Charlotte Forten’s Arrival on St. Helena Island: A Cultural & Culinary Adjustment

Throughout the year we host programs we call “Gullah Campfire Suppers with Stories and Songs”.  They are history programs that showcase African American history, our foodways, traditions, and songs of different time periods. In October we celebrate the arrival of Charlotte Forten to St. Helena Island to serve as a teacher at the newly founded Penn School.

“Charlotte Forten Grimke was a Philly, Pennsylvania Black woman, poet, abolitionist, teacher, and diarist.  As a freed Black woman in the mid-late nineteenth century Forten’s pedigree was one of privilege in her day.  To add to the rarity of her social class Charlotte was also from a wealthy Black family (her grandfather was a successful sail salesman) of influential socialite abolitionists who and associated with prominent figures of the day.  ‘Forten's paternal aunt Margaretta Forten worked in the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society along with her sisters Harriet Forten Purvis and Sarah Louisa Forten…