Dwayne, as the battle between ADOS and Pan-Africanism rages, your piece offers a great snapshot of some of those complexities — like Owens and Josephine.

While I am ADOS by birth, I also stand with Pan-Africanists who understand the differences in our lived experiences which, over hundreds of years spent in this country, have forced the kind of assimilation to which Dr. Wilson referred in your piece..

The other aspect of this is that in the Caribbean, Africans were able to retain elements of African culture which Black Americans have not been able to retain.

While you’re correct in this assessment, there are still some of us who remember and are trying to preserve the West African culture our ancestors brought with them through the Middle Passage to slavery. I am a proud descendant of the Gullah people of Charleston, South Carolina, by way of Edisto Island, one of the barrier islands surrounding the peninsula. Here are a couple links about who we are:

The Gullah are fighting to preserve their culture

The Gullah: Rice, Slavery, and the Sierra Leone-American Connection

Ranky Tanky releases new album ‘Good Time” spreading Gullah culture beyond Charleston

And some books:

“Black Rice” by Judith A. Carney, “Africanisms in the Gullah Dialect” by Lorenzo Dow Turner , “And I’m Glad, An Oral History of Edisto Island” by Nick Lindsay and “Gullah Culture in America” by Wilbur Cross.

The gentrification that’s pretty much swallowed downtown Charleston whole, pushing what used to be its “Black Majority” (see Peter H. Wood’s book of the same name) either out of the city proper, or sometimes out of the state, has been a blessing or a curse for the city — depending on who you ask. And NOW, given the astronomically high tourism rates and accolades from this magazine or that Jame Beard Award (due in large part to what Black folk built, read: Gullah cuisine, music, seagrass baskets, quilting, infrastructure, architecture, etc., etc, etc.), the white powers that be have decided in their benevolence, to build us a museum, supposedly all of our own. A quick note: the mayor in the video at that link was mayor when I left Charleston for college at 18 years old. When I moved back home 40 years later in 2014 and built a house, hoping to live there for the rest of my life once my husband retired in 2017 — he was STILL the mayor. {SMDH} Not until November 2015, did he finally lose — to a commercial, white realtor. Not hard to figure out why the Gullah are still fighting to preserve our culture.

I’m no longer there. My first granddaughter was born in 2016 in the Belly of the Beast (TX) so we sold the house and moved here in 2017. I thought it way more important to teach her who and whose she is while I’m still alive — so she can know the truth about, as James Baldwin once said, from “whence we came.”