03/26/2025
"Every year over Memorial Day weekend, against the backdrop of the bucolic Beaufort River and under the shade of swaying palmetto trees, the Beaufort waterfront comes alive with the colors, sounds, and tastes of West Africa. You can almost feel the music before you hear it—the pounding percussion of complex African American beats as history comes to life with The Original Gullah Festival at the Henry C. Chambers Waterfront Park.
It is a celebration of hope, history, and the magnificent Gullah culture. “It’s a time of fellowship and it’s a time of learning and teaching,” says festival president Thomas Roy Hicks II. “We provide a platform for descendants of the Gullah community to communicate our history through food, dance, music, and storytelling.” This year’s festival will include a somber note, as the Gullah community continues to mourn the loss of seven residents of nearby Sapelo Island, who died in a gangway collapse at a Gullah Geechee celebration there in October.
The Gullah are descendants of enslaved Africans, brought from West and Central African countries to the Carolinas and Florida to toil on plantations along the coastal waterways. They brought specialized skills in rice cultivation and, as they commingled, created a dazzlingly rich cultural heritage. Because the enslaved people hailed from different regions of Africa, they created an English-based Creole language and shared strong traditions around spirituality, family, food, art, and music." text via Atlanta Magazine
Original Gullah Festival | May 23 - 25, 2025
