Welcome to the Lowcountry Rice Culture Project. The purpose of our organization is to serve as a clearing house and partnership builder for activities that explore, reveal, and reclaim the shared cultural inheritance of historical southeastern Lowcountry rice cultivation and lifestyle as a basis for promoting community development and advancing the cause of human dignity. An emphasis of this organization is to examine the consequences of this history and the meaning of heritage, as they are manifested in human interaction, through oral history projects, and other research and educational initiatives.

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For a century, Charleston, South Carolina was arguably among the richest communities in the world and the wealthiest city in the United States thanks to the labor of enslaved Africans and the business enterprise of a small and powerful landed class. Agriculture—especially rice cultivation, but also indigo, cotton and tobacco farming—was the economic engine that enabled these planters to establish a ruling class, wield political influence, and build the most dynamic and cosmopolitan urban center in the Southeast.

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Rice cultivation was a primary activity among the West Africans forcibly captured and brought to America for their specialized skill and engineering expertise that helped forge what we know today as Gullah Geechee culture. By extension, Gullah Geechee culture has lent much of the fabric required to stitch together an empire and that contributed to a myriad of ways to life in the Lowcountry over the centuries. The efforts of rice cultivators, then, provided the basis for the South’s cultural and economic inheritance, which still is very much felt today.