IN MEMORY – The Reverend Victoria Glover Washington, featured in the film “Bin Yah”, passed away on June 24, 2010. She was 95 years old. The filmmakers would like to dedicate the July 8th broadcast of the film to her. Her generosity of spirit and heartfelt contributions to “Bin Yah”, for which the filmmakers are extremely grateful, will always be remembered. Through her words and memories the history and culture of Gullah communities in Mt. Pleasant and throughout the Lowcountry will live on.

Screening Details: SCETV Southern Lens Website

Trucks and cars pass above Mount Pleasant’s new Memorial Waterfront Park and some of them slow to follow signs directing them from the bridge to the town’s new waterfront gateway that opened July 3.

Visitors have found that the park is a great place to fish, take a nap on a bench or find a backdrop for their photos. Residents say the park beneath the footings of the Arthur Ravenel Jr. Bridge — complete with a fishing pier, cafe, war memorial, playground, visitor center and Sweetgrass Cultural Arts Pavilion — boosts home values.

Charla Henderson, of Harbour Watch neighborhood, a mile bike ride from the park, said she and her children have enjoyed the fishing opportunities and playground. “It adds to our property value and it’s a great place for kids,” Henderson said.

Prior to the its opening, a park across the street from Alhambra Hall on the opposite side of Mount Pleasant, was the closest playground to Henderson’s home.

The nine-acre $14 million waterfront park has also attracted people from outside Mount Pleasant. On a recent afternoon, Linda Bowles of Ladson visited the park with her family while children made use of the playground.

“It’s a nice use of land under the bridge as long as no one …,” Bowles said pointing to the passing traffic and flipping her hand indicating the possibility that something could flip or be thrown from the bridge above.

The only complaint so far has been from sweetgrass basketmakers. Ruth Wright set up outside the Sweetgrass Cultural Arts Pavilion for a week and failed to sell a single basket.

Normally she operates a stand outside the Charleston Federal Courthouse where she’s sure to attract a passing shopper. During peak tourist season she sells about 10 baskets a week.

“If I don’t sell a basket, at least I sell a wreath,” she said.

Tourists have stopped at the park, but Wright said they rush into the visitor center, pick up some forms and leave.

“You can’t even sell roses here,” Wright said. “I can’t make gas money.”

The pavilion is open daily 9 a.m.-5 p.m. But it is to be closed to sweetgrass basketmakers during town events and closes before evening concerts that Charleston County Parks and Recreation holds at the pier.

One basketmaker suggested allowing them to stay through the events to boost sales.

Most often the basketmakers set up along U.S. Highway 17 and don’t need much advertising because they lure tourists traveling the highway as they pass between Charleston and Myrtle Beach.

But at the park, that traffic roars right over the park in a rush of claps and rumbles.

“I don’t know if people know we are here or not,” Wright said.

Reach Jessica Johnson at 937-5921 or jjohnson@postandcourier.com.

For more video on Sweetgrass Basket Making culture, see “Bin Yah”.

Sweetgrass basketmaking culture, preserved on the sides of Mount Pleasant’s roadways for generations, has been given a special place in a new park near the Arthur Ravenel Jr. Bridge.

The park, complete with a visitor’s center, war memorial, cafe and fishing pier, sits along Wingo Way just under the U.S. Highway 17 approach to the bridge.

The pavilion, an open-air structure with sliding barn-like doors and shaded porches, offers an exhibit of sweetgrass basketmaking history and room for basket sewers to sell their wares.

Michael Allen, National Parks Service Gullah/Geechee coordinator, said that erecting a building has been a process that began in 1997 when the town first recognized the significance of the roadside basket stand by placing a historical marker along U.S. 17 at the intersection of Hamlin Road.

The location is thought to be near the site of the first basket stand on U.S. Highway 17 in Mount Pleasant.

The structure can serve as a model for how other communities can preserve and promote history along the Gullah-Geechee corridor, he said. “This is a representation and acknowledgement of the sacrifice, contribution and heritage of three centuries of history that has been put in a place and that can be experienced by all,” Allen said.

Mount Pleasant Councilwoman Thomasena Stokes-Marshall, taking a sneak preview of the facility, couldn’t stop smiling and said she was a little overwhelmed.

The interior of the structure includes historical photographs, information on basketmaking history and area stories including that of Peter and Pearl Ascue, who have amassed one of the area’s largest collections of sweetgrass baskets. Peter Ascue started the collection in the 1970s when he accepted baskets as payments for vehicle repairs.

