International African American Museum Opens In Charleston, SC

This place–the International African American Museum–had to be here. No place in America has been untouched by the influence of people descended from the enslaved who began arriving in what would become the United States in the early 1500s, but this place, South Carolina, Charleston in particular, and Gadsden’s Wharf specifically, needed to be the site for this museum.

Charleston was North America’s largest trans-Atlantic slave trade port with Gadsden’s Wharf often being the location of disembarkation. The new museum opened on June 27, 2023, calls that exact spot home.

Roughly 40% of all enslaved Africans sent to North American, some 150,000 souls, arrived through Charleston Harbor. As the Charleston Post and Courier newspaper states, “any history of slavery in America begins with Charleston.”

So, then, too, does any history of what became of those people and their descendants. Empowering, uplifting stories of survival, resistance and exceptionalism in the face of one of the most barbaric chapters man has ever written. IAAM honors the untold stories of the African American journey at the sacred site of Gadsden’s Wharf and beyond, tracing its full history from ancient civilizations in west and central Africa through today.

The evil for which Charleston would become ground zero began taking off when the English settled Carolina in 1670. Here, they developed a plantation economy increasingly reliant upon enslaved labor supplied through the trans-Atlantic slave trade. By 1708, the colony of South Carolina had a Black majority population.

By 1776, the eve of the American Revolution, Charleston was home to nine of America’s 10 wealthiest people, every penny of those fortunes extracted from the enslaved. As the colonies were espousing their rights to freedom and liberty from the British–rights they claimed were unalienable, granted by the creator at birth to all–Charleston’s population was composed of more than 70% enslaved Black people.

Through the 1850s and the verge of another war, three out of four white Charleston families enslaved at least one Black person. No other major North American city retained its Black-majority demographics this long.

That reality would exist all the way until the Great Migration of the 20th century.

The African diaspora is a global story, a story which cannot be told without Charleston.

A Long Time Coming

The International African American Museum explores the history, culture, and impact of the African American journey on Charleston, on the nation, and on the world, shining light and sharing stories of the diverse journeys, origin, and achievements of descendants of the African Diaspora. The project has been in the works since 2000 when former Charleston Mayor Joseph P. Riley, Jr. voiced a need for the museum in his State of the City address. Since then, roughly $100 million has been raised to turn the vision into this reality.

Nine distinct galleries demonstrate how enslaved Africans and free blacks shaped economic, political, and cultural development throughout the nation and beyond while offering an especially close look at the connection to the South Carolina Lowcountry. Special exhibitions are additionally featured.

Outside, the African Ancestors Memorial Garden spreads across the museum’s grounds and reflects on the historic significance of Gadsden’s Wharf, one of the many docks in Charleston Harbor at which enslaved Africans entered this country. Art installations and site objects mark the history and archeology of this area which is free and open to the public.

IAAM also provides a genealogical resource, The Center for Family History. Staff members and archived documents will help community members find connections between themselves and their ancestors, as well as others. This department will store photos, marriage records, archival tools, and the largest collection of United States Colored Troop records outside of the National Archives. All are available digitally in the Center for Family History.

Carolina Gold

Early colonizers in South Carolina tried growing tobacco, silk, olives, and indigo; none flourished. Undaunted, they finally struck gold, so to speak. Around 1700 they identified a specialized strain of rice that flourished here and came to be known as “Carolina Gold.” It would become the colony’s major cash crop and required an outrageous amount of labor–10 times more than other crops–to produce. All enslaved labor.

One of IAAM’s permanent exhibitions is devoted to Carolina Gold.

Enslaved West Africans, particularly women, the principal rice growers in their homelands, brought knowledge and technological contributions to rice cultivation in the region without which plantation owners would have been lost.

The success of Carolina Gold resulted in a boom for the trafficking of enslaved people from Africa. Not only were more and more people needed to work larger and larger plantations, but the working conditions on those plantations bore a gruesome toll.

Enslaved people died at much higher rates in the rice region than anywhere else in the South. They were brutalized, undernourished and overworked, forced to work in standing water and mud from daylight to dusk under a viscous sun.

Disease was rampant as Peter McCandless details in his 2011 book, “Slavery, Disease and Suffering in the Southern Lowcountry.” His research found that more than half, and perhaps closer to two-thirds, of children born on 19th-century rice plantations did not survive to age 15.

While plantation owners would leave their Lowcountry estates during the peak months for yellow fever in the summer, labor continued. McCandless quotes a Charleston enslaver telling Fredrick Law Olmsted, “I would as soon stand fifty feet from the best Kentucky rifleman and be shot at by the hour, as to spend a night on my plantation in summer.”

About one-third of kidnapped Africans trafficked to South Carolina died within a year.

Livestock has rarely been treated so wantonly in human history.

McCandless’ book sites a port physician assigned to inspect slave ships for contagious disease as writing that most of the ships coming into Charleston “had many of their cargoes thrown overboard; some one-fourth, some one-third, some lost half; and I have seen some that have lost three-fourths of their slaves.”

Thousands died in captivity waiting to be auctioned off.

The smells would be unimaginable to contemporary senses.

Yet more and more arrived to feed the grisly machine. To fuel the wealth of plantation owners.

Import of enslaved Africans through Charleston had reached a level of more than 3,000 per year by 1770. The Revolutionary War temporarily diminished the practice, but upon the war’s conclusion, with Carolina Gold taking off and a prohibition on importing enslaved labor to America set to begin in 1808, Charleston traders brought in some 70,000 Africans between 1804 and 1807.

Visiting Charleston

IAAM tells a sweeping story of the African Diaspora with an emphasis on Charleston. For a deeper exploration still, at street level, Frank Williams’ “Frankly Charleston Black History Tours” take guests to other locations throughout the historic district notable for their role in Charleston history, American history and Black history, including the Mother Emanuel AME Church where, in 2015, a white supremacist shot and killed nine Black parishioners.

The Church is a half mile from the museum.

Visitors to Charleston will discover one of the best boutique hotel cities in America. A favorite is the iconic, pink, Mills House, ideally located smack dab in the middle of historic downtown easily walkable to art and antique galleries, exceptional dining and the Gibbes Museum of Art, one mile from IAAM.