Through the story of the beautiful coiled basket, the Freedom Center’s new exhibition, Grass Roots, demonstrates the enduring contribution of African people and culture to American life.

The exhibition opens on Feb. 10, 2009, in the Jack H. Skirball Gallery.  Featuring more than two hundred objects, including baskets made in Africa and the American South, African sculptures, paintings from the Charleston Renaissance, historic photography, and new video, the exhibition traces the history of the coiled basket on two continents and shows how a simple farm tool once used for processing rice has become a work of art and an important symbol of African-American identity.

This exhibition was organized by the Museum for African Art, New York, in cooperation with the Avery Research Center for African American History and Culture at the College of Charleston, the McKissick Museum at the University of South Carolina, and the Sweetgrass Cultural Arts Festival Association.

Grass Roots is supported, in part, by grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Endowment for the Arts, The Getty Foundation (for the exhibition publication), the Gaylord and Dorothy Donnelley Foundation, and the MetLife Foundation. Funding for the video components of the exhibition has also been provided by The Henry and Sylvia Yaschik Foundation, South Carolina Humanities Council, and the South Carolina Arts Commission.

The pictures of Jim and Sarah (Sally) Stallworth hung on our family room wall along with all of the other family members in our bi-racial family.  Jim’s picture was especially intriguing to our visitors as they could not tell whether he belonged to my family or to my African-American husband’s family.  Sally was very dark with Negroid features so there was no doubt as to her ancestry but Jim could have been English or Scottish with his straight hair and light eyes.  Family oral history was not clear so there was no agreement.

As time went on I became more and more obsessed with the answer to this question.  Was he white?  Was he the son of a white slaveholder? Since there was no agreement in the family, I became determined to find the answer.

One of the known facts was that Jim had been born into slavery in South Carolina in 1842.  Also known was that he had purchased land in 1895 in Alabama–land which remains in the family today. It was while visiting the property in Alabama that I began to identify with this man who had come from the depths of slavery to being a small land owner and the progenitor of eight children and numerous descendants.

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