Gullah Geechee elders work to preserve sacred songs passed down by enslaved ancestors

ST. HELENA ISLAND, S.C. (AP) — Minnie “Gracie” Gadson claps her hands and stomps her feet against the floorboards, lifting her voice in a song passed down from her enslaved ancestors who were forced to work the cotton and rice plantations of the South Carolina Sea Islands.

It's a Gullah spiritual, and the 78-year-old singer is one of a growing group of artists and scholars trying to preserve these sacred songs and their Gullah Geechee culture for future generations.

“I have a passion to sing these songs,” Gadson said.

On a recent summer day, her voice rang out inside Coffin Point Praise House. It’s one of three remaining wooden structures on St. Helena Island that once served as a place of worship for the enslaved, and later, for generations of free Black Americans.

Gadson grew up singing in these praise houses. Today, as a Voices of Gullah member, she travels the U.S. with others in their 70s and 80s singing in the Gullah Creole language that has West African roots.

“This Gullah Geechee thing is what connects us all across the African diaspora because Gullah Geechee is the blending of all of these cultures that came together during that terrible time in our history called the trans-Atlantic slave trade,” said Anita Singleton-Prather, who recently performed and directed a play about Gullah history.

The show highlighted Gullah contributions during the American Revolution, including rice farming and indigo dying expertise. At the theater entrance, vendors offered Gullah rice dishes and demonstrated how to weave sweetgrass into baskets.

More than 5,000 descendants of enslaved plantation workers are estimated to live on St. Helena Island, the largest Gullah community on the South Carolina coast where respect for tradition and deep cultural roots persists.

“A lot of our songs were coded, and this language is a language of survival, a language of resilience, a language of tenacity,” Singleton-Prather said, adding that despite slavery’s brutality, the Gullah people were able to thrive, “giving our children a legacy — not a legacy of shame and victimization, but a legacy of strength and resilience.”

Gullah culture includes art forms, language and food by the descendants of West Africans who have lived on the coasts of the Carolinas, Florida and Georgia since slavery.

“It’s important to preserve the Gullah culture, mainly because it informs us all, African Americans, where they come from and that it’s still here,” said Eric Crawford, author of “Gullah Spirituals: The Sound of Freedom and Protest in the South Carolina Sea Islands.”

For most of his life, he hadn’t heard the word Gullah. That changed in 2007 with a student's master’s thesis about Gullah culture in public schools.

“As I began to investigate it, I began to understand that ‘Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen,’ ‘Roll Jordan Roll,’ ‘Kumbaya!’ — all these iconic songs came from this area,” he said.

Versions of these songs, he said, can be traced back to the 19th century when “Slave Songs of the United States,” the first book of African American spirituals, was recorded on St. Helena Island.

“And so my question was: ‘These songs that trace back to the 1800s — were they still being done over 150 years later?’”

He was so curious that he traveled to St. Helena, where he met the singers and began recording their music.

“These songs became pivotal,” Crawford said, sitting on the original wooden pews of the island’s Mary Jenkins Praise House. “They were forced to go to their owners’ church and stay in the balcony. But then in the evening, typically on Sunday evenings, Tuesday and Thursday, they had this space by themselves, away from the watchful eye of the owners, and they could engage in their own songs.”

At the praise houses, he said, they connected with their ancestors following West and Central African practices. Prayers and song would end with a counterclockwise dance and a “ring shout” — a rare outlet of joy for the enslaved.

These days the singers no longer rise to do the ring shout due to their age. But at a recent concert they clapped their hands in one rhythm, stomped the floor in another and swayed, singing at the island’s Brick Baptist Church.

“These singers are as close as we would ever come to how the enslaved sang these songs,” Crawford said. “That authenticity — you just cannot duplicate that.”

He began to take the singers on tour in 2014. Since then, they’ve performed across the U.S. as well as in Belize and Mexico.

The touring band's members include Gadson; 89-year-old Rosa Murray; 87-year-old Joe Murray; and their son, Charles “Jojo” Brown.

“I’m gonna continue doing it until I can’t do it no more, and hope that younger people will come in, others younger than me, to keep it going,” said Brown who, at 71, is affectionally called the “baby.”

His mother agrees. Sitting in her living room, surrounded by framed photos of dozens of grandchildren, she said she’ll continue singing for them.

“I hope and pray one or two of them will fall in my footsteps,” she said. “I’m leaving a legacy for them to do what I’m doing for the Lord.”

Other community members share that mission to teach future generations.

The Gullah Heritage Trails Tours take visitors through historic neighborhoods surrounded by beaches, wealthy vacation homes and golf resorts on Hilton Head Island. The tours were started by a family of 12 brothers and sisters in 1996.

