For a Distinctive Black Culture, a Rerouted Parade Feels Like Erasure

The annual Penn Center Heritage Day Parade in South Carolina draws hundreds to celebrate the Gullah Geechee people. But a new route has Black residents feeling as if their legacy is vanishing.

The Penn Center Heritage Day Parade on St. Helena Island in South Carolina fills streets with colorful African garbs, drums and marching bands. Credit...Donaven Doughty for The New York Times

For a Distinctive Black Culture, a Rerouted Parade Feels Like Erasure

The annual Penn Center Heritage Day Parade in South Carolina draws hundreds to celebrate the Gullah Geechee people. But a new route has Black residents feeling as if their legacy is vanishing.

• Nov. 8, 2025

For nearly four decades, the parade on St. Helena Island celebrating the Gullah Geechee people, descendants of enslaved West Africans, has played out in the same way. It starts at the local elementary school off Highway 21 and ends roughly a mile away at the Penn Center, the first school in the South for freed slaves that now serves as a museum of Black history.

Drawing hundreds of people across the Creole-speaking diaspora every November, the Penn Center Heritage Day Parade in the South Carolina Lowcountry fills streets with people wearing colorful African garbs, playing drums and, of course, marching bands. A local church float, fluffed with purple ribbons, gets the party going with a saxophonist and a rollicking gospel choir.

But after several years of traffic complaints, the parade has been scaled back. Among others things, Saturday’s hourlong procession had fewer floats than last year. It didn’t occupy the narrow highway’s two lanes and the median, but only one lane to accommodate traffic. And it didn’t start at the school, where most residents are alumni, but on a smaller road that shortened the route.

The changes, residents say, have come to feel like a microcosm of larger issues facing the Black residents of St. Helena, who have grown more concerned about gentrification and the erasure of their culture as a wealthier, and whiter, population booms around them.

“It’s not just a parade, but a beautiful display of our heritage,” said Isiah Smalls, pastor of the Friendship Baptist Church, which puts on the float. “This is like telling your wife, ‘Honey, it’s our wedding, but you go ahead and wear your jeans, and it’ll be OK.’”

‘A Disaster’

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For decades, the parade had started at St. Helena Elementary School, where many residents are alumni.Credit...Donaven Doughty for The New York Times

Of course, many St. Helena residents say things are not OK.

In the 1860s during the Civil War, the island’s Black population was freed from slavery by Union troops, and then many other enslaved people freed by Harriet Tubman also moved to the area. Since then, “this has been a revolutionary community,” said Robert L. Adams Jr., the director of the Penn Center.

Recently, the heirs of that heritage have been feeling pressured on multiple fronts.

Rising property taxes and an influx of new residents have forced many locals to move. On neighboring islands, gated communities have sprung up by the water, making Highway 21, or Sea Island Parkway, a heavily trafficked road that was not designed for such volume.

And that growth is not expected to slow down: Beaufort County, which includes St. Helena, is one of the fastest growing in South Carolina, which also happens to be one of the fastest-growing states in the country.

So weeks after the 2023 parade, the county sheriff, P.J. Tanner, was firm: A route change was needed, he said. Traffic was too backed up during the event that year. Scores of complaints had been sent to his office.

St. Helena residents had tried to argue that it was all a bad coincidence. The Veterans Day parade had fallen on the same Saturday as the Penn Center parade that year, so the traffic chaos wouldn’t happen again in 2024, they argued.

Sheriff Tanner was not convinced, saying traffic concerns had long been bubbling in the area. But he agreed to a compromise: Fewer floats and only one lane, but they could still use Highway 21. Cones were placed in the median, and traffic continued along the other lane.

How did it go last year?

“A disaster,” said Sarah Reynolds Green, 74, the co-founder of a nonprofit that distributes food. She recalled hearing children ask if a car could drive over the cones and hit them. No one seemed to be happy with the compromise, she said.

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Sarah Reynolds Green said no one seemed happy with the compromise last year over the parade and traffic issues. Credit...Donaven Doughty for The New York Times

To make matters worse, the event felt unorganized. It was missing its main parade marshal, James Peter Smalls, a 78-year-old deacon and Vietnam War veteran who had been struck by a vehicle days before the procession while he was walking outside. He was hospitalized.

