Book Talk with Joseph McGill Jr. & Herb Frazier Authors of “Sleeping with the Ancestors”

Celebrating Our Ancestors is a multi-day public event designed to share the history of enslaved people in Pensacola and celebrate the many important contributions they made to create this city and its unique culture. 

Celebrating Our Ancestors will begin with a book talk with Joseph McGill Jr, Founder and Executive Director of the Slave Dwelling Project, and Herb Frazier about their book Sleeping with the Ancestors: How I Followed the Footprints of Slavery. 

About Sleeping with the Ancestors

In this enlightening personal account, one man tells the story of his groundbreaking project to sleep overnight in former slave dwellings that still stand across the country—revealing the fascinating history behind these sites and shedding light on larger issues of race in America.

Joseph McGill Jr., a historic preservationist and Civil War reenactor, founded the Slave Dwelling Project in 2010 based on an idea that was sparked and first developed in 1999. Since founding the project, McGill has been touring the country, spending the night in former slave dwellings—throughout the South, but also the North and the West, where people are often surprised to learn that such structures exist. Events and gatherings are arranged around these overnight stays, and it provides a unique way to understand the often otherwise obscured and distorted history of slavery. The project has inspired difficult conversations about race in communities from South Carolina to Alabama to Texas to Minnesota to New York, and all over the United States.

Sleeping with the Ancestors focuses on all of the key sites McGill has visited in his ongoing project and digs deeper into the actual history of each location, using McGill’s own experience and conversations with the community to enhance those original stories. Altogether, McGill and coauthor Herb Frazier give readers an important unexpected emersion into the history of slavery, and especially the obscured and ignored aspects of that history.

About the Authors

Joseph McGill, Jr.

Joseph McGill, Jr. is the founder of the Slave Dwelling Project and a history consultant for Magnolia Plantation in Charleston, SC. By arranging for people to sleep in extant slave dwellings, the Slave Dwelling Project has brought much needed attention to these often-neglected structures that are vitally important to the American built environment.

Mr. McGill has conducted over 250 overnights in approximately 150 different sites in 25 states and the District of Columbia. He has interacted with the descendants of both the enslaved communities and of the enslavers associated with antebellum historic sites. He speaks with school children and college students, with historical societies, community groups, and members of the public.

Since 2016, Mr. McGill expanded the Slave Dwelling Project to offer a program of living history called “Inalienable Rights: Living History Through the Eyes of the Enslaved.” The Project has conducted 7 conferences since 2013.

Mr. McGill is a Civil War Reenactor who participates in living history presentations, and lectures.

Mr. McGill was a field officer for the National Trust for Historic Preservation, working to revitalize the Sweet Auburn commercial district in Atlanta, GA and to develop a management plan for the Mississippi Delta National Heritage Area.

Mr. McGill served as the Executive Director of the African American Museum located in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. His responsibilities included seeking funds from grant making entities to support the capital and operating budget of the museum/cultural center and developing programs that interpret the history of African Americans.

Mr. McGill is the former Director of History and Culture at Penn Center, St. Helena Island, South Carolina. Penn School was the first school built during the Civil War for the education of recently freed slaves. As Director, he was responsible for the overall development and implementation of the Center’s program for collecting, preserving, and making public the history of Penn Center and the Sea Island African American history and culture.

Mr. McGill was also employed by the National Park Service, serving as a Park Ranger at Fort Sumter National Monument in Charleston, South Carolina. As a Park Ranger, Mr. McGill gave oral presentations on Fort Sumter and Fort Moultrie on and off site. He supervised volunteers and participated in living history presentations.

Mr. McGill appears in the book Confederates in the Attic by Tony Horwitz. He is also a member of the South Carolina Humanities Council Speakers Bureau.

Mr. McGill is coauthor of the book: Sleeping with the Ancestors: How I Followed the Footprints of Slavery.

Mr. McGill is a native of Kingstree, South Carolina. Upon graduating from high school, he enlisted in the United States Air Force. While in the Air Force, Mr. McGill served as Security Policeman in England, Washington State and Germany.

Mr. McGill holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in Professional English from South Carolina State University, Orangeburg, South Carolina.

He is married to the former Vilarin Mozee, and they have one daughter, Jocelyn Mozee McGill.

Herb Frazier

Herb Frazier is a Charleston, South Carolina-based writer. He is senior projects editor at the Charleston City Paper. He’s the former marketing director at Magnolia Plantation and Gardens in Charleston. Before he joined Magnolia, Frazier edited and reported for five daily newspapers in the South, including his hometown paper, The Post and Courier.

The South Carolina Press Association named him Journalist of the Year. He has taught news writing as a visiting lecturer at Rhodes University in South Africa. He is a former Michigan Journalism Fellow at the University of Michigan.

Frazier has led journalism workshops in West Africa, East Africa and South America for the U.S. government and a Washington, D.C.-based journalism foundation.

His international reporting includes West Germany during the fall of the Berlin Wall, humanitarian relief efforts in Bosnia and Rwanda during its post-genocide, social and political issues in Japan and South Korea and Cuba’s cultural ