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Hilton Head Island Themes
Island Life, Told in Clips
The narrators of Hilton Head Island Voices covered a lot of ground: how they made a living, where they went to school, what they cooked and celebrated, and how the island changed around them. We’ve gathered short clips from the interviews into themes so you can follow a single thread across many voices.
Choose a theme below to hear what narrators said about it, or use the filters to narrow clips by place. Each clip links to the full interview, so you can keep listening wherever a story leads.
Education
One-room schoolhouses, dedicated teachers, and the long road to integration
Farming
Cotton, rice, and family plots that fed households and generations
Civil Rights
Segregation, desegregation, and the fight for equal schools and opportunity
Fishing and Hunting
Oysters, crabs, shrimp, and game: making a living from water and woods
Commerical Development
Resorts, real estate, and how development reshaped land and livelihoods
Recreation
Boats, beaches, gatherings, and what people did for fun
Conflicts
Disputes over land, change, and community, on the island and beyond
Tales and History from the Islands
Family stories, local lore, and memories of Mitchelville and earlier times
Travel
Bateaus, ferries, sailing vessels, and finally the bridge
Explore the Themes
From this county, I don’t know. For one white school on this island, there must’ve been about four or five little Black schools, you know? ‘Cause they had neighborhood schools.
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The residents of the Black community were former slaves, who literally survived here from the time they were brought into slavery, to freedom, up till today. The ancestors are still here from those slaves.
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And then, a woman in the church came up to me, and she said, did I need money? And I said of course, I needed money and that all I had to give was my time. She gave me $10,000. And of course, we got it through the Presbyterian Church because she needed a tax write-off for that $10,000.
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When I grew up, the whites didn’t have any private schools. The public schools were theirs. For us in the higher grades, we were all at private schools.
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There were sea-goin’ vessels that would come out here. If you were goin’ to Daufuskie, you’d go to Savannah, or Bluffton, or Hilton Head. You wouldn’t come from here. These are sailin’ vessels, with all the—brought in spices, and probably slaves, and everything else in here back in those days.
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The Black kids had to go to Beaufort, Savannah, someplace else to complete high school. They did not have a full high school. And so, after elementary school, many of them had to quit if the parents couldn't afford to send them away.
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You know, when they changed those names, maybe they didn’t buy those companies from the different company and they changed the name, you know.
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