The Jubilee Project

Drayton Hall is absolutely thrilled to be involved in the Jubilee Project, a collaborative and fascinating project that includes celebration, education and inquiry related to the Emancipation Proclamation and the Civil Rights Movement  – read the official Jubilee Project flyer below and follow the links to learn more. We hope you’ll mark your calendar and join us on some of these dates!  

To mark the publication 150 years ago, on September 22nd, 1862, of the Emancipation Proclamation, the College of Charleston’s program in the Carolina Lowcountry and Atlantic World (CLAW) is pleased to announce the launch of the Jubilee Project, 2013. As a spin-off from the CLAW program’s commemoration of the 150th anniversary of the Civil War, the Jubilee Project is a collaborative academic and cultural project extending across the College and City of Charleston, the Carolina Lowcountry, and beyond. The project celebrates the 150th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, the 50th anniversary of the desegregation of public education in South Carolina, and commemorates other key events both of 1863 and of the Civil Rights movement in 1963. The coincidence of the anniversaries of these two significant events also prompts us to ask what happened in the intervening century, and to what extent emancipation and equality of opportunity have been achieved up to this day.

Partners in the year-long project include colleges, historical sites, and city, county, and state agencies up and down the coast and across the state, from the Penn Center on St. Helena’s Island, to various Charleston sites, to Brookgreen Gardens in Murrells Inlet. In addition, university and college partners will include Claflin, Clemson, Furman, and South Carolina State, as well as the University of South Carolina. The Project’s formal opening will take place on New Year’s Eve, 2012, with a special City of Charleston sponsored New Year’s celebration followed by an Emancipation Day Parade in downtown Charleston on New Year’s Day, 2013. The Project’s closing event will take place on November 19th, 2013 (the anniversary of the Gettysburg Address, in which President Lincoln spoke of “a new birth of freedom”) at the South Carolina Department of Archives and History. Public commemorations and exhibitions between those two dates will address historic events such as the Battle of Gettysburg and the attack on Fort Wagner, as well as key moments in the Civil Rights era, such as when Clemson admitted its first African-American student in Spring 1963, and when both USC and Charleston County public schools followed suit in the Fall.

Jubilee Project highlights also include an exhibition of Civil Rights era photography at the Gibbes Museum, an exhibition of African art at South Carolina State University, the southern regional conference of the American Studies Association, the annual conference of the African Literature Association at the College of Charleston, and a performance by the Fisk Jubilee Singers at the Avery Research Center.

In addition to these one time public and academic events, the Project aims to have a lasting impact on the way in which South Carolinians think about the history of emancipation and educational access. To that end the Project will collaborate with the Lowcountry Digital Library (lowcountrydigital.library.cofc.edu) in developing long-term digital history projects and online archival collections. We also welcome public participation in the Project. If you or an organization you represent have a suggestion for an event that you would like to stage or would like to be involved in or affiliated with the Project in any way, please contact Simon Lewis at 843-953-1920, or e-mail him at lewiss@cofc.edu.

For information about individual events, please call the event organizer directly. For further information on the Jubilee Project as a whole, please call Simon Lewis at 843-953-1920, or e-mail him at lewiss@cofc.edu.  A complete listing of Jubilee Project events and partners is available at the Jubilee Project website: www.jubileeprojectsc.wordpress.com