The New York Times has a Juneteenth Weekend trip to Jekyll Island and the Golden Isles in Georgia focused on its history of slavery, Reconstruction, and Jim Crow. Jekyll Island was the site of the last large-scale illegal slave importation business. According to the article:
In the fall of 1858, an elegant 114-foot yacht arrived on the reedy shores of Jekyll Island off the southern coast of Georgia. The Wanderer had traveled seven days from West Africa before mooring clandestinely on the island’s marshy coast. Owned by the South Carolina businessman and socialite William Corrie, the vessel was often used for entertaining wealthy friends. On this occasion, though, the Wanderer’s mission was less benign: Crammed beneath its deck were hundreds of kidnapped West Africans, destined to labor on the region’s plantations in defiance of the U.S. ban on the importation of slaves that had been instituted a half-century earlier. While historians debate various details of the crime, it’s generally agreed that some 400 Africans arrived on Jekyll Island, with scores dying en route from disease.
From the article:
My interest in St. Andrews Beach was less about swimming than about how it came to be. Its history is remarkable: Back in the late 1940s‚ a white Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist named Roy Sprigle colored himself black during his investigation of the color line in the Deep South. Among his observations, published in serialized articles in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette: In this beautiful coastal community, African Americans were prohibited from swimming — or as he put it, there was nowhere “a Negro can stick a toe in salt water.” Those who dared to do so were, at best, fined $50.
“Georgia bought the fabulous Jekyll Island‚ playground of the Rockefellers‚ Whitneys and Bakers for $800‚000,” wrote Sprigle. “It will build a great seashore resort for the citizens of Georgia. But there will be no accommodations for Negroes‚ despite pleas by most of the Negro organizations in the state.”
The series, along with petitions by Black residents in nearby Brunswick, sparked a furor that led the state, in 1950, to grant African Americans access to a slice of Jekyll — the first public beach in Georgia open to Black people. The area soon blossomed; its Dolphin Club and Motor Hotel became a “Chitlin’ Circuit” hot spot in the 1950s, luring such performers as B.B. King, Otis Redding, Millie Jackson and Percy Sledge.
Relaxing in the solitude of a nearly empty St. Andrews Beach, with its eerily beautiful sun-bleached dead trees, and pelicans swirling and dipping along the white sandy shore, I couldn’t shake a sense of despair over what the moment must have been like for captive Africans arriving on these “Golden Isles.” I thought of the revolt in 1803 at Igbo Landing at Dunbar Creek on St. Simons Island, among the largest mass suicides of enslaved people. Historians don’t always agree on the facts — some naysayers have even called the occurrence a legend — but here’s what’s been recorded: The Savannah slave merchants John Couper and Thomas Spalding purchased 75 Igbo and other West African captive slaves for $100 apiece, planning to sell them to plantation owners on St. Simons. During the 1803 voyage from Savannah to St. Simons, the Black captives took control of the vessel, drowned the crew and then themselves. The tale of African resistance, the choice to die rather than submit, is kept alive in Gullah Geechee culture.
Follow Reconstruction Blog on Social Media:
Very informative
Have a good 4th Matt.