Beaufort, South Carolina
Beaufort is a city in and the county seat of Beaufort County, South Carolina, United States. Chartered in 1711, it is the second-oldest city in South Carolina, behind Charleston; the city's population was 12,361 in the 2010 census. It is a primary city within the Hilton Head Island-Bluffton-Beaufort, SC Metropolitan Statistical Area. Beaufort is located on Port Royal Island, in the heart of the Sea Islands and South Carolina Lowcountry; the city is renowned for its scenic location and for maintaining a historic character by preservation of its antebellum architecture. The prominent role of Beaufort and the surrounding Sea Islands during the Reconstruction era after the U. S. Civil War is memorialized by the Reconstruction Era National Monument, established in 2017; the city is known for its military establishments, being located in close proximity to Parris Island and a U. S. naval hospital, in addition to being home of the Marine Corps Air Station Beaufort. The city has been featured in the New York Times, named "Best Small Southern Town" by Southern Living, a "Top 25 Small City Arts Destination" by American Style, a "Top 50 Adventure Town" by National Geographic Adventure.
Written history began 500 years ago with the discovery of the area by Spanish Captain Diego Guilarte de Salazar in 1514. Thus, Beaufort County was the site of the second landing on the North American continent by Europeans, in 1514; the first landing—Pedro Menéndez de Avilés at St. Augustine—was only a year earlier; the Lowcountry region had been subject to numerous European explorations and failed attempts at colonization before the British founded the city in 1711. The city grew subject to numerous attacks from Native American tribes and threats from the powerful Spanish Empire to the south, it flourished first as a center for shipbuilding and when the colony was established as a slave society, as the elite center for the Lowcountry planters through the Civil War. Several months after hostilities began between the states, Beaufort was occupied by Union forces following the Battle of Port Royal. Due in part to its early occupation, the city attracted escaping slaves; the Union declared the slaves emancipated and initiated efforts at education and preparation for full independence.
The Freedmen's Bureau worked with local blacks during Reconstruction. After the war, the city relied on phosphate mining before a devastating hurricane in 1893 and a fire in 1907 brought extensive destruction and economic turmoil, their effects slowed growth of the city for nearly half a century. In the latter half of the twentieth century, the community became a destination for tourists, it benefited by the growth of military installations in the area and related employment. Local groups have worked to preserve significant architecture. In addition to the Beaufort Historic District, The Anchorage, William Barnwell House, Barnwell-Gough House, Beaufort National Cemetery, John A. Cuthbert House, Fort Lyttelton Site, Hunting Island State Park Lighthouse, Laurel Bay Plantation, Seacoast Packing Company, Seaside Plantation, Robert Smalls House, Tabby Manse, John Mark Verdier House are listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Beaufort is located at 32°25′55″N 80°41′22″W; the majority of the city is situated upon Port Royal Island, an interior Sea Island that the city shares with neighboring Port Royal and unincorporated portions of Beaufort County.
The city has annexed lands across the Beaufort River on Lady's Island. The city is amid a marshy estuary, according to the United States Census Bureau has a total area of 33.6 square miles, of which 27.6 square miles is land and 6.0 square miles, or 17.80%, is water. Remnants of the original English colonial settlement of Beaufort can be found in the downtown or historic district area. 304 acres of the town have been designated a National Historic Landmark. With approximate dimensions, downtown is defined as anything upon the peninsula jutting into the Beaufort River, located east of Ribaut Road. Further defined, downtown is broken into five distinct historic neighborhoods: Downtown, The Point, The Bluff, The Old Commons, the Northwest Quadrant; as the city expanded in the 20th century, additional growth focused on undeveloped areas north and west of the historic district. Much of the growth can be attributed to the increased military influence during the 1940s and 1950s, in which Beaufort's population doubled as a result of new military personnel and families moving to the area.
