📜 Introducing the Gullah Geechee Corridor Heritage Tour
Amadu Massally
🗓️ October 19–27, 2025
🚍 From Wilmington to St. Augustine — A Journey Through Memory, Land & Liberation
🔗 https://lowcountrygullah.com/lowcountry-gullah-heritage-tours/
Dear colleagues, friends, and fellow stewards of memory,
We're thrilled to share with you an immersive cultural heritage experience we’ve carefully curated — The Gullah Geechee Corridor Heritage Tour: The Road Before Return. This tour is more than a trip. It is a moving classroom, a gathering of sacred sites, and a call to reckon with the living legacy of the Gullah Geechee people.
Across 8 days and multiple states, we’ll walk ancestral pathways, meet living griots, engage with cultural stewards, and stand on the soil where African knowledge reshaped the New World. Highlights include:
Touring historic Gullah rice basins in North Carolina
Ships from Africa did land here — not in overwhelming numbers, but in significant ways. Many more came through Caribbean and intra-Colonial routes. Still, the rice fields whisper the rhythms of African hands and knowledge. You’ll feel it under your feet.
Meeting descendants of Priscilla, a girl brought on the Hare in 1756
Priscilla was just ten years old when the Atlantic swallowed her world. Her legacy lives on in Thomalind Martin Polite and her children — living proof of one girl’s unbreakable line. You don’t just hear the story. You shake its hand.
Sharing a bonfire fish fry at Penn Center, one of the oldest African American institutions
Everyone’s heard of Penn Center — but did you know Martin Luther King Jr. had a house there? That he drafted speeches and strategy in this Gullah haven? This is not just a stop. It’s a fire-lit communion with freedom fighters, past and present.
Visiting Mitchelville, the first self-governed Black town in the U.S.
They don’t just claim that title — they back it up with history. Walk the grounds where freedom meant more than emancipation. It meant self-rule.
Screening The Language You Cry In with Wilson Moran
History pulls up a chair at dinner. Wilson Moran, son of Mary, carries a 5-line Mende funeral song passed down through the generations. The film is powerful — but hearing it from him will leave you speechless.
Ending at Fort Mose, the first free Black settlement in the U.S.
This wasn’t just a fortress — it was a blueprint. Some Africans arrived here as skilled apprentices (grumetas) to help build Florida’s sugar economy. Some returned. Others remained, planting the early seeds of Gullah Geechee culture in Spanish Florida before we fled south seeking sanctuary.
We will also talk about the slave ship Hare
Arguably one of the best documented voyages in the entire transatlantic archive. From purchase to delivery, it reveals how the trade operated — and reminds us that behind every entry was a child, a name, a people.
Whether you're a historian, educator, artist, archivist, or advocate — this tour is for you.
📎 Details and full itinerary available upon request.
Let us know if you'd like to hold a spot or have further questions.
Let’s walk this road together. ✊🏿
Luana and Amadu
“The idea that some lives matter less is the root of all that's wrong with the world.”
—Dr. Paul Farmer
Chief Strategist & Co-founder