"M" is for Moving Star Hall

"M" is for Moving Star Hall (Johns Island). Located in the South Carolina lowcountry, Moving Star Hall provides an example of an antebellum “praise house” that served the slave community and later the freed people, as a center of social and cultural life. “The Hall,” as the people of Johns Island referred to it, featured intense all night “prayings” in an expressive and egalitarian worship style. Following emancipation, the Hall was the headquarters for the Moving Star Society, a fraternal order. In the early twenty-first century, the Hall served as a place of worship for an African American Pentecostal Church. The folkways of the people of Johns Island have been kept alive by the Moving Star Hall Singers who have shared the music of the Hall and stories of lowcountry life, with regional and national audiences.