Culture and Community at Heritage Days Festival

Culture and Community at the Penn Center Historic Landmark District is supporting a symposium on Gullah/Geechee lineage and legacy as part of the Penn Center’s annual Heritage Days, one of the longest running festivals in the Southeast. The Culture and Community partnership will also coordinate and fund a delegation of students attending the festival from Claflin University, College of Charleston, and Georgia Tech. The festival takes place November 6-9, with the symposium scheduled for 3-5 p.m. on Friday, November 7.

The symposium panelists are Dr. Edda Fields-Black, Professor of history and director of the Dietrich College Humanities Center at Carnegie Mellon University and winner of the 2025 Pulitzer Prize in History for her book COMBEE: Harriet Tubman, the Combahee River Raid, and Black Freedom during the Civil War; Dr. Gina Paige, co-founder and president of AfricanAncestry.com; and Dr. Amir Jamal Toure of the Center for Africana Studies at Georgia Southern University and the Gullah Geechee Cultural Heritage Center.

Tickets for the festival, including VIP packages and passes for individual events, are available here.