“We thought it was important for people to know that Gullah people live on this island,” said Emory Campbell, 82, who helped translate the New Testament into Gullah and for decades led the respected Penn Center, one of the country’s first schools for freed slaves.

“If we don’t know who we are, we’re lost,” said Marlena Smalls, a singer and actor who for decades has been performing adaptations of Gullah spirituals for new audiences and founded the popular Gullah Festival. Her work even appeared on an SAT question about Gullah culture.

“I want to know who I am. And I want my children to know who they are and their children to know who they are. That’s why it’s important,” said Smalls, who is also known for playing Bubba’s mother in the film “Forrest Gump.”

Her adaptations of Gullah music, she said, are a way of preserving it by appealing to a mass audience. But she treasures the old spirituals, calling the group of singers, “true keepers of the culture.”

Given their age, Crawford sometimes asks himself “who will carry the torch.” He has been working to get grants so students can also start projects to preserve the songs, language and culture.

On a recent day, a group of students from Atlanta’s Morehouse College arrived at the Mary Jenkins Praise House to admire a site built in the early 1900s.

“It is a portal into the past and a window into the future,” said Tendaji Bailey, 35, founder of “Gullah Geechee Futures,” a project that focuses on the preservation of Gullah communities and cultural sites. For the past three years, he has been bringing Morehouse students to visit praise houses.

“They hear some of the prayers, some of the songs, and they always come out of that experience transformed. So, I know that there’s power in this place, still.”

Associated Press journalist Jessie Wardarski contributed to this report.

Associated Press religion coverage receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content.

"Voices of Gullah" members, Rosa Murray, from right, Minnie "Gracie" Gadson and Joe Murray walk out of the Brick Baptist Church after a concert, in St. Helena Island, Saturday, July 19, 2025. (AP Photo/Luis Andres Henao)

A visitor poses for a photo next to a statue of Harriet Tubman and a child titled "Journey to Freedom," at Historic Mitchelville Freedom Park on Hilton Head Island, Sunday, July 20, 2025. (AP Photo/Luis Andres Henao)

Spanish moss covers oak trees at the ruins of the St. Helena Parish Chapel of Ease on St. Helena Island, South Carolina, Monday, July 21, 2025. (AP Photo/Luis Andres Henao)

Gullah Heritage Trails Tours founder Emory Campbell talks to tourists during a visit to historic Gullah neighborhoods on Hilton Head Island, Sunday, July 20, 2025. (AP Photo/Luis Andres Henao)

Concertgoers listen to Gullah spirituals at the Brick Baptist Church in St. Helena Island, Saturday, July 19, 2025. (AP Photo/Luis Andres Henao)

"Voices of Gullah" members, Joe Murray, from left, Minnie "Gracie" Gadson, Rosa Murray and Charles "Jojo" Brown, sing Gullah spirituals at the Brick Baptist Church in St. Helena Island, Saturday, July 19, 2025. (AP Photo/Luis Andres Henao)

Eric Crawford, author of "Gullah Spirituals: The Sound of Freedom and Protest in the South Carolina Sea Islands," poses for a photo at the Mary Jenkins Praise House in St. Helena Island, Sunday, July 20, 2025. (AP Photo/Luis Andres Henao)

"Voices of Gullah" singers, Rosa Murray, left, and Minnie "Gracie" Gadson share a laugh at Murray's home in St. Helena Island, Saturday, July 19, 2025. (AP Photo/Luis Andres Henao)

Playwright and actress, Anita Singleton-Prather, second left, smiles at members of the cast of a play that highlights Gullah contributions during the American Revolutionary period, at the May River Theatre in Bluffton, South Carolina, Saturday, July 19, 2025. (AP Photo/Luis Andres Henao)

Actors wait on stage before the start of the play "Da'Gullah American Revolution" at the May River Theatre in Bluffton, South Carolina, Saturday, July 19, 2025. (AP Photo/Luis Andres Henao)

James Peter Smalls, a deacon, who takes care of the Mary Jenkins Praise House, poses for a photo outside the wooden structure in St. Helena Island, Sunday, July 20, 2025. (AP Photo/Luis Andres Henao)

A bench with wood burning designs paying homage to praise houses that once served as a place of worship for the enslaved, and later, for generations of free Black Americans sits outside the Tabernacle Baptist Church in Beaufort, South Carolina, Saturday, July 19, 2025. (AP Photo/Luis Andres Henao)

"Voices of Gullah" singer Minnie "Gracie" Gadson sings a Gullah spiritual while musicologist Eric Crawford follows along patting his thighs in body percussion, at the Coffin Point Praise House in St. Helena Island, Sunday, July 20, 2025. (AP Photo/Luis Andres Henao)

Singer and actress Marlena Smalls sings a Gullah spiritual at the Tabernacle Baptist Church in Beaufort, South Carolina, Saturday, July 19, 2025. (AP Photo/Luis Andres Henao)

CAIRO (AP) — The White House released the names of some of the leaders who will play a role in overseeing next steps in Gaza after the Palestinian committee set to govern the territory under U.S. supervision met for the first time Friday in Cairo.