These areas have since become integral parts of the city and today are home to the majority of the residents in the city. The Pigeon Point and Higginsonville neighborhoods are located north of Downtown Beaufort and are built around the Beaufort National Cemetery, they contain two major city parks: Pigeon Point Community Park and the Basil Green Recreation Complex. An area with smaller homes and one-story early 20th century structures, Pigeon Point has experienced a renewal of development interest, with many homes being "flipped" or renovated in recent years. Higginsonville is more similar in character to the Northwest Quadrant neighborhood and has its street names come from famous abolitionists during the Civil War era; the West End and Depot neighborhoods are located west of Ribaut Road, south of Boundary Street and north of the Technical College of the Lowcountry campus. These areas have been the focus of recent redevelopment efforts. Concentrated around the Beaufort rail station, the neighborhoods have similar charac
A Soldier's Story
A Soldier's Story is a 1984 American drama film directed by Norman Jewison, adapted by Charles Fuller from his Pulitzer Prize-winning Off Broadway production A Soldier's Play. A black officer is sent to investigate the murder of a black sergeant in Louisiana near the end of World War II, it is a story about racism in a segregated regiment of the U. S Army commanded by white officers and training in the Jim Crow South, in a time and place where a black officer is unprecedented and bitterly resented by nearly everyone; the film was first shown at the Toronto International Film Festival. It won the New York Drama Critics Award, the Outer Critics Circle Award, the Theater Club Award, three Village Voice Obie Awards, it won the Golden Prize at the 14th Moscow International Film Festival. It was nominated for three Academy Awards: for Best Picture, Supporting Actor, Screenplay Adaptation; the time is 1944 during World War II. Vernon Waters, a master sergeant in a company of black soldiers, is drunk and staggering along a road along Fort Neal, a segregated Army base in Louisiana.
Waters' last words amidst his raucous laughter were "They still hate you! They still hate you!" before he is shot to death with a.45 caliber pistol. When Waters' body is found the next day, Captain Richard Davenport, a black officer from the Judge Advocate General's Corps is sent to investigate, against the wishes of commanding officer Colonel Nivins. While the general consensus is that he was killed by local members of the Ku Klux Klan, others are doubtful, having heard that Waters' stripes and insignia were still on his uniform and aware that the Klan's typical M. O. is to remove them before lynching their victims. From the outset, Davenport is faced with obstacles. Colonel Nivins will only give him three days to conduct his investigation. Captain Taylor, the one white officer in favor of a full investigation, is uncooperative and patronizing, fearing that a black officer will have little success in catching those responsible. While some black soldiers are happy and proud to see one of their own race wearing captain's bars, others are distrustful and evasive.
Davenport learns that Waters' company was part of the 221st Chemical Smoke Generator Battalion and while eager to serve their country overseas, when not training they are assigned menial jobs in deference to their white counterparts. However, most are former baseball players from the Negro baseball league and grouped as a unit in order to play ball, with Waters assigned to manage the players, their success as a team playing against white soldiers gives them a good deal of popularity, with talk of the team playing against the New York Yankees in an exhibition game. James Wilkie, a fellow sergeant whom Waters demoted to private for being drunk on duty portrays Waters as a strict "spit-and-polish" disciplinarian but a just, good-natured NCO who got on well with the men the jovial and well-liked C. J. Memphis, but as Davenport probes deeper, he uncovers Waters' true tyrannical nature and his disgust with his fellow black soldiers those from the rural South. An interview with Private Peterson revealed how he stood up to Waters when he berated the men after another winning game.
