These resources were originally curated to support the participants of the 2023 Johns Island Field School, but it can be used by anyone who is interested in researching the history and culture of the South Carolina Sea Islands.
The below records are from the Avery Research Center's archival and library materials. Researchers should also consider reviewing the holdings of Special Collections at the College of Charleston and the South Carolina Historical Society.
Ain't You Got a Right to the Tree of Life? by 
The Citizenship Education Program and Black Women's Political Culture by
How Black women used lessons in literacy to crack the foundation of white supremacy Southern Association for Women Historians Julia Cherry Spruill Prize Finalist, Hooks National Book Award This book details how African American women used lessons in basic literacy to crack the foundation of white supremacy and sow seeds for collective action during the civil rights movement. Deanna Gillespie traces the history of the Citizenship Education Program (CEP), a grassroots initiative that taught people to read and write in preparation for literacy tests required for voter registration--a profoundly powerful objective in the Jim Crow South. Born in 1957 as a result of discussions between community activist Esau Jenkins, schoolteacher Septima Clark, and Highlander Folk School director Myles Horton, the CEP became a part of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in 1961. The teachers, mostly Black women, gathered friends and neighbors in living rooms, churches, beauty salons, and community centers. Through the work of the CEP, literate Black men and women were able to gather their own information, determine fair compensation for a day's work, and register formal complaints. Drawing on teachers' reports and correspondence, oral history interviews, and papers from a variety of civil rights organizations, Gillespie follows the growth of the CEP from its beginnings in the South Carolina Sea Islands to southeastern Georgia, the Mississippi Delta, and Alabama's Black Belt. This book retells the story of the civil rights movement from the vantage point of activists who have often been overlooked and makeshift classrooms where local people discussed, organized, and demanded change. A volume in the series Southern Dissent, edited by Stanley Harrold and Randall M. Miller
Down by the Riverside by 
John's Island by
A collection of photographs from past generations that help preserve a disappearing way of life in John's Island, South Carolina. John's Island (also spelled ""Johns Island"") is the largest Sea Island and the second largest island on the East Coast. The legendary Angel Oak, a restored 18th-century mansion, and an African-American praise house are a few of the historic treasures found beyond the island's wide salt marsh vistas. Its scenic roads wind along rivers under moss-draped oaks, where planters and their descendants have farmed for generations. Since new development is rapidly changing the island's character, residents, including native author Connie Walpole Haynie have collected these photographs from over the years to allow you to go inside the island's history.
A Place Called St. John's by 
The Shell Builders by
Beaufort, South Carolina, is well known for its historical architecture, but perhaps none is quite as remarkable as those edifices formed by tabby, sometimes called coastal concrete, comprising a mixture of lime, sand, water, and oyster shells. Tabby itself has a storied history stretching back to Iberian, Caribbean, Spanish American, and even African roots--brought to the United States by adventurers, merchants, military engineers, planters, and the enslaved. Tabby has been preserved most abundantly in the Beaufort area and its outlying islands, (and along the Sea Islands all the way to Florida as well) with Fort Frederick in 1734 having the earliest example of a diverse group of structures, which included town houses, seawalls, planters' homes, barns, agricultural buildings, and slave quarters. Tabby's insulating properties are excellent protection from long, hot, humid, and sometimes deadly summers; and on the islands, particularly, wealthy plantation owners built grand houses for themselves and improved dwellings for enslaved workers that after two hundred-plus years still stand today. An extraordinarily hardy material, tabby has a history akin to some of the world's oldest building techniques and is referred to as "rammed earth," as well as " tapia" in Spanish, "pisé de terre" in French, and "hangtu" in Chinese. The form that tabby construction took along the Sea Islands, however, was born of necessity. Here stone and brick were rare and expensive, but the oyster shells that were used as the source for the tabby's lime base were plentiful. Today these bits of shell, often visible in the walls and forms constructed long ago, give tabby its unique and iconic appearance. Colin Brooker, architect and expert on historic restoration, has not only made an exhaustive foray into local tabby architecture and heritage; he also has made a multinational tour as well in search of tabby origins, evolution, and diffusion from the Bahamas to Morocco to Andalusia, which can be traced back as far as the tenth century. Brooker has spent more than thirty years investigating the origins of tabby, its chemistry, its engineering, and its limitations. The Shell Builders lays out a sweeping, in-depth, and fascinating investigative journey--at once archaeological, sociological, and historical--into the ways prior inhabitants used and shaped their environment in order to house and protect themselves, leaving behind an architectural legacy that is both mysterious and beautiful. Lawrence S. Rowland, a distinguished professor emeritus of history at the University of South Carolina Beaufort and past president of the South Carolina Historical Society, provides a foreword.