Why It's Important

the lowcountry: why it's important

Street Vendors in Charleston, courtesy of the Library of Congress

Charleston, South Carolina was a major port of entry for the International Slave Trade. Savannah, Georgia and St. Augustine, Florida were siginificant ports of entry where captive Africans were imported and sold throughout the eighteenth century. Planter migrations and the domestic slave trade scattered the descendants of the founding enslaved communities throughout the United States.

Runaway enslaved people from South Carolina, Georgia and beyond found a safe haven in Florida from the earliest Colonial period until the mid 1820s. From there, some made their way to the Bahamas, to Cuba or were removed to the West with the Creek and Seminole Indians. [1]

Thus, many enslaved people who were brought into South Carolina, Georgia and Florida, or were born into slavery there, later migrated to other parts of Norh America, or to the Caribbean. There are many thousands of African American and African Caribbean descendants whose ancestral roots lie in the Lowcountry Southeast. Lowcountry Africana will bring you resources for exploring that ancestral heritage.

The Lowcountry of today is the home of living history - the history of the cultural connections between the ancestors of West Africa and their descendants in America today. It is an endangered history, as development encroaches upon even the most isolated and pure of the Gullah-Geechee communities. We add our voices to those seeking the preservation of the cultural heritage of the Lowcountry Southeast.