Exhibit planner Carol Poplin, who is senior project manager of The History Workshop, said designing an exhibit within the building posed an interesting challenge because the barn doors slide open to let the breeze through and she didn’t have much wall space to work with. Instead, she created three movable kiosks trimmed with wood panels and tin roofs to resemble basket stands.

“It really captures the essence of it,” Stokes-Marshall said of the exhibit.

The pavilion also can be seen as a monument to the growing relationship between the basketmaking community and the town of Mount Pleasant and surrounding area, Allen said. In addition to the historical marker, legislators have named a portion of U.S. Highway 17 the Sweetgrass Basket Maker Highway. Mount Pleasant and Charleston County implemented a basketmaker overlay district that allows basket sewers to keep their stands along the highway right of way from Long Point Road to Porchers Bluff Road.

The community’s roughly 500 basketmakers will be allowed to set up and sell their baskets from the pavilion 9 a.m.-5 p.m. daily on a rotating schedule.They will also stream movies and media, including the lowcountry film by Justin Nathanson, “Bin Yah”.

The Sweetgrass Cultural Arts Festival Association has leased the facility from the town and has selected which basket sewers will work when through a lottery drawing system with basketmakers who have volunteered and supported the festival association getting first draw, said Stokes-Marshall. Sweetgrass Cultural Arts Festival project director Cambridge Jenkins II, will serve as the pavilion’s manager.

The town is the first to have a physical structure to recognize the Gullah/Geechee culture along the corridor, a national heritage area, Allen said.

For more video on Sweetgrass Basket Making culture, see “Bin Yah”.

Researchers reported that as late as 1979, 100,000 South Carolinians spoke Gullah. Current estimates count 7,000 to 10,000 people speaking Gullah at home. Without intervention, the Gullah language will soon live only in scholarly textbooks and on fragile academic recordings.

The origins of Gullah date back to a sad chapter in America’s past. When slave traders sailed to West Africa and stuffed their ships full of men, women and children to be sold as slaves to Southern planters, Gullah was conceived. As that black culture meshed with the white, Gullah was born. A thick, lilting mix of African and English dialects, it started as a makeshift second language used among the sea island slaves, and it slowly evolved into the unwritten native tongue of their descendants.

Oddly, slavery and the antebellum South fed energy to the language. Gullah served a very practical transitional purpose, and its use and culture actually developed during those years. After the Civil War, however, the separation between the black and white cultures became highly exaggerated for nearly a century and a half. Cut off from the cultural homogenization that occurred everywhere else in America, life along the sea islands changed very little. Sea islanders still fished the coastline, shrimped the marsh, hunted for game in the woods, and spoke their native tongue unashamedly.

Gullah stubbornly survived in this splendid isolation, until the world rediscovered the islands and invested millions of dollars to develop them as resorts. Suddenly, bridges were built that introduced paved roads, indoor plumbing, better education, and access to higher paying mainland jobs. Gullah became thought of as “bad English”. Soon it was something to be ashamed of or denied. Then television, the greatest homogenizing influence of all, came along and nearly snuffed the language out altogether.

Finding true Gullah today is like finding gold. Its rare, and its kept hidden from “outsiders”. Still, there are a few islanders determined to keep it alive. There still are those who knit their own fishing nets, who still cook the Gullah recipes and serve their families whole meals fresh from the sea. Thankfully, there are those who take what’s left of the sweetgrass from the riverbanks and fashion baskets of great skill and beauty – just like their ancestors did back in Sierra Leone.

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Bin Yah: There’s No Place Like Home is a documentary for sale on this website: presented by Justin Nathanson and The ChasDOC Film Society, the film explores the potential loss of important historic African American communities in Mt. Pleasant, S.C due to growth and development. Through the testimonies of the residents themselves, the film explores the culture, the history, the importance of land and the concept of home, giving a voice to those who seldom have had a chance to be heard.

A proposed highway extension threatens to bisect these close-knit neighborhoods of cousins and kinfolk, established by freed slaves and home to generations of their families for hundreds of years. Many residents are artisans and craftspeople, practicing traditional skills including sweetgrass basketmaking, brought over from West Africa and handed down from mothers and fathers to sons and daughters. Today, Mt. Pleasant, South Carolina is the primary place in the U.S. where this grass is harvested and “sewn” into this particular type of basket.

Bin Yah will attempt to preserve – at least on film – the memories of the special places that may be lost forever as the struggle between the real “bin yahs” and the “come yahs” escalates.

At the Sweetgrass Cultural Arts Festival 2008 at Laing Middle School.

The school is nestled within the Sweetgrass Basket corridor on Hamlin Road in Mount Pleasant. The Community Action Group for Encouragement, or CAGE posted signs and have petitions to stop demolition plans.

