The April 27 Daniel Island News Author Series event will feature authors Joseph McGill Jr. and Herb Frazier and their new book, “Sleeping with the Ancestors: How I Followed the Footprints of Slavery.” The event begins at 7 p.m. at the Daniel Pointe Retirement Community Theater.
McGill, a historic preservationist, and Civil War reenactor founded the Slave Dwelling Project in 2010 based on an idea sparked and developed in 1999. Since founding the project, McGill toured the country, spending the night in former slave dwellings – throughout the South, but also the North and the West, where people are often surprised to learn that such structures exist.
Events and gatherings were arranged around these overnight stays, which provided a unique way to understand the often otherwise obscured history of slavery. The project inspired difficult conversations about race in communities from South Carolina to Alabama, Texas to Minnesota to New York, and all across the country.
“Sleeping with the Ancestors” focuses on the key sites McGill visited in his ongoing project and digs deeper into the actual history of each location, using McGill’s own experience and conversations with the community to enhance those original stories. Together, McGill and coauthor Herb Frazier give readers an important unexpected immersion into the history of slavery, especially the obscured and ignored aspects of that history.
Frazier is a local author and journalist. A former South Carolina Journalist of the Year, he edited and reported for five daily newspapers in the South, including his hometown paper, The Post and Courier. His international reporting experience includes West Germany during the fall of the Berlin Wall, humanitarian relief efforts in Bosnia and Rwanda during its post-genocide period, and the military conflict in Sierra Leone.
He’s the special projects editor for the Charleston City Paper and the former marketing director at Magnolia Plantation and Gardens. Frazier published multiple books on Black history and Gullah traditions, including co-author of “We Are Charleston: Tragedy and Triumph at Mother Emanuel” with Marjory Wentworth and Dr. Bernard Powers Jr.
The event is set for Thursday, April 27, at 7 p.m. in the theater at Daniel Pointe Retirement Community. Tickets are free – sign up on EventBrite at bit.ly/DINews_April2023.