When Land is Gone is a play my students and I created from archives, news sources, and oral histories, to tell an empowering, interactive history of the Penn Center—the first school in the South for formerly enslaved Africans, an important meeting place for Civil Rights activism, and now a national historic landmark devoted to the preservation and transmission of Gullah Geechee cultures. Beginning with the early history of Penn School, the play uses verbatim archival sources to explore the stories and connections to Penn Center of people like Laura Towne, Ellen Murray, Charlotte Forten, Hastings Gantt, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Septima Clark, Dr. York W. Bailey, and others, and ending with contemporary community responses to a developer’s plans to build a gated community and golf resort. Our aim was to share the histories through theatre, and to reflect on their relevance to the present, specifically surrounding the themes of education, land ownership, and land loss. This project centered local histories in partnership with local artists, who advised on our script, and local youth, with whom we collaborated on the performances. The project was made possible by the "Culture and Community at Penn Center National Historic Landmark District" partnership between UGA’s Willson Center for Humanities and Arts and the Penn Center, funded by a grant from Mellon Foundation (PIs: Drs. Barbara McCaskill and Nicholas Allen), and including research residencies that brought students from area universities together on St. Helena Island, SC. Dr. Barbara McCaskill and Ms. Angela Dore provided crucial assistance with the project's planning and production. The residencies featured performances of our play, led by my students and performed by students from multiple institutions, in the summers of 2023 and 2024.
