Penn Center: A History Preserved by Orville Vernon Burton (review)

With the conclusion of the Civil War’s sesquicentennial commemorations, scholars who have used the opportunity to highlight the importance of this critical period ought to take advantage of the fact that they are in the midst of another vital commemoration, the fiftieth anniversary of the civil rights movement. The issues that America’s most destructive war left unresolved continued to fester deep into the twentieth century. Too often, however, historians bracket themselves off from other eras, the result of page limits, deadlines, or traditional demarcations of historical periods.

By focusing on one institution’s history from the Civil War to the present, Orville Vernon Burton’s narrative of Penn Center transcends the usual historical boundaries, demonstrating the connections between the problems of the nineteenth century and the ongoing struggles of the twentieth. This concise and easy-to-read narrative highlights the challenges faced by an institution, initially created to educate freedpeople, as it weathered the storms of paternalism, racism, and financial strife to emerge in the mid-twentieth century as a haven for civil rights campaigners, and finally as a center for the study and preservation of the Sea Islands’ Gullah culture.

According to Burton, Penn Center “was born of the abolitionist spirit of 1862” (1). Located on St. Helena Island, along the South Carolina coast, the school began operations during the Civil War. With southern landowners abandoning their coastal plantations, missionaries and government agents entered the region determined to establish free labor, resume agricultural production, and educate the freedpeople. From its inception, Penn School faced financial difficulties, and the problem of keeping the doors open occupied the minds of many of the school’s administrators. At the turn of the twentieth century, the Hampton Institute, which had been founded by Samuel C. Armstrong to provide freedpeople with an industrial education, stepped in to help run the school. Armstrong, as Burton notes, “thoroughly disapproved of a liberal, classical education for African Americans, and … opposed their having voting rights for at least generations to come” (43). Under Hampton’s umbrella, Penn also adopted the industrial education model.

Battered by financial troubles, natural disasters, and opposition from hostile southerners opposed to African American education, Penn School ended its educational responsibilities in 1948. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, Penn Center hosted meetings, workshops, and retreats for civil rights leaders, including Martin Luther King Jr. Burton argues that the retreats at Penn Center “deeply influenced King, and King validated the special value of Penn Center. King and the SCLC needed a place where they could get away from the glare of publicity in order to safely air doubts and grievances as well as reaffirm their determination” (87).

After the civil rights movement, Penn Center transformed again, this time into a hub for the study of African customs in the Sea Islands. For much of its history, Penn School had attempted to remove from its students the Gullah language and affiliated customs deemed incompatible with white perceptions of civilization. Ironically, then, Penn Center became a place designed to preserve Gullah language and customs.

While Burton’s clear prose and the forty-two accompanying images help situate Penn Center’s past at the heart of America’s conflicts from the mid-nineteenth century to the present, it does not really engage historical debates. In linking Penn Center’s position to the broader narrative of U.S. history, Burton misses opportunities to discuss the challenges and issues facing the school and its students in greater depth. He relies on primary accounts to tell the institution’s story, but student voices are sadly absent from several sections (the result, probably, of a lack of records).

Burton correctly zeroes in on the educational debate between those who advocated industrial education and those who hoped to inspire African Americans to challenge their second-class status in Jim Crow society. He suggests that “Penn Center started subtly at first, by facilitating interracial groups, and then grew bolder by setting up...