In retaliation, the sergeant beat him badly. Davenport learns through interviews with other soldiers how Waters charged C. J. with the murder of a white MP, after a search conducted by Wilkie turned up a discharged pistol under C. J.'s bunk. Confronting him with the evidence, Waters provoked C. J. into striking him, whereupon the weapons charge was dismissed and C. J. was charged with striking a superior officer. When C. J.'s best friend Bernard Cobb visits him in jail, C. J. is suffering from intense claustrophobia and tells Cobb of a visit from Sgt. Waters, who admitted to C. J. that it was a set-up and that Waters had done it at least five times before to others like him, saying "the Black race can't afford you no more... the day of the Geechee is gone, boy. And you're going with it." When Davenport asked Corporal Cobb what happened to C. J. he is told that the man hanged himself in his cell while awaiting trial. In protest, the platoon threw the last game of the season, while Waters was left profoundly shaken by the suicide.
The team was disbanded by the players assigned to a smoke generating company. Davenport finds out that two white officers coming from a military exercise, Captain Wilcox and Lieutenant Byrd, had an altercation with the drunk sergeant a short time before his death; when questioned, both officers admit to physical assault when confronted by Waters on a drunken tirade, but deny killing him, revealing that they had not been issued.45 ammunition for the exercise as it was in short supply and it was reserved for MPs and soldiers on special duty. Though Taylor is convinced that Wilcox and Byrd are lying and is eager to arrest them, Davenport releases them. While a search has begun for Privates Peterson and Smalls who have both gone AWOL, Davenport questions Wilkie once more, the demoted private is forced to admit that he planted the gun under C. J.'s bunk on Waters' orders. Though he hid it from everyone, Waters divulged in private to Wilkie his intense hatred of C. J. and others like him whom Waters felt were an unwelcome weight on the Black race.
Waters reveals that during World War I he helped lynched an African American soldier who had played an Uncle Tom to French civilians. Davenport asks why Waters didn't go after Peterson since they had the fight, Wilkie tells him that Waters liked Peterson because he fought back and was planning to promote him. Davenport has Wilkie placed under arrest just as an impromptu celebration has begun outside after learning
Caribbean
The Caribbean is a region of The Americas that consists of the Caribbean Sea, its islands and the surrounding coasts. The region is southeast of the Gulf of Mexico and the North American mainland, east of Central America, north of South America. Situated on the Caribbean Plate, the region comprises more than 700 islands, islets and cays; these islands form island arcs that delineate the eastern and northern edges of the Caribbean Sea. The Caribbean islands, consisting of the Greater Antilles on the north and the Lesser Antilles on the south and east, are part of the somewhat larger West Indies grouping, which includes the Lucayan Archipelago; the Lucayans and, less Bermuda, are sometimes considered Caribbean despite the fact that none of these islands border the Caribbean Sea. In a wider sense, the mainland countries and territories of Belize, the Caribbean region of Colombia, the Yucatán Peninsula, Margarita Island, the Guyanas, are included due to their political and cultural ties with the region.
Geopolitically, the Caribbean islands are regarded as a subregion of North America and are organized into 30 territories including sovereign states, overseas departments, dependencies. From December 15, 1954, to October 10, 2010, there was a country known as the Netherlands Antilles composed of five states, all of which were Dutch dependencies. From January 3, 1958, to May 31, 1962, there was a short-lived political union called the West Indies Federation composed of ten English-speaking Caribbean territories, all of which were British dependencies; the West Indies cricket team continues to represent many of those nations. The region takes its name from that of the Caribs, an ethnic group present in the Lesser Antilles and parts of adjacent South America at the time of the Spanish conquest of the Americas; the two most prevalent pronunciations of "Caribbean" outside the Caribbean are, with the primary stress on the third syllable, with the stress on the second. Most authorities of the last century preferred the stress on the third syllable.
This is the older of the two pronunciations, but the stressed-second-syllable variant has been established for over 75 years. It has been suggested that speakers of British English prefer while North American speakers more use, but major American dictionaries and other sources list the stress on the third syllable as more common in American English too. According to the American version of Oxford Online Dictionaries, the stress on the second syllable is becoming more common in UK English and is considered "by some" to be more up to date and more "correct"; the Oxford Online Dictionaries claim that the stress on the second syllable is the most common pronunciation in the Caribbean itself, but according to the Dictionary of Caribbean English Usage, the most common pronunciation in Caribbean English stresses the first syllable instead. The word "Caribbean" has multiple uses, its principal ones are political. The Caribbean can be expanded to include territories with strong cultural and historical connections to slavery, European colonisation and the plantation system.
