The Charleston Museum unveiled on Oct. 25 its new permanent exhibition, “Beyond the Ashes: The Lowcountry’s New Beginnings.” The exhibit covers pivotal events in Charleston’s history from the wake of the Civil War to the 21st century, picking up where the exhibitions had previously left off, at the end of the Civil War.
Charleston Museum Director Carl Borick told the Charleston City Paper it was “always the plan” to have an exhibition dedicated to these some 160 years post- Civil War, but that the museum had a huge undertaking in tracking down the right artifacts to tell that story.
It pulled off the new display with the curatorial help of Dr. Millicent Brown, a civil rights trailblazer who was one of the first 11 students to be integrated into Charleston public schools in 1963.
“You can’t possibly cover every single piece of our history, I mean, it’s just impossible,” Borick said. “A lot of what we do here revolves around the collection pieces that we have.
“So working with Dr. Millicent Brown enabled us to define some things that we could put in our exhibit case, offering an opportunity to bring in new things and talk more about the different facets of civil rights, Charleston and Lowcountry history.”
The new exhibit has some includes several items of local significance:
- An Edisto Island church pew made by enslaved people in the 1830s. They later used it after they were free. The artifact bridges the beginning and end of Reconstruction in the exhibition.
- A red shirt, emblematic of the violence that occurred in South Carolina after the Civil War. Shirts dyed red were once symbols adopted by White supremacist paramilitary organizations that emerged to oppose the Reconstruction government, a mockery of the concept of “waving the bloody shirt.”
- The piano on which George Gershwin composed Porgy & Bess in the summer of 1934 on Folly Beach.
- A commissioned recent quilt by local fiber artist Cookie Washington to commemorate the victims of the Emanuel Nine – clergy and church members who were murdered in 2015 at the historic Emanuel AME Church.
Artifacts in “Beyond the Ashes” illustrate Reconstruction, the earthquake of 1886, the Charleston Renaissance, the impact of the two World Wars on the area, the Jim Crow era, the civil rights movement, Hurricane Hugo and more.
“The museum is the only place you can come in person where you can find an A-to-Z history of our area in terms of cultural history, from native peoples all the way up to the 21st century [and] , natural history from 400 and 500 million years ago to the current epoch.
“Now, we’ve got this complete story.”
Learn more at charlestonmuseum.org.
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