When visiting Sullivan’s Island off the coast of Charleston, South Carolina, a few years ago, designer Walter Hood came across an interesting pattern or tapestry of some sort in a small museum there. As he looked closer, he realized that it wasn’t a pattern: It was the outlines of bodies lined up next to each other.
He was looking at the Brooks Map, the document that shows how enslaved Africans were packed into the bottom of slave ships. Sullivan’s Island was a slave ship hub; it was where slave traders stopped before arriving at Gadsden’s Wharf in Charleston, the site where almost half of enslaved Africans entered the country via these ships.
Gadsden’s Wharf is also the site of the future International African American Museum, which breaks ground next year, and that Hood is helping design. Not to be confused with the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture in D.C., the IAAM is a project the city of Charleston is pursuing to “re-center South Carolina’s place in global history” in terms of its role in the international slave trade and the Civil War. Henry Cobb of Pei Cobb Freed & Partnersapproached Hood, a landscape architecture and design professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and founder of Hood Design Studio, to help lead design efforts for this project.
[For more on this story by BRENTIN MOCK, go to https://www.citylab.com/equity/2017/10/how-to-visualize-the-trauma-of-slavery/543861/]
Photo: Part of Walter Hood's vision for the International African American Museum in Charleston, South Carolina is a memorial garden where people can reflect on the trauma of slavery. Hood Design Studios.
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