A production of South Carolina E.T.V.

In 1861, shortly after the fall of Fort Sumter, Union forces, thinking to gain a foothold in the South, attacked and conquered Beaufort and the surrounding Sea Islands.

When the conquering army reached St. Helena Island, they found more than 10,000 slaves on abandoned cotton plantations.

What happened next began a century of testing social theories.

This is the story of how a small institution played a significant role in what became known as the Port Royal Experiment.

This is the story of Penn School of St. Helena Island.

(choir singing) ♪ Jer-u-sa-lem, ♪ ♪ Jer-u-sa-lem.

♪ ♪ When the battle is over, ♪ ♪ we shall wear a crown.

♪ ♪ We shall wear a crown, ♪ ♪ we shall wear a crown.

♪ ♪ When the battle is over, ♪ ♪ we shall wear a crown ♪ ♪ in the new Jer-u-sa-lem.

♪ ♪ When the battle is over, ♪ (singing fades) ♪ we shall wear a crown.... ♪♪ Regarding the issue of slavery, the great historical benchmark was the Emancipation Proclamation, which officially made all slaves free under the jurisdiction of the federal government.

It was signed by President Abraham Lincoln on January 1, 1863, but the first mass liberation of slaves in the South occurred almost a year and two months earlier.

On November 7, 1861, the Blacks of St. Helena Island, So uth Carolina, awakened to the dawn of what was be their last day under a master's whip.

At 9:25 a.m. Union ships sailed toward the entrance of Port Royal Sound.

They were fired upon from Confederate coastal batteries, beginning with Fort Beauregard on Bay Point and Fort Walker on Hilton Head Island.

The Union flagship USS "Wabash," under the command of Commodore Samuel Francis DuPont, led the federal armada.

The ships' guns raked the fort an d Bay Point with cannon fire, and with picture perfect pr ecision, turned in formation, and maneuvered toward Hilton Head Island.

The booming of gunfire as it rolled over the islands created confusion and hasty preparations for evacuation.

Slaves abandoned their duties and came running in from the fields.

They found their masters packing what little they could to flee the island.

[insects humming] After three passes by Union gunboats, flags on the Confederate fort were lowered in surrender.

Confederate wives and daughters were anxiously waiting here on the veranda of the Thomas B. Chaplin home, known as Tombee Plantation.

When they saw the Confederate surrender, they followed previous instructions given by their menfolk.

They gathered their necessities, bade farewell to their plantation homes, and fled to the mainland.

Many were never to return to the island.

[footfalls on stairs] With the departure of their white masters, the slaves were faced with a situation for which they were totally unprepared.

They were unofficially free.

However, they were neither slave nor freeman because they were considered contraband property, and therefore subject to the federal government.

They were abandoned property of an enemy to the Union.

It would take the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation by President Lincoln to make them completely free under federal law.

This wasn't to happen for another year.

[birds calling] Federal Treasury Secretary Salmon P. Chase had assumed responsibility for the island and its thousands of inhabitants.

Chase had emerged as the leading antislavery exponent within the council of the President.

He had the unenviable task of raising revenue to support the war.

Concerned as he was with the welfare of the people, he was equally concerned with salvaging the partially harvested cotton crop.

He knew that anything he could find would aid the war effort.

Sea Island cotton was renowned for its long fiber.

He knew that the crop would bring a good price in the open market.

This revenue would add greatly to the Union war chest.

His only problem was to get it harvested.

With the help of contraband labor, the Union would get the cotton to market to help finance the war.

For the first time in their lives, former slaves would be promised wages for work.

By so doing, the Sea Island natives' lives were changed dramatically.

The Port Royal Experiment had begun... albeit inadvertently.

[insects humming] The federal government's handling of the cotton harvest on St. Helena Island began almost a century of testing social theories.

Conservative economists had long believed that Blacks wouldn't work if left to their own devices.

Liberal economists had been waiting for an opportunity to disprove this theory, believing in the superiority of free labor.

What better way to do that than on an island filled with former slaves right in the South's backyard?

