance regarding Vietnam. During a rare formal speech at Penn he laid out a set of what he called the inseparable triplets, three intrinsically connected evils in America, racism, excessive materialism, and militarism. He urged his fellow leaders there to consider and address all three in their attempts to

elicit change. The organizers who gathered at Penn Center didn't always agree on the best courses of action, and although it is remote, they still had to exercise caution to keep each other safe, perhaps especially doctor King, who was very much in the public eye and was assassinated in April nineteen sixty eight in Memphis, Tennessee, just four months after his last meeting at Penn Center, and the day after he had told striking sanitation workers, We've got to

give ourselves to this struggle. Until the end. After the Civil Rights era, the center continued its work, hosting retreats for churches and other organizations, training peace corps agricultural workers, promoting environmental sustainability, and serving as an educational site for black history and culture. The Old School campus was added to the National Register of Historic Places in nineteen seventy four.

The original trade class shop, built in nineteen twelve, was rededicated in nineteen ninety nine to honor doctor York W. Bailey, who attended the Penn School as a child in the late eighteen hundreds, earned his medical degree from Howard University, and returned home to become Saint Helena's first black physician. Today, the shop houses a museum, the showcases and archive of rare photographs of African Americans, as well as artifacts related

to Glagichi history and culture. In twenty sixteen, Penn's then executive director, doctor Rodell Lawrence wrote for The Hill quote, most Americans came from somewhere else to this continent, and Penn Center provides us with a direct link to the African origins of slaves that occupied America's southeastern seaboard. It is a window to a place in which many African Americans emerged from bondage and set out on a new journey as free men and women. It is a place

and a time to celebrate. Penn Center vividly embodies the American ideal of liberty and justice for all, and in every sense is a true historic national monument. To that end, President Barack Obama named a swath of Beaufort County, South Carolina, including the Penn Center, a national historical monument to the Reconstruction Era, a week before he left office in January of twenty seventeen. It's now part of the Reconstruction Era

National Historic Park managed by the National Park Service. Today you can visit the center to explore the museum and take a tour. Penn hosts lots of local events too, including the Heritage Days Festival in early November of every year, celebrating the area's Gllageechee cultural legacy with an educational symposium, a space for artists and authors, craft and genealogy workshops, music,

and a fish fry and oyster roast. Today's episode is based on the article Pen Center, a little known haven of the Civil Rights Movement on how stuffworks dot com, written by Kerry Tatreu. Brain Stuff is production of iHeartRadio in partnership with how Stuffworks dot Com and is produced by Tyler Klang. Four more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.