The school district plans to build a three school community on the existing site.
Charleston County school officials plan to look at three design options for the new Jennie Moore Elementary and Laing Middle schools campus in Mount Pleasant.

A group of residents has lobbied district officials for more than a year to spare the existing Jennie Moore building, and two of the three options would allow that to happen. The district plans to rebuild Jennie Moore on its existing site, add a new Laing Middle building and build a kindergarten through second-grade school on the same campus.

Gullah Heritage Preservation doesn’t want to see Jennie Moore or Laing Middle torn down because both schools have historical significance to the black community, said Jeannette Lee, a member of the preservation group and resident of the Seven Mile community.

It’s especially important because most things associated with black history are destroyed, said George Freeman, a member of the group. Jennie Moore was a school for blacks, and Freeman said the intent was not educate them but to keep them isolated.

He compared the destruction of Jennie Moore to the postwar destruction of detention centers built for Japanese-Americans in World War II. Today, some people don’t know Japanese-Americans were detained in camps because they no longer exist, he said. If Jennie Moore is demolished, the history of segregated schools also will be destroyed.

He called Laing and Jennie Moore the “only remaining educational structures still standing to preserve the educational history of African Americans in Mount Pleasant.”

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Bin Yah: There’s No Place Like Home is a documentary for sale on this website: presented by Justin Nathanson and The ChasDOC Film Society, the film explores the potential loss of important historic African American communities in Mt. Pleasant, S.C due to growth and development. Through the testimonies of the residents themselves, the film explores the culture, the history, the importance of land and the concept of home, giving a voice to those who seldom have had a chance to be heard.

A proposed highway extension threatens to bisect these close-knit neighborhoods of cousins and kinfolk, established by freed slaves and home to generations of their families for hundreds of years. Many residents are artisans and craftspeople, practicing traditional skills including sweetgrass basketmaking, brought over from West Africa and handed down from mothers and fathers to sons and daughters. Today, Mt. Pleasant, South Carolina is the primary place in the U.S. where this grass is harvested and “sewn” into this particular type of basket.

Bin Yah will attempt to preserve – at least on film – the memories of the special places that may be lost forever as the struggle between the real “bin yahs” and the “come yahs” escalates.

SCETV – August 14, 2008 – 10pm

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Bin Yah: There’s No Place Like Home is a documentary for sale on this website: presented by Justin Nathanson and The ChasDOC Film Society, the film explores the potential loss of important historic African American communities in Mt. Pleasant, S.C due to growth and development. Through the testimonies of the residents themselves, the film explores the culture, the history, the importance of land and the concept of home, giving a voice to those who seldom have had a chance to be heard.

A proposed highway extension threatens to bisect these close-knit neighborhoods of cousins and kinfolk, established by freed slaves and home to generations of their families for hundreds of years. Many residents are artisans and craftspeople, practicing traditional skills including sweetgrass basketmaking, brought over from West Africa and handed down from mothers and fathers to sons and daughters. Today, Mt. Pleasant, South Carolina is the primary place in the U.S. where this grass is harvested and “sewn” into this particular type of basket.

Bin Yah will attempt to preserve – at least on film – the memories of the special places that may be lost forever as the struggle between the real “bin yahs” and the “come yahs” escalates. ]]> http://binyahfilm.org/2008/07/next-television-broadcast-of-bin-yah/feed/ 2 http://binyahfilm.org/2008/05/video-sweetgrass-basket-sculpture-unveiling-dedication-to-gullah-geechee-culture/ http://binyahfilm.org/2008/05/video-sweetgrass-basket-sculpture-unveiling-dedication-to-gullah-geechee-culture/#comments Sat, 10 May 2008 16:46:14 +0000 admin http://binyahfilm.org/?p=34 “Winnowing Hands” Dedication and Unveiling

May 10, 2008

Click to Play Video - Sweetgrass Basket Sculpture Unveiling & Dedication to Gullah Culture

Octavia Mitchell from WCBD and Thomasena Stokes-Marshall, Mount Pleasant Town Council Member and President of the Sweetgrass Cultural Arts Festival Association welcomed and presented “Winnowing Hands”, a beautiful, big bronze sculpture in the Oakland Plantation Shopping Center in Mount Pleasant, SC.

Almost 3 years of planning went into this dream, honoring sweetgrass weaving heritage and Gullah – Geechee culture.

More than 150 people joined Mayor Harry H. Hallman, Congressman and super delegate James E. Clyburn, NPS Gullah Geechee Heritage Corridor Coordinator Michael Allen and others as Tex Small unveiled the sculpture. Winnowing Hands was created by sculptor Shirley McWorter-Moss, who was on hand and shared some nice words.