Sapelo Island, Georgia, the Place Where Africans Survived America: Modernist Primitivists’ Hunt for African Retentions and the Discovery of Sapelo Island, Georgia’s Gullah Community, 1915–40

The history of Sapelo Islanders in published works reveals a complex cast of characters, each one working through ideas about racial distinction and inheritance; African culture and spirituality; and ancestral legacies relative to the black American slave past during the most turbulent years in America’s race-making history.  Feuding social scientists, adventure seeking journalists, amateur folklorists, and other writers, initiated and shaped the perception of Sapelo Islanders’ distinct connection to African culture during the 1920s and 1930s, and labeled them “Gullah.”  These researchers characterized the “Gullah,” as being uniquely connected to their African past, and as a population among whom African “survivals” were readily observable, in short, as authentic primitives in modern America.  This paper argues that the popular view of Sapelo Islanders’ “uniqueness” is largely the product of changing and evolving formulations about race and racial distinction in America.  Consequently, the “discovery” of Sapelo Island’s Gullah folk is more a sign of times than an anthropological discovery.

During the 1920s and 1930s, “islands,” held a special place in the Modernist imaginary.  For Modernists, the waters and oceans that separated islands from mainland communities also separated the “modern world” from the “primitive past”.  From this vantage point, islands, and the people who populated them, (especially non-white people) were believed to be stuck in an earlier time—remnants of a mythical past.  During the 1920s and 1930s, the convergence of the vogue of “Negro themes,” the hunt for black Americans’ African past, and the stark contrast between “primitive islands” and “modern main lands” guaranteed that Sapelo Islanders would become a subject of popular interest.   My paper examines these issues and unearths the way that intellectual and cultural trends cultivated a popular and enduring fascination with black Sapelo Islanders in the Jim Crow South.