Tongues of Our Grandmothers

Tongues of Our Grandmother is a public history project that intricately examines African American slavery and its legacies to the microlevel. TOG will utilize birds-eye view spatial visual sources such as aerial photography and satellite images, photos, videos, interactive maps, oral history, archival documentary sources, GIS, and digital archives to recreate plantation societies in the south. Allowing for virtual time travel through colonial era southern plantation society to post Reconstruction sharecropping and tenant farming communities, TOG will show the political and socioeconomic legacy of chattel slavery and land ownership highlight African American communities, slave owning families, slave inventory appraisals, wills, estates, diaries, court and church records, newspaper archives, and tax records. TOG will trace present day descendants of enslaved Africans showing how they not only carry these legacies in their last name but in their daily lives.

The pilot study will examine Sumter, South Carolina.

Pilot Study: Sumter, South Carolina

1770 Map

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Oral History Interviews