[wind moving through grasses] This plantation house at Coffin Point served as one of the headquarters for the Port Royal Experiment.

Northern educators would arrive here to manage education and relief activities of the island.

One of the new arrivals was Laura M. Towne.

She was an abolitionist from Salem, Massachusetts, and worked as a representative of the Philadelphia Port Royal Experiment Mission, sending supplies to Beaufort.

She came to Beaufort in April 1862 and worked with government officials.

However, she soon became tired of the petty bureaucracy and formed her own program of education for the islanders, which would improve their way of life.

[no audio] Laura Towne began teaching at the Oaks Plantation on St. Helena Island in this very room.

This wall was covered with slate, and all seven feet were used as a blackboard.

The first class consisted of nine pupils, all adults.

By the end of the month, the class had grown to 80.

This necessitated moving to a brick church used by white congregations before the war.

[no audio] The early days showed great promise, but Laura Towne had to contend with unexpected priorities, mainly ill health of the islanders.

She had received some medical training, and in the beginning most of her time was spent tending the sick.

She battled a smallpox epidemic and the reoccurring yellow fever.

In June of 1862 Laura Towne was joined by Ellen Murray, a Canadian who came to assist with teaching.

The lifestyle of slavery had been a pitiful, low standard of living.

The goal of Laura Towne and Ellen Murray was to bring island culture in line with dominant American norms and values.

It was clear that this would not be an easy task.

[no audio] In 1864 the Pennsylvania Freedmen's Association sent a prefabricated three-room sc hoolhouse to the island.

It was landed at Oaks Plantation and brought by wagon to this site where the land had been purchased from Hasting Gantt.

This was the first school in the South devoted exclusively for use of former slaves.

Laura Towne gave the school a fine brass bell, a replica of the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia.

The replica had the inscription "P roclaim Liberty," and the school was named Penn School in honor of Pennsylvania's founder, William Penn.

So the Penn schoolhouse became the island's first stand-alone school.

The curriculum of those early da ys concentrated on academics, but through the years other subjects were added to help meet the needs of the struggling community.

Classes began to include training in homemaking, agriculture, and industrial arts.

[insects humming] The training in agriculture was needed because second to education, the Black people wanted land.

They felt that true freedom meant farming their own soil.

In 1864 the federal government sold 20-acre plots of land for $1.25 an acre to heads of families of the African race.

Many seized this opportunity and quickly established themselves as farmers.

When Penn School began, there was a great deal of national interest because it promised to help Black people develop their own capabilities.

Many Southerners feared that, if left to themselves, the Sea Island Blacks would revert to the cultural practices of their ancestors.

The growing successes of Penn School graduates proved that this fear was absolute nonsense!

[birds calling] For 40 years Laura Towne and Ellen Murray kept to their labors at Penn School.

Very little has been written about their accomplishments because the only record was Ellen Murray's diary.

With the passage of time, interest in the school waned, as one by one the Northern relief associations disbanded.

But Laura Towne fought to keep the school open.

She often paid teachers with her own money and called for financial support from her family in Massachusetts.

These two women, Laura Towne and Ellen Murray were a powerful influence upon the lives of the Sea Islanders.

Not only were the Blacks taught academics, but they were also taught the importance of saving money and the necessity for very careful habits of crop husbandry.

[no audio] In 1900 Laura Towne fell ill.

Fearing that Penn School would close after her death, she called for assistance from the man who was considered the leading authority on Black education.

Hollis Burke Frissell was principal of Hampton Institute in Virginia where curriculum emphasized industrial education.

He felt that the Penn School would give him an opportunity to prepare a program of industrial education which would benefit the entire rural South.

[no audio] Two months after meeting with Frissell, Laura Towne died, and with her death an era was ended.

Frissell breathed life into the old Penn School.

Due to lack of administrative attention and funding, the school had reached only a small percentage of the island's Black population.

But Frissell's intent immediately became clear.

He had the school incorporated, and he established a board of trustees.

Almost overnight, Penn School became an offshoot of Hampton Institute.

