Story by Khalil Garriott ('04)
Design by Amanda Brock ('04)

JOE OPALA HAS LONG LISTENED FOR VOICES silenced by time and neglect, by the strident noise of nation building and by the pounding of outright oppression.

The JMU history professor and Honors Program faculty member-in-residence has heard them while studying the slave trade on West Africa's Rice Coast. He has tracked them, faint at first and protesting, across the ocean, two continents and 250 years. Opala's research into the historical links between the people of Sierra Leone and the Gullahs of South Carolina and Georgia, and the Black Seminoles of Florida, Oklahoma, Texas and Mexico has opened up a great swath of previously neglected American history.

"The role of Sierra Leone, in particular, in the South Carolina slave trade was much greater than historians have realized," says Opala, who lived in Sierra Leone for 17 years before returning to the United States five years ago. The reason for the connection, he explains, was rice. In the second half of the 18th century, South Carolina rice  planters paid higher prices for skilled slaves from Sierra Leone, part of the rice-growing region of West Africa.

Now both the history and Opala himself, one of the country's foremost experts on Gullah and Black Seminole history, are attracting interest. Opala has appeared on CNN and 60 Minutes II, and on the pages of The New York Times and The Washington Post.

He is a well-known speaker across college campuses, including Harvard's Kennedy school, and his research is the basis of two documentaries. The first, shown on PBS, was Family Across the Sea (1991). The second, The Language You Cry In (1998), stars those voices that Opala has strained to hear throughout his career.

One of them is Amelia Dawley's. In 1931 in the Gullah community of Harris Neck, Ga., according to the film, scholars recorded her singing a haunting African melody. Fifty years later, Opala crisscrossed Sierra Leone playing Amelia's recording in village after village. In Senehun Ngola, a woman named Bendu Jabati began to sing along. She recognized it as a song her grandmother taught her as part of a burial ritual. Through her, Opala and his colleagues had confirmed what those earlier scholars suspected - that the song was an ancient African funeral dirge carried by Sierra Leonean slaves to Georgia and handed down orally over two centuries. The film culminates with a reunion of Amelia Dawley's daughter, Mary Moran, with Bendu Jabati in Sierra Leone.

The influences of Amelia's Sierra Leonean and Gullah ancestors reach farther still. In fact, Opala says, "... The  story of the Black Seminoles will ultimately change our perceptions of American history."

Between about 1690 and 1835, he explains, Gullah slaves from coastal Georgia and South Carolina fled south, establishing independent Black Seminole villages and an "African frontier" in the Florida wilderness. But as white settlers began moving into the area, a full-scale war erupted in 1835, with these Black Seminoles and the native Seminole Indians allied against the whites. Eventually, they fought the U.S. Army to a standstill and won the right to migrate - in what has become known as the Trail of Tears - to the unsettled Western frontier, which is now Oklahoma and Opala's home.

"Amazingly, older Black Seminole descendants in small communities in Oklahoma, Texas and Mexico still speak Gullah - 250 years after their ancestors escaped from the Carolina rice plantations," Opala says.

"The Black Seminoles fought side by side - died, bled - for those lands in Florida," Opala said on a 60 Minutes II segment highlighting the modern rift between the Black and Native American Seminoles over federal compensation for their loss of those Florida lands. "They've been together. They've been good brothers and good neighbors for three centuries."

Today Opala has reached a crossroads. It has been five years since his midnight escape on a boat from Sierra Leone's civil war. Thousands of villagers were massacred and mutilated after the government broke down. Rebels and war criminals hacked off limbs in a campaign called "No Living Thing." Even Bendu Jabati was repeatedly tortured.

Opala has spent these years teaching at JMU and advocating for U.S. political intervention in Sierra Leone. Now that the nation is once again at peace, he is at odds between staying in the United States and returning to his second home in West Africa. "My heart wants me to go back, but this year is the first year I've really felt at home here in the United States," Opala says.

If he stays, he'll follow through on a proposal he and his JMU students presented in April to the U.S. Park Service to establish a historic trail (much like the Underground Railroad program) that would link Gullah-related sites in seven countries. Accustomed to briefing such august bodies as the United Nations, World Bank, U.S. State Department and U.S. Congress on the collapse of the Sierra Leone government, the ensuing human rights catastrophe and misguided international intervention, Opala gave six of his students an opportunity to make their first public presentation. Students Amir Allak, John Daly, Melissa Dobruck, Joanna Mirsky, Dominique Semeraro and Chris Wells made presentations on the various sections of the trail they researched. Students urged the park service to preserve these sites and develop them for historical tourism.

For three semesters, JMU honors students, including Cristen Crabtree, Jenny Sweet, Katrina Cunningham, Christopher France and Jonathan Nein have researched the 37 sites of the proposed trail based on a new historical concept Opala has introduced - The Gullah Connection.

"The Gullah people of South Carolina and Georgia," their proposal explains, "are the center of a great chain of migration stretching back to West Africa and then forward to such diverse places as Florida, the Bahamas, Oklahoma, Texas and Mexico.

"The Gullah Connection is a powerful historical tool," the report continues. "It shows that the Gullah - the African-Americans who have preserved more of their African linguistic and cultural heritage than any other - are not just a remarkable folk culture. They have also played a major role in U.S. history."

In the JMU classroom, Opala says, "I've been trying to shake up students' historical worldview." Through his students' mentored research, he hopes to carry this knowledge of Gullah history into the national park system where, he says, everyday Americans can learn that "Americans from all ethnic groups have made profound contributions to our history."

Read more about Opala's films and his activism on behalf of Sierra Leone at these Web sites: www.newsreel.org/films/langyou or www.teleline.terra.es/personal/inkoak/entlyci.htm.