Eugene Frazier

James Island: Stories from Slave Descendants Eugene Frazier First edition

Today, James Island is a bustling community seven miles west of Charleston, South Carolina, alive with families, growing industry and a direct route to the Lowcountry's popular Folly Beach. However, the island's past was not always as sunny. Beginning in the eighteenth century, when more than forty percent of the slaves to enter the United States arrived at the Port of Charleston, James Island was the destination for hundreds of slaves who were tortured with unimaginable hardships while crossing the Atlantic Ocean, then put to work on one of the island's numerous plantations.

In James Island: Stories From Slave Descendants, Eugene Frazier, Sr., compiles narrative interviews with slaves, slave descendents, and descendents of plantation owners. The stories he gathered give us a singular perspective on the lives of African Americans from 1732-1950, following the James Island community from more than 130 years of slavery to decades of sharecropping and farming while slavery's long shadow survived in segregation.

Frazier's interviews, conducted between 1942 and 2005, chronicle stories that would otherwise be forgotten. The personal narratives and dark histories revealed by the interviews provide an alternate history to James Island's famous plantations: Dill, McLeod, Seabrook, Legare, Clark, and ten others. An excellent resource for historians, teachers or those interested in the journey from slavery to integration, James Island: Stories From Slave Descendants will be an enlightening and meaningful addition to any library.