Frissell's intent was twofold... to continue and emphasize agricultural education and to reform the school's system.

The fact that the former was very prominent in his mind is shown that when the new charter went into effect, the school was renamed Penn Normal, Industrial and Agricultural School.

[footfalls on porch] [doors opening and closing] [footfalls on floor] Frissell hoped to encourage the people to stay on the island and develop a farming community.

For this he enlisted the former student from Hampton P.W.

Dawkins to assist in the agriculture experiments.

Dawkins organized the men into holding farmers' conferences, and he developed a school farm to demonstrate the latest agricultural methods, particularly the use of horses, mules, and even cattle for plowing.

Up to this time, the method of plowing on the island was by the heavy hand hoe plow.

This made for backbreaking labor in the fields.

Dawkins also encouraged the planting of food crops.

[insects humming] His efforts wouldn't be enough, and his school farm was something short of a failure because the land was sand and the crops wouldn't grow.

Another problem was that Ellen Murray didn't understand the value of agricultural and industrial education.

She had been running the school since the death of Laura Towne, and she felt that simple academics was the key to moral development.

To her, industrial education meant to mend and sew, to hammer and saw, to plant and reap.

She didn't understand the valuable lessons that farming education would give, particularly in self-reliance.

[no audio] Three years later, in 1906, Rossa Belle Cooley, a teacher from the Hampton Institute, replaced Ellen Murray as principal.

[insects humming] Ellen Murray became a figurehead.

She was allowed to preside only at the beginning of weekly sessions.

At the closing of Penn School in the spring of 1906, she made a pathetic address to the student body, saying that she had been driven out by the rich board of trustees.

Shortly after this speech, her work of 40 years came to an end.

She fell ill of yellow fever and died on January 13, 1908.

[no audio] At her graveside one of her old students paid a most worthy tribute to this woman who had spent and dedicated most of her adult life to the Sea Island Blacks.

He's recorded as having said, "What we is, what we has, and what we done... all, all is done by her."

Ellen Murray and her colleague Laura Towne had helped the Sea Island Blacks rise from slavery.

In the 1900s no one else could appreciate the improvements made by Penn School more than Ellen Murray because no one else could remember the desolation that she had observed when she first arrived on the island 40 years earlier.

No one could contrast the present with the past.

Certainly her methods were outmoded, but what was more hurtful to her was the way she felt that she had been cast out of her position and passed over.

[no audio] P.W.

Dawkins resigned, dissatisfied because he had been passed over by the board and that a second woman, Rossa Belle Cooley, would be principal.

His replacement was another Hampton alumni by the name of Joshua Enoch Blanton.

Blanton immediately tackled the abandoned school farm and made it produce through sheer determination.

Blanton was a man whose jovial manner and style in dealing made him well-liked by all Sea Islanders, Black and White.

He introduced the idea of crop rotation and used a miniature one-acre farm at Penn School to dramatize the method.

At first this idea was met with skepticism, but the one-acre farm produced 35 bushels of corn.

No one could argue with that when the average Sea Island yield was 16 bushels an acre.

He taught development of poultry and livestock.

He encouraged truck farming and planting of winter crops.

Indeed, Blanton's miniature farm at Penn School was a tremendous success!

[no audio] During World War I many St. Helena men were drafted into the army.

Joshua Blanton was sent to Europe as a morale effort for Black soldiers far from home.

Some teachers were drafted.

This crippled, in part, Penn School's effort.

The rewarding thing lay in letters sent by graduates of Penn School who told how much their education had meant and how it had set them above others of their race.

For example, Benjamin Barnwell wrote, after several days of army intelligence testing, that he had quickly been elevated through the ranks.

He was convinced that more education was needed for all Black people.

(Barnwell, dramatized) "I am thankful "that I am connected with the great hosts "that are looking for greater things in human life.

"I shall return to Penn School to render services to my people of the island."

(Mary Long) Barnwell would return.

He became the second Black in the nation appointed by the United States Department of Agriculture as a demonstration agent.