The committee's leader, Ali Shaath, an engineer and former Palestinian Authority official from Gaza, pledged to get to work quickly to improve conditions. He expects reconstruction and recovery to take about three years and plans to focus first on immediate needs, including shelter.

“The Palestinian people were looking forward to this committee, its establishment and its work to rescue them,” Shaath said after the meeting, in a television interview with Egypt’s state-owned Al-Qahera News.

U.S. President Donald Trump supports the group's efforts to govern Gaza after the two-year war between Israel and Hamas. Israeli troops withdrew from parts of Gaza after the ceasefire took effect on Oct. 10, while thousands of displaced Palestinians have returned to what is left of their homes.

Now, there will be a number of huge challenges going forward, including the deployment of an international security force to supervise the ceasefire deal and the difficult process of disarming Hamas.

Under Trump's plan, Shaath's technocratic committee will run day-to-day affairs in Gaza under the oversight of a Trump-led “Board of Peace,” whose members have not yet been named.

The White House said an executive board will work to carry out the vision of the Board of Peace.

The executive board’s members include U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Trump envoy Steve Witkoff, Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner, former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, Apollo Global Management CEO Marc Rowan, World Bank President Ajay Banga, and Trump’s deputy national security adviser Robert Gabriel.

Nickolay Mladenov, a former Bulgarian politician and U.N. Mideast envoy, is to serve as the executive board’s representative overseeing day-to-day matters.

The White House also announced the members of another board, the “Gaza Executive Board,” which will work with Mladenov, the technocratic committee and the international stabilization force.

Witkoff, Kushner, Blair, Rowan and Mladenov will also sit on that board. Additional members include: Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan; Qatari diplomat Ali Al-Thawadi; Hassan Rashad, director of Egypt’s General Intelligence Agency; Emirati minister Reem Al-Hashimy; Israeli businessman Yakir Gabay; and Sigrid Kaag, the Netherlands’ former deputy prime minister and a Mideast expert.

In the West Bank, friends and relatives gathered Friday to mourn the death of a 14-year-old Palestinian boy killed by Israeli forces.

The Palestinian Health Ministry, which confirmed his death, said Mohammad Na’san was the first child killed by the army in the occupied West Bank in 2026.

Residents said Israeli forces fired stun grenades and tear gas in an unprovoked attack. Israel’s military said in a statement that the incursion came after Palestinians had hurled rocks at Israelis and set tires aflame.

“There was gunfire directed at citizens and farmers, the most dangerous of which occurred during the storming of the village as people were leaving the mosques. The streets were crowded with the elderly, children, women, and elders, and they began firing relentlessly,” said Ameen Abu Aliya, head of the Al-Mughayyir village council.

The death was the latest episode of violence to hit al-Mughayyir, a village east of Ramallah that has become a flashpoint in the West Bank. Much of the community’s agricultural land falls under Israeli military control.

Early this year, settlers and Israeli military bulldozers destroyed olive groves in the area, saying they were searching for Palestinian gunmen. A children’s park in al-Mughayyir was also demolished.

In 2025, 240 Palestinians — including 55 children — were killed by Israeli forces or settlers in the West Bank, while Palestinians killed 17 Israelis — including one child — in the region, according to the United Nations.

Meanwhile, two children were killed Friday in Gaza, a 7-year-old girl and a 16-year-old boy. They were killed in Beith Lahiya, near the Yellow Line, and their bodies taken to al-Shifa Hospital, the hospital said. No further details were immediately available.

Price reported from Washington. Associated Press reporters Jalal Bwaitel and Imed Isseid contributed to this report from Ramallah, Wafaa Shurafa from Deir Al-Balah, Gaza Strip, and Matthew Lee from Washington.

A Palestinian inspects the rubble of the al-Hawli family home, destroyed in an Israeli strike in Deir al-Balah, in the central Gaza Strip, Friday, Jan. 16, 2026. (AP Photo/Abdel Kareem Hana)

Palestinians inspect the rubble of the al-Hawli family home, destroyed in an Israeli strike in Deir al-Balah, in the central Gaza Strip, Friday, Jan. 16, 2026. (AP Photo/Abdel Kareem Hana)

Children walk over a pile of garbage at a makeshift tent camp for displaced Palestinians on a beach in Deir al-Balah, in the Gaza Strip Friday, Jan. 16, 2026. (AP Photo/Abdel Kareem Hana)