About
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Our Mission
The mission of Penn Center is to promote and preserve Penn’s true history and culture through its commitment to education, community development and social justice.
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Our Vision
Penn Center will be a world-class organization that serves as a local, national, and international resource center and catalyst for the development of programs for community self-sufficiency, civil and human rights, and positive change. Penn Center will encourage the development of critical thinking, creative skills, and social consciousness through preserving and documenting history, collecting and exhibiting, presenting and exploring ideas.
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Significance
“More than a century since its founding, Penn Center still remains at the forefront in the fight for human dignity.”
— U.S. Congressman John Lewis, Georgia's 5th District
Penn Center
For more than one hundred fifty years, Penn Center National Historic Landmark District, located on St. Helena Island, South Carolina, has been at the epicenter of African American education, historic preservation, and social justice for tens of thousands of descendants of formerly enslaved West and Central Africans living in the Sea Islands, known as the Gullah Geechee people.
The Gullah Geechee represent the most tangible living example of one outcome of the Port Royal Experiment, a Civil War-era plan to tutor freedpeople out of slavery and into freedom—a “rehearsal for Reconstruction,” as historians have called it.
Founded in 1862, Penn School, established by northern missionaries, was one of the first academic schools in the South to provide a formal education for previously enslaved West Africans.
After the school closed in 1948, Penn became the first African American site in South Carolina whose primary purpose was to safeguard the heritage of a Gullah Geechee community.
Later, in the 1960s, Penn Center took up the mantle of social justice, ushering in the Civil Rights Movement and serving as the only location in South Carolina during the Civil Rights Movement where interracial groups, such as Dr. Martin L. King, Jr., the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and the Peace Corps could have safe sanctuary in an era of mandated segregation.
Penn Center continues to thrive as a National Historic Monument serving as a viable catalyst for sustaining the history and culture of the Sea Islands. It continues to foster initiatives that impact local, national, and international communities.
Penn Center is a multi-service 501(c)3 non-profit organization.
Support our museum and educational programs by making a donation or volunteering your time.