After World War I, Cooley took the school in a new direction.

She realized that the Penn School was out of step with the agricultural life of the island.

Cooley arranged classes around specific periods of the year.

For example, in autumn, for two weeks, students would be allowed to help in the sweet potato harvest.

This annual event would come to be known as Potato Week.

[no audio] In years to come, Penn School would face many challenges.

Between 1917 and 1920, 70% of the island cotton crop was lost to the boll weevil.

During the '30s the islanders weathered the Great Depression as best they could.

To make matters worse, there were droughts, hurricanes, and severe epidemics which continued to plague the islanders.

[no audio] During World War II the greatest problem was the lack of able-bodied men to stay and work the St. Helena farms.

As they left to serve in the armed forces, a whole new world opened to them.

After they finished their stint in the military, many chose not to return.

The glamour and excitement of city life made farming on the island seem dull by comparison.

[no audio] The '40s was to be th e last decade for Penn School as far as its original functions were concerned.

On May 6, 1948, Penn Normal, Industrial and Agricultural School became Penn Community Services.

The school stopped accepting new students, as the task of education was taken by the state and county boards of education.

[no audio] So, with the graduating class of 1953, the Port Royal Experiment came to an end.

Through the years Penn Community Services has been concerned with community planning and development.

This location received national notice in the '60s when Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. held his Southern Christian Leadership Conferences here.

This was one of the few facilities available in the South at that time for such a biracial meeting.

The historic March on Washington of 1963 was partly planned here at the Gantt Building on the Penn Center campus.

[no audio] In 1974 the Penn Center campus was designated a National Historic Landmark.

Although the school-- the first in the South established for freed slaves-- no longer exists, the ideals of freedom which first came alive here still exist because Penn Center is now a training center for the Peace Corps.

And it's very fitting that here, in the area where a school began for freed slaves of African descent, young Americans now prepare to go to Africa to help the underprivileged.

[windflaw noise] Experts in the social sciences disagree as to whether or not Penn School accomplished its initial goals.

Be that as it may, as we visit the campus today and walk among the stately live oaks and palmettos where Laura Towne and Ellen Murray once passed, we are aware of the enduring spirit of Penn Center.

[footfalls on grass] It's a sense of caring, of concern, of a human will which, in the face of impossible odds, created an institution-- the first of its kind in the South-- to help Blacks understand their own social and intellectual potential.

It's here, in the spirit of those who have gone before, and in the presence of this generation, that dreams become reality.

It's here that the Sea Island Blacks have been able to realize their own strength, their own identity, and most importantly, their own voice.

(Martin Luther King Jr., recorded) "When we allow freedom to ring, "when we let it ring "from every village and every hamlet, "from every state and every city, "we will be able to speed up that day "when all of God's children, "Black men and White men, Jews and Gentiles, "Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands "and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, "'Free at last, free at last.

Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!'"

(choir singing) ♪ When the battle is over, ♪ we shall wear a crown.

♪ ♪ We shall wear a crown, we shall wear a crown.

♪ ♪ When the battle is over, we shall wear a crown.

♪ ♪ In the new Jer-u-sa-lem.

♪ ♪ When the battle is over, we shall wear a crown.

♪ ♪ We shall wear a crown, we shall wear a crown.

♪ ♪ When the battle is over, we shall wear a crown.

♪ ♪ In the new Jer-u-sa-lem.

♪ Program captioned by: CompuScripts Captioning, Inc. 80 3.988.8438 ♪ [choir continues through credits] ♪ When the battle is over, we shall wear a crown.

♪ ♪ In the new Jer-u-sa-lem.

♪ ♪ When the battle is over, we shall wear a crown.

♪ ♪ We shall wear a crown, ♪ ♪ we shall wear a crown.

♪ ♪ When the battle is over, we shall wear a crown.

♪ ♪ In the new Jer-u-sa-lem.

♪ In the new Jer-u-sa-lem.

♪ ♪ In the new, ♪ ♪ In the new Jer-u-sa-lem.

♪