Thirty years ago, I made a conscious decision to ensure that St. Helena Island would be the base of operations for the Gullah/Geechee Sea Island Coalition which is the oldest organization in world history that has “Gullah/Geechee” in its name.  When I founded, the Gullah/Geechee Sea Island Coalition, one of our missions was to ensure that authentic Gullah/Geechee culture would be supported not simply verbally but politically and financially.  So, I am sure that the ancestors that were fighting to protect St. Helena from being destroyed by a four to five lane highway expansion and against what I consider “destructionment” were smiling when the Beaufort Open Land Trust purchased the parcel of land at the intersection of Sea Island Parkway and Polowana Road in order to secure it for the St. Helena Island community.  That parcel could have been a supermarket, the library location or the post office location since all of these were proposed in the past.  Now there is a feasibility study being done for this to be the location of the St. Helena Island Gullah/Geechee Multipurpose Center which many natives of  St. Helena Island requested years ago.  

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