The United Nations geoscheme for the Americas presents the Caribbean as a distinct region within the Americas. Physiographically, the Caribbean region is a chain of islands surrounding the Caribbean Sea. To the north, the region is bordered by the Gulf of Mexico, the Straits of Florida and the Northern Atlantic Ocean, which lies to the east and northeast. To the south lies the coastline of the continent of South America. Politically, the "Caribbean" may be centred on socio-economic groupings found in the region. For example, the bloc known as the Caribbean Community contains the Co-operative Republic of Guyana, the Republic of Suriname in South America and Belize in Central America as full members. Bermuda and the Turks and Caicos Islands, which are in the Atlantic Ocean, are associate members of the Caribbean Community; the Commonwealth of the Bahamas is in the Atlantic and is a full member of the Caribbean Community. Alternatively, the organisation called the Association of Caribbean States consists of every nation in the surrounding regions that lie on the Caribbean, plus El Salvador, which lies on the Pacific Ocean.
According to the ACS, the total population of its member states is 227 million people. The geography and climate in the Caribbean region varies: Some islands in the region have flat terrain of non-volcanic origin; these islands include Aruba, Curaçao, Bonaire, the Cayman Islands, Saint Croix, the Bahamas, Antigua. Others possess rugged towering mountain-ranges like the islands of Saint Martin, Hispaniola, Puerto Rico, Dominica, Saba, Sint Eustatius, Saint Kitts, Saint Lucia, Saint Thomas, Saint John, Grenada, Saint Vincent, Guadeloupe and Trinidad and Tobago. Definitions of the terms Greater Antilles and Lesser Antilles vary; the Virgin Islands as part of the Puerto Rican bank are sometimes included with the Greater Antilles. The term Lesser Antilles is used to define an island arc that includes Grenada but excludes Trinidad and Tobago and the Leeward Antilles; the waters of the Caribbean Sea host large, migratory schools of fish and coral reef
African Americans
African Americans are an ethnic group of Americans with total or partial ancestry from any of the black racial groups of Africa. The term refers to descendants of enslaved black people who are from the United States. Black and African Americans constitute the third largest racial and ethnic group in the United States. Most African Americans are descendants of enslaved peoples within the boundaries of the present United States. On average, African Americans are of West/Central African and European descent, some have Native American ancestry. According to U. S. Census Bureau data, African immigrants do not self-identify as African American; the overwhelming majority of African immigrants identify instead with their own respective ethnicities. Immigrants from some Caribbean, Central American and South American nations and their descendants may or may not self-identify with the term. African-American history starts in the 16th century, with peoples from West Africa forcibly taken as slaves to Spanish America, in the 17th century with West African slaves taken to English colonies in North America.
After the founding of the United States, black people continued to be enslaved, the last four million black slaves were only liberated after the Civil War in 1865. Due to notions of white supremacy, they were treated as second-class citizens; the Naturalization Act of 1790 limited U. S. citizenship to whites only, only white men of property could vote. These circumstances were changed by Reconstruction, development of the black community, participation in the great military conflicts of the United States, the elimination of racial segregation, the civil rights movement which sought political and social freedom. In 2008, Barack Obama became the first African American to be elected President of the United States; the first African slaves arrived via Santo Domingo to the San Miguel de Gualdape colony, founded by Spanish explorer Lucas Vázquez de Ayllón in 1526. The marriage between Luisa de Abrego, a free black domestic servant from Seville and Miguel Rodríguez, a white Segovian conquistador in 1565 in St. Augustine, is the first known and recorded Christian marriage anywhere in what is now the continental United States.