After the 2024 parade, many Black residents demanded that they be allowed to use the entire highway again. Hundreds signed a petition sent to the South Carolina Department of Transportation.

The agency replied in June, saying that during the parade, it was “becoming increasingly burdensome for the traveling public to safely move through the area,” which had no detour route. The department agreed with them on one point. It was dangerous to allow motorists to move through the parade. Perhaps they could find another route?

The people of St. Helena were not interested.

Sheriff Tanner said in an interview that while he loved the St. Helena community and respected their desire to keep things the same, rapid growth simply made that impossible. Highway 21, the only way to get to Hunting Island State Park and Fripp Island to the east, is too vital to partially shut down for more than an hour, he said.

The opinion of St. Helena residents is, “‘Well, we’ve been doing this for 40 years,’” said Mr. Tanner, who has been sheriff for nearly three decades. “You know, I agree with you. But now in 2025, this county’s landscape has changed.”

The ‘Been Heres’ and ‘Come Heres’

To the Gullah Geechee people, the traffic complaints feel riddled with racial undertones, since many of the people on nearby islands are either vacationers or affluent white residents. The residents of St. Helena have recently fought over access to burial grounds against wealthy landowners, a proposed golf course and the potential loosening of a zoning law that prohibits gated communities and resorts from being built on the island.

The root of that struggle, the Gullah Geechee people say, is to protect their vanishing culture, as well as their small-town, riverside aesthetic. For some, the best meal of the day still often means casting a line for whiting fish on the Cowen Creek, beside giant oak trees dripping with silver strings of Spanish moss. Some still divide residents of the island into two camps: those who have resided here for generations (the “Been Heres”) and those who have newly moved in (the “Come Heres”).

Other parades in the area, they added, aren’t nearly as scrutinized. Officials say that’s because they have alternative traffic routes.

The level of scrutiny toward the Penn Center parade, though, is difficult to measure. Shelley Gay Yuhas, a Republican who ran for a State House seat last year and who lives on Fripp Island, said she hadn’t heard any neighbors complain about the parade over the years.

“The Fripp Island residents that I know of are very understanding and so respectful of the Gullah community,” she said.

On a recent morning, as neighbors preparing for the celebration mixed Gullah Lowcountry nectar, a kind of blackberry drink, Mr. Smalls, the parade marshal, was still recuperating from the nine broken ribs he had suffered after being struck by the S.U.V. last year. But he said he was intent on being at the parade on Saturday, despite his reservations about the new route.

“It just don’t add up,” the deacon said before the festivities. “Why pick on an event that represents the Black community, represents our culture and try to mess it up, changing things to correct for a few people? They feel they should have the privilege to disturb a whole community?”

Instead of cones, the median this year had a row of about a dozen parked vehicles. Many loathed that plan, even if it was safer.

But Dr. Adams, the Penn Center director, said that he could empathize with arguments about backed-up traffic.

“I don’t want to simplify it into, ‘It’s Fripp versus St. Helena, it’s rich white folks versus impoverished Black folks on the island,’” he said. “It’s a lot more complicated than that. It’s connected to growth.”

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Carrie Major, who grew up on the island, found the changes to the route to be a “slap in the face.”Credit...Donaven Doughty for The New York Times

For people like Carrie Major, 72, who grew up on the island, “the disrespect feels like a slap in the face.” With only one lane to maneuver in, she wondered, would the dancers even have room to perform?

The answer on Saturday morning was “barely,” according to Danielle White, the choreographer for the preteen dance troupe that shimmied and bounced to hip-hop down the highway.

People still gathered on one side and collected candy being tossed out from floats. Children screamed with glee as motorcyclists revved their engines.

But many said the scene was tinged with sadness. The sidewalks weren’t brimming with parade watchers. There were no marching bands. And in the gaps between floats, one could see cars slowly driving by on the far lane.

When the parade finally turned on to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Drive and headed toward the Penn Center, a family complained that it felt short. So they headed to a food truck where others were gathered, and ordered the fried shark combo. There was still a party to enjoy.

Kirsten Noyes contributed research.

Eduardo Medina is a Times reporter covering the South. An Alabama native, he is now based in Durham, N.C.

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