American Beach Afrotopia

09/05/2023

Magical bookends. A portal of sorts. These two photos are 25 years apart in the same location. The Atlantic Ocean on the other side of Lake Retba aka “The Pink Lake” in Senegal, West Africa. The first picture was in 1997?98? As a young teacher at the Verde Valley School in Sedona AZ, I was given the chance to design a service learning “field trip” for the school which was founded by anthropologists and committed to world citizenship. I had only first traveled to Senegal myself the year before, looking for traces of my ancestress Anta Madjiguene NDiaye or Anna Kingsley. That first sight of the Atlantic was absolutely spellbinding, the sunlight was brilliant and the air was heavy with mist from the ocean. It had taken A LOT to get there and we had actually made it! I had pulled it off, we were in AFRICA on a field trip! Several of the students had never been out of the US before. was in the 1st group of VVS students, a very talented creative with a sophisticated eye. She was like a little sister/mentee to me out there in the red rocks and I was delighted to share such a special experience with her. The second picture is July 2022, I had returned to Senegal after a gap of over a decade. How I got there was a comedy of errors involving a con woman/ scam artist of epic proportions who lured me there under false pretenses & loads of promises (aka lies,) but that’s a whole nother story! I had two wonderful travel companions along for the ride who had never been to West Africa and I wasn’t going to let some shenanigans steal our joy!! is a super talented vocalist and 🧚🏾 who had been a little busy raising her bevy of 4 beautiful daughters and one handsome sun ☀️ and had not found the time to leave the country, she is always down for afrotopianadventures having road tripped with me to camp out under the on Historic American Beach and to check at in Later she would make a music video on that same beach! We had a time! This is what I love to do! Whether it’s your first trip out of the country or you’re a seasoned traveler- I can show you the world!

06/21/2023

06/21/2023

The “Harriet Tubman Journey to Freedom" traveling statue is currently on display at The SC Lowcountry Tourism Commission's Frampton Plantation Visitor's Center in Yemassee through July 30th. The 9ft tall bronze statue depicts Tubman protecting and leading a child slave to freedom. It just looks amazing sitting under those live oaks and Spanish moss. 💕

📸 SC Lowcountry Tourism Commission

02/22/2023

The project spanned four weekends and wrapped up this Saturday. It was made possible through a partnership with Eat Your Yard Jax and White Harvest Farms.

04/14/2022

03/26/2022

In Sarasota, Florida, members of the African American Cultural Coalition are working to preserve an important story from Black American history that has rarely been told.

02/16/2022

02/11/2022

Under pressure, commissioners eventually agreed to pitch in county money, but residents of Florida’s oldest Black beach still need to pay upfront — and risk a lien on their property — before getting a refund years later.

10/07/2021

This is Charles & Willa Bruce. In 1912 they bought prime beachfront land in Manhattan Beach, LA County and built a Black resort community. In 1924 the county took it and refused to pay its value. On 30th September 2021, now worth $72 million, it was returned to their descendents by Senate Bill 796.

10/06/2021

This amazing 1998 documentary shows how the Gullah descendants of Mende people from Sierra Leone preserved an old mourning song in the Georgia Sea Islands, in their ancestral language, though they no longer understood the words or the meaning.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j0OirdYGdlY&fbclid=IwAR0pswn-sXg7zmWZeoxPTjGAduYDoAhLnJBf9nBhY0HiSkk4j1tYSTHuPw8

In Harris Neck, in Georgia's coastal islands, in the 1930s, Lorenzo D. Turner recorded a 50-year-old woman singing. Her song preserved the longest known text in an African language in the North American diaspora. It was later recognized as Mende by a grad student from Sierra Leone, on the basis of a single word, kambei, which had funerary significance, and he published a translation of the song.

The singer's grandmother had been born into slavery, a descendant of many West Africans trafficked to Georgia because of their expertise in rice cultivation. Slave traders paid a higher price for people with this skill, shipping captives from the rice-growing countries from Senegambia to Sierra Leone and Liberia. More than 45% of those trafficked to Savannah were taken from Sierra Leone, out of Bunce Island which was used as a holding area prior to the Middle Passage. The channels these Mende people dug for rice plantations still remain in Georgia.

A group of Gullahs returned to Sierra Leone, and performed this melody for their African hosts. They discovered that one word, tombei, could be traced to a specific place. Anthropologists took recordings of the song around that region, and at first people recognized one or two words, but not the song. The researchers finally gave up, disappointed. Later, Cynthia Schmidt decided to try one more place, just outside the boundaries of the area they had searched in. To her amazement, people began to sing the song, which included the words “Everybody come together, the grave is restless, the grave is not yet at peace.” (starting around 15:25 in the video at link)

This was a song that Mende women sang at burials, in a funerary rites called Tenjami, Cross the Water. Bendu Jabati describes how her grandmother taught her how to perform the mourning rites, kneeling and making gestures to the ground with outstretched hands. (And it seems that the grandmother foresaw that her descendant would be the one to preserve this knowledge, and the connection that it would make to distant kin.)

The ceremony began with a call to the ancestors to accept the dead person. The women went in procession, their faces painted with white clay, dancing while bent over. They then cooked at the grave side (three days after a woman’s death, and four days after a man’s). They performed ritual crying and lamentation at the grave, and bid farewell with rice mixed with palm oil and meat. The ceremony ended when the pot was upturned over the grave, the final farewell.

The ceremony lapsed after World War II, according to the narrator, when soldiers brought back Islam and Christianity; but this one woman Bendu Jabati had been charged to remember by her grandmother, and she kept the knowledge and the song alive.

Back in the Georgia Sea Islands, Amelia Dawley taught this song to her daughter. Living in a remote area, without TV or radio, she was able to preserve it. (Hear her sing it around 26:00 in the video) The anthropologists visit and play the recording of her grandmother, telling her of the historical importance of her family legacy, in its connection to African roots.

Thanks to Hannah Ekberg for this link.

10/05/2021

RENAMING, REIMAGINING, RENEWING!

The American Beach Museum has been renamed the A. L. Lewis Museum at American Beach, Florida to honor the founder of American Beach, Dr. Abraham Lincoln Lewis.

This new identity is just one of the changes taking place at YOUR museum! We are renovating the exhibition area and reimagining its principal exhibition.

Although we are still closed to the public, we hope to open our doors in January 2022, where we can all celebrate the name change, view the new exhibition, and present new interactive experiences within the A. L. Lewis Museum at American Beach, Fla.

In the meantime, we are excited to announce that we are online, both on Instagram (you can follow us ) and here on our page.

We look forward to sharing upcoming announcements through these pages, as well as facts about our museum, our founders, and images from our
collections.

We hope to use these online spaces to hold ongoing conversations with you, our community.

Stay tuned for more and thank you for your patience!