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Joseph McGill & Herb Frazier on "Sleeping with the Ancestors"

Echoes of the Enslaved Event

Co-authors Joseph McGill and Herb Frazier will discuss "Sleeping with the Ancestors: How I Followed the Footprints of Slavery" with the State Archivist and Public Records Administrator for the District of Columbia, Dr. Lopez D. Matthews Jr. Presented by PGCMLS and Prince George's County Department of Parks and Recreation.

The personal account of one man's groundbreaking project to sleep overnight in the countless oft-overlooked former slave dwellings that still stand across the country, the fascinating history behind those sites, and how he has used the experiences to shed light on larger issues of race in America.

Prior to his current position as founder of the Slave Dwelling Project, Joseph McGill was a field officer for the National Trust for Historic Preservation. He is the former executive director of the African American Museum in Cedar Rapids, Iowa and the former director of history and culture at Penn Center, St. Helena Island, South Carolina. McGill was also a park ranger at Fort Sumter. He appears in the book "Confederates in the Attic" by Tony Horwitz. He is also a member of the South Carolina Humanities Council Speakers Bureau and holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in Professional English from South Carolina State University. 

For more information about the Slave Dwelling Project, visit https://slavedwellingproject.org/

Herb Frazier is a Charleston, South Carolina-based writer. He’s the special projects editor for the Charleston City Paper and the former marketing director at Magnolia Plantation and Gardens in Charleston. Before he joined Magnolia, Frazier edited and reported for five daily newspapers in the South, including his hometown paper, The Post and Courier. The South Carolina Press Association named him a Journalist of the Year. He has taught news writing as a visiting lecturer at Rhodes University in South Africa. He is a former Michigan Journalism Fellow at the University of Michigan. He studied journalism at the University of South Carolina.

After leaving daily journalism in 2006, Frazier led journalism workshops in Sierra Leone, Zambia, Ghana, Suriname, Guyana, and The Gambia for the U.S. government and a Washington, D.C.-based journalism foundation. His international reporting experience includes West Germany during the fall of the Berlin Wall and humanitarian relief efforts in Bosnia and Rwanda during its post-genocide period. He also reported on the military conflict in Sierra Leone. Frazier has written about the historical and cultural ties between West Africa and the Gullah Geechee people of coastal South Carolina and Georgia. He formerly represented South Carolina on the Gullah Geechee Cultural Heritage Corridor Commission, created by the U.S. Congress in 2006.

He is the author of "Behind God’s Back: Gullah Memories." He is a co-author of "We Are Charleston: Tragedy and Triumph at Mother Emanuel with Marjory Wentworth and Dr. Bernard Powers Jr." Frazier is also the co-editor of "Ukweli: Searching for Healing Truth, South Carolina Writers and Poets Examine American Racism." 

Lopez D. Matthews Jr., Ph.D., is the State Archivist and Public Records Administrator for the District of Columbia. In this capacity, he serves as the Historian of the District of Columbia, Chair of the D.C. Historical Records Advisory Board, and Director of the DC Office of Public Records and Archives. A native of Baltimore Maryland, he earned a BS in History from Coppin State University in 2004. He then earned a master’s degree in Public History and Archival Administration from Howard University in 2006 and a Ph.D. in United States History from Howard University in 2009.

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Currently, he is a member of the Council of State Archivists and an Executive Council Member of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History. He has published several articles and is the author of Howard University in the World Wars: Men and Women Serving the Nation. He is the host of In Retrospect and Prospect where he interviews practitioners about African American history projects for ASALH TV. In 2020, he became a Senior Advisor to the US Truth, Healing, and Transformation Leadership Group.

The Echoes of the Enslaved events are held in partnership with The Slave Dwelling Project, a non-profit whose vision is to encourage a “more truthful and inclusive narrative of the history of the nation that honors the contributions of all our people." Joseph McGill, founder of The Slave Dwelling Project, has taken his message of historic preservation and heritage to over 23 states and Washington, D.C., ensuring that the brave stories of enslaved families will be shared with future generations. Each year, Mr. McGill leads facilitated conversation circles at Echoes of the Enslaved, where participants discuss the legacies of slavery in this nation.