Paul Pressly

11:00 am – 12:00 pm Tuesday, April 21 and Friday, April 24

This two-part program is not open to individual session participation.

The Gullah Geechee have passed down oral histories about a group of captive Ibos who, smuggled into Georgia, rose up on a vessel as it neared St. Simons Island, overpowering the white sailors and choosing death by walking into water and drowning themselves, rather than face a lifetime of enslaved labor. The story has risen to enor­mous significance in the canon of African American culture.

Paul Pressly researches eighteenth-century colonization and slavery. He is the author of On the Rim of the Caribbean: Colonial Georgia and the British Atlantic World and A Southern Underground Railroad: Black Georgians and the Promise of Spanish Florida. Following his tenure as headmaster at Savannah Country Day School, he founded and directed the Ossabaw Education Alliance.