Moving Star Hall

Moving Star Hall, ca. 1920, is a community treasure and historic property on the  National Register for Historic Places  (NRHP). It is significant for its establishment as a rural mutual aid and fraternal organization, function as a praise house, and connection to the modern Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s as a site of resistance in the Jim Crow South.

In all of these functions, Black women have been central as both "cultural carriers" and "memory keepers."

It is also the physical location for a community's memory, a "site of memory" for the  Gullah Geechee  people of Johns Island and along the cultural heritage corridor.

The people now known as Gullah Geechee emerged from Africans enslaved during the 18th and early 19th centuries along the rice-producing Atlantic coast of the United States. These Africans were from the "rice coast" of West Africa, which included countries such as Gambia, Guinea-Bissau, and Sierra Leone, and formed what historian Edda Fields-Black called a "cultural rice knowledge system," which they brought with them to the United States. This knowledge of rice cultivation was one of the things that made Charleston and South Carolina one of the wealthiest states in antebellum America.

The isolation of the coastal communities led to the retention of their African forbears' language, agricultural, and spiritual traditions. This retention of African cultural identity was a form of resistance, rejecting European language and cultural standards. Africans in this region led the  Stono Rebellion of 1739 , one of the earliest large-scale uprisings of enslaved communities in colonial America.

After the Civil War, African Americans worked to build communities and institutions in a political landscape that became increasingly hostile to their educational, political, and economic aspirations. This institution-building included creating organizations and institutions that nurtured their spiritual and financial well-being.

Post-Reconstruction African-American communities built churches to fulfill them, both spiritually and intellectually. Many Black churches served as schools during Reconstruction, and many continued to function as schools in the Post-Reconstruction period. Additionally, African Americans created mutual aid societies and fraternal organizations to assist their members in caring for the sick, providing financial assistance, and burying the dead. Fraternal orders, such as the  Odd Fellows  and the  Grand United Order of True Reformers  formed; other fraternal orders, such as the  United Order of the Tents  and the  Independent Order of St. Luke  also became active during this time.

According to recollections by members of the organization, the Moving Star Hall Young Association was created and began operation around 1917. Alexander W. Wine, Rose E. Lee, and John H. Richardson formally chartered the organization on March 23, 1920, and served as president, treasurer, and secretary. The founding document listed their objectives as "social, fraternal, and charitable," they operated as a mutual aid and burial society. The Association also purchased land from Simon Smalls in April 1920. This society loaned money to members who could not secure bank loans, assisted families of sick members, and paid for burials for their members.

More than anything, the Moving Star Hall became known as a "praise house" in the traditional sense, and people from various churches and ministries came to Moving Star Hall for prayer service and worship. According to the oral testimony of Mrs. Betsy Pinckney and Mrs. Alice Wine, services started in 1917.  Here, member Betsy Pinckney talks about the founding of Moving Star Hall and the days before 1917 .

For most of the 20th century, the Moving Star Hall operated as a praise house for various congregations. Outfitted with austere wooden benches and a wood burning stove, it provided a place for community gathering. Members of Wesley United Methodist Church, Bethel Baptist Church, and many other churches in the area met about community matters, sing, prayed, and praised God.

Beginning in the 1950s, members Esau Jenkins and others worked with Septima Clark and Bernice Robinson to create the South Carolina Sea Islands Citizenship Schools to teach people in the Sea Islands to read and write, with the goal of passing voter registration tests put in place in South Carolina and other places in the South to disfranchise Black voters.

The basic purpose of the Citizenship Schools is discovering local community leaders. [It is important that the schools have] the ability to adapt at once to specific situations and stay in the local picture only long enough to help in the development of local leaders ... It is my belief that creative leadership is present in any community and only awaits discovery and development. ... The teachers we need in a Citizenship School should be people who are respected by the members of the community, who can read well aloud, and who can write their names in cursive writing. These are the ones that we looked for ... We were trying to make teachers out of these people who could barely read and write. But they could teach. — Septima Clark

The program continued through 1961 when Southern Christian Leadership Conference hired Mrs. Clark to lead its Citizenship School program.

Although the Moving Star Hall formally closed in 1977, the Moving Star Hall Singers continued to share the music of their Gullah Geechee heritage. The building, a National Register site in 1982, was acquired by William Coker and Abe Jenkins to continue the work of community development as a sister site to the Progressive Club founded in 1948.

Manna Life Ministries moved into the site in 1999 and continued its life as a site of prayer and praise; Pastor Kay Colleton, a board member of the Progressive Club, leads the ministry and continues to promote its history and heritage as a part of the  Gullah Geechee National Heritage Corridor , created by an act of Congress in 2006 and a part of the National Heritage Areas Act of 2006.