The ill-fated colony was immediately disrupted by a fight over leadership, during which the slaves revolted and fled the colony to seek refuge among local Native Americans. De Ayllón and many of the colonists died shortly afterwards of an epidemic and the colony was abandoned; the settlers and the slaves who had not escaped returned to Haiti, whence. The first recorded Africans in British North America were "20 and odd negroes" who came to Jamestown, Virginia via Cape Comfort in August 1619 as indentured servants; as English settlers died from harsh conditions and more Africans were brought to work as laborers. An indentured servant would work for several years without wages; the status of indentured servants in early Virginia and Maryland was similar to slavery. Servants could be bought, sold, or leased and they could be physically beaten for disobedience or running away. Unlike slaves, they were freed after their term of service expired or was bought out, their children did not inherit their status, on their release from contract they received "a year's provision of corn, double apparel, tools necessary", a small cash payment called "freedom dues".
Africans could raise crops and cattle to purchase their freedom. They raised families, married other Africans and sometimes intermarried with Native Americans or English settlers. By the 1640s and 1650s, several African families owned farms around Jamestown and some became wealthy by colonial standards and purchased indentured servants of their own. In 1640, the Virginia General Court recorded the earliest documentation of lifetime slavery when they sentenced John Punch, a Negro, to lifetime servitude under his master Hugh Gwyn for running away. In the Spanish Florida some Spanish married or had unions with Pensacola, Creek or African women, both slave and free, their descendants created a mixed-race population of mestizos and mulattos; the Spanish encouraged slaves from the southern British colonies to come to Florida as a refuge, promising freedom in exchange for conversion to Catholicism. King Charles II of Spain issued a royal proclamation freeing all slaves who fled to Spanish Florida and accepted conversion and baptism.
Most went to the area around St. Augustine, but escaped slaves reached Pensacola. St. Augustine had mustered an all-black militia unit defending Spain as early as 1683. One of the Dutch African arrivals, Anthony Johnson, would own one of the first black "slaves", John Casor, resulting from the court ruling of a civil case; the popular conception of a race-based slave system did not develop until the 18th century. The Dutch West India Company introduced slavery in 1625 with the importation of eleven black slaves into New Amsterdam. All the colony's slaves, were freed upon its surrender to the British. Massachusetts was the first British colony to recognize slavery in 1641. In 1662, Virginia passed a law that children of enslaved women took the status of the mother, rather than that of the father, as under English common law; this principle was called partus sequitur ventrum. By an act of 1699, the colony ordered all free blacks deported defining as slaves all people of African descent who remained in the c
Bruh Rabbit and the Tar Baby Girl
Bruh Rabbit and the Tar Baby Girl is a 2003 picture book by Virginia Hamilton and illustrated by James Ransome. It is a retelling by Hamilton, in the Gullah dialect, of the classic story of Bruh Rabbit outwitting Bruh Wolf. BookList, in a review of Bruh Rabbit and the Tar Baby Girl, wrote "In this version of the beloved Tar Baby trickster story, she drew on Gullah folklore from the Sea Islands of South Carolina, her rhythmic, immediate version is well matched by Ransome's paintings, both cozy and exciting, which extend the fun with beautiful farmland scenes at dayclean and daylean picturing the wily rabbit thief in human clothes outwitting the wolf." and the School Library Journal described it as "meticulously paced, hilarious, a joy to read aloud." With "lush watercolors suit the story perfectly". Bruh Rabbit and the Tar Baby Girl has been reviewed by The Horn Book Magazine, Kirkus Reviews, Publishers Weekly, the Florida Media Quarterly, it is a 2004 ALA Notable Book for children, a 2004 CCBC Choices book
Black church
The term black church or African-American church refers to Protestant churches that or have ministered to predominantly black congregations in the United States. While some black churches belong to predominantly African-American denominations, such as the African Methodist Episcopal Church, many black churches are members of predominantly white denominations, such as the United Church of Christ. Most of the first black congregations and churches formed before 1800 were founded by free blacks – for example, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; the oldest black Baptist church in Kentucky, third oldest in the United States, was founded about 1790 by the slave Peter Durrett. After slavery was abolished, segregationist attitudes in both the North and the South discouraged and prevented African Americans from worshiping in the same churches as whites. Freed blacks most established congregations and church facilities separate from their white neighbors, who were their former masters; these new churches created communities and worship practices that were culturally distinct from other churches, including forms of Christianity that derived from African spiritual traditions.
