This year, the Gullah Geechee Cultural Heritage Corridor wanted to shake things up, get away from what has been their traditional meeting formula, and instead offer an up-close and personal, historically engaging experience.
The nonprofit’s North Carolina Summit invites you to take part in the “Black Church Crawl,” an immersive tour celebrating the history of Black churches that have housed decades of congregants in Brunswick and New Hanover counties.
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Scheduled from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. April 18, the tour will allow participants to step within the walls of three historic Black churches, where speakers will delve into the stories of how these cultural landmarks came to be and their significance as spaces of faith, fellowship and community.
“Although you might live in a certain area, you might not be really invested in what’s going on,” said Nora Williams, Gullah Geechee Cultural Heritage Corridor public relations and marketing campaign coordinator. “We wanted something that was happening in their community and something that they also could get involved in. Of course, anyone is allowed to participate, but we felt like this would be a great way for people to learn more about themselves and their history and the culture.”
The summit in North Carolina kicks off the first of four meetings the commission-led nonprofit holds annually in each of the states in which the corridor spans.
The corridor is one of the largest of the 62 designated national heritage areas in the country, encompassing about 2,200 miles through coastal counties from Florida to southeastern North Carolina.
“We’re one of the ones that primarily focus on people,” Williams said.
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The Gullah Geechee are the descendants of West and Central Africans ripped from their native land and shipped to America, where they were enslaved to work on the coastal rice, Sea Island cotton and indigo plantations of Florida, Georgia and the Carolinas.
Their enslavement on isolated coastal plantations and barrier islands helped them retain many of their indigenous African traditions, which remain today through spiritual traditions, arts and crafts, and food.
They even created their own language, Gullah, a mixture of West African dialects and English that is not spoken anywhere else in the world.
Congress enacted the Gullah Geechee Cultural Heritage Corridor and the commission established to oversee it on Oct. 12, 2006, through the National Heritage Act of 2006 with the aim of recognizing, sustaining, and celebrating the Gullah Geechee’s contributions to American culture and history.
The nonprofit assists the four state governments and local governments within those states in interpreting the Gullah Geechee’s story and preserving historic sites, data and artifacts associated with its people and culture.
One of those sites sits just off Cedar Hill Road in Navassa, the first stop of the church crawl, an event that will feature public historian, performance artist and Gullah Geechee’s own Tyanna Parker-West, Wilmington native and WilmingtoNColor founder Cedric Harrison, and Pastor Derrick Parker.
Just last year, a multiyear, more than $1 million effort to restore Reaves Chapel, a one-room church built on the bluffs of the Cape Fear River in Brunswick County by people formerly enslaved at Cedar Hill Plantation more than a century ago, was completed.
The little chapel in Navassa was eventually relocated by its congregation, using logs and a team of oxen, inland on land Ed Reaves, a former Cedar Hill Plantation slave, donated to the church in 1911. The church eventually became affiliated with the African Methodist Episcopal denomination and remained an AME church until its doors closed permanently in the mid-2000s.
Today, it is a tangible testament to those who built it, maintained it, and worshiped in it.
The crawl will continue across the Cape Fear River to downtown Wilmington, where Chestnut Street Presbyterian Church, the oldest African American presbyterian church in North Carolina, and St. Stephen African Methodist Episcopal Church continue to welcome congregants.
Services have been held at Chestnut Street Presbyterian Church for more than 150 years since it was erected during the third great awakening, a time in the United States of religious activism and social reform that occurred from the late 1850s to the early 20th century.
Roughly a third of a mile away, congregants have filled the pews in St. Stephen AME Church’s current sanctuary since its completion in 1886. The building that stands at 501 Red Cross Street today replaced the original, simple wooden chapel whose members, about 1,500 by 1879, had outgrown its sanctuary.
“The congregation of the popular church was a powerful influence on the community and the state,” according to the North Carolina Department of Cultural and Natural Resources.
When President William Howard Taft visited Wilmington in 1909, he stopped at the church to make a speech to African American schoolchildren.
Williams said in a telephone interview last week that heritage corridor officials chose to hold the church crawl in the Wilmington area because the nonprofit organization wants to preserve and celebrate the Gullah Geechee community in New Hanover and Brunswick counties.
“We understand that Wilmington and the surrounding area is growing very fast,” she said. “Our goal as the corridor is to preserve and amplify the Gullah Geechee community in these areas, so we felt like this was a great time to highlight that community.”
Registration for the Black Church Crawl is $25, which includes transportation and a lunch featuring the culinary flare of two-time James Beard nominee Chef Keith Rhodes, owner of the wildly popular Catch in Wilmington and Voyce Bistro, his newest restaurant featuring coastal cuisine infused with Caribbean flavors.
“We would love for it to fill up and have as many people as possible,” Williams said of the church crawl. “We’re flexible and we have the ability to provide more transportation if more people are interested.”
She anticipates the organization will hold future events as part of its state summits, adding “We do see this growing and being a more interactive experience as opposed to you come in and it’s a presentation. I think we really want people to experience these spaces, experience the people.”
