Michael Allen sells Gullah goods at a booth inside Charleston’s historic city market. His display offers a tantalizing array of homemade sweetbread, exotic spices and mouth-watering jams. The “tastee treats”, as they’re called, come with a message.
“We say this little saying,” says Allen. “Indulge in a rich Gullah flavor.”
It’s a flavor Allen has savored all his life.
Family legacy
The family recipes have been passed down for generations and likely came from enslaved Africans. But growing up in Kingstree, Allen says, he didn’t really understand what it meant to be Gullah.
“I saw Africanisms around me, but often things were not discussed in that manner,” says Allen.
Today Allen discusses those Africanisms regularly.
He learned their significance as an adult, studying history at South Carolina State University. Then, in 1980, he went to work for the National Park Service where he spent the next 40 years trying to change the narrative, especially around Civil War sites, to include Black history.
Allen helped create the Gullah Geechee Cultural Heritage Corridor in 2006, as well as Charleston’s new International African American Museum which opened last year.
Now he’s excited about a new opportunity, this time, from across the Atlantic.
“It’s an opportunity to work collaboratively if you will, a global initiative,” says Allen.
South Carolina's connection
The Guardian Newspaper in Manchester, England reached out to Allen last year after it began looking into its past following the 2020 murder of George Floyd.
“The whole world, at that moment, recognized that would not have happened if he (Floyd) hadn’t been Black,” says Ebony Riddell Bamber, the director of The Guardian’s living legacy enslavement program.
The program aims to make amends for the newspaper’s role in slavery which was discovered after Floyd’s death.
The Guardian’s owner, the Scott Trust, commissioned a study and learned the newspaper’s 1821 founder, John Edward Taylor, had acquired much of his wealth as a cotton merchant. Many of his funders had too. In fact, one funder owned slaves on a plantation in Jamaica.
And that cotton they so richly profited from was picked by enslaved Africans on America’s sea islands in South Carolina, Georgia and Florida.
“We knew this was a massive moment for us, that we had to fully acknowledge and do something that met the moment,” says Joseph Harker, who’s worked at The Guardian for 30 years.
In 2023, the newspaper apologized and published its findings.
“And then we felt we needed to do more still,” says Harker. “So, we drew up a plan for restorative justice.”
Restorative justice
That plan called for an advisory board, which Allen joined this year. Its members will help The Guardian figure out how to repair communities directly impacted by slavery.
The newspaper has committed to spending roughly $12 million dollars over the next ten years in places like the U.S., the Caribbean, South Africa and South America. Just last month, it sent a team to the Lowcountry to ask Gullah people what they need.
“You know, we’re hearing a lot about land and property,” says Bamber. “We’re hearing generally about a desire to create more generational wealth.”
Bamber says her team will assess and address those needs monetarily and through reporting.
Allen, meantime, is eager to share the history and traditions of Gullah people. And he hopes The Guardian’s efforts will inspire other institutions.
“They should look into their past. Look into their history. Don’t be afraid of the answers but use those answers as a way of dealing with the present.”
Britain abolished slavery long before the U.S., in 1833. But it’s government paid the enslavers for their lost, forced labor. That debt wasn’t resolved until 2015.