African-American churches have long been the centers of communities, serving as school sites in the early years after the Civil War, taking up social welfare functions, such as providing for the indigent, going on to establish schools and prison ministries. As a result, black churches were important during the civil rights movement. Evangelical Baptist and Methodist preachers traveled throughout the South in the Great Awakening of the late 18th century, they appealed directly to slaves, a few thousand slaves converted. Blacks found opportunities to have active roles in new congregations in the Baptist Church, where slaves were appointed as leaders and preachers; as they listened to readings, slaves developed their own interpretations of the Scriptures and found inspiration in stories of deliverance, such as the Exodus out of Egypt. Nat Turner, a slave and Baptist preacher, was inspired to armed rebellion, in an uprising that killed about 50 white men and children in Virginia. Both free blacks and the more numerous slaves participated in the earliest black Baptist congregations founded near Petersburg, Savannah and Lexington, before 1800.
The slaves Peter Durrett and his wife founded the First African Church in Lexington, Kentucky about 1790. The church's trustees purchased its first property in 1815; the congregation numbered about 290 by the time of Durrett's death in 1823. Following slave revolts in the early 19th century, including Nat Turner's Rebellion in 1831, Virginia passed a law requiring black congregations to meet only in the presence of a white minister. Other states restricted black churches, or the assembly of blacks in large groups unsupervised by whites; the black Baptist congregations in the cities grew and their members numbered several hundred each before the Civil War. While led by free blacks, most of their members were slaves. In plantation areas, slaves organized underground churches and hidden religious meetings, the "invisible church", where slaves were free to mix evangelical Christianity with African beliefs and African rhythms. With the time, many incorporated Wesleyan Methodist hymns, gospel songs, spirituals.
The underground churches provided psychological refuge from the white world. The spirituals gave the church members a secret way to communicate and, in some cases, to plan rebellion. Slaves learned about Christianity by attending services led by a white preacher or supervised by a white person. Slaveholders held prayer meetings at their plantations. In the South until the Great Awakening, most slaveholders were Anglican if they practiced any Christianity. Although in the early years of the first Great Awakening and Baptist preachers argued for manumission of slaves and abolition, by the early decades of the 19th century, they had found ways to support the institution. In settings where whites supervised worship and prayer, they used Bible stories that reinforced people's keeping to their places in society, urging slaves to be loyal and to obey their masters. In the 19th century and Baptist chapels were founded among many of the smaller communities and common planters. During the early decades of the 19th century, they used stories such as the Curse of Ham to justify slavery to themselves.
They promoted the idea that hard-working slaves would be rewarded in the afterlife. Sometimes slaves established their own Sabbath schools to talk about the Scriptures. Slaves who were literate tried to teach others to read, as Frederick Douglass did while still enslaved as a young man in Maryland. Free Blacks in both northern and southern cities formed their own congregations and churches before the end of the 18th century, they organized independent black congregations and churches to practice religion apart from white oversight. Along with white churches opposed to slavery, free blacks in Philadelphia provided aid and comfort to slaves who escaped and helped all new arrivals adjust to city life. In 1787 in Philadelphia, the black church was born out of protest and revolutionary reaction to racism. Resenting being relegated to a segregated gallery at St. George's Methodist Church, Methodist preachers Absalom Jones and Richard Allen, other black members, left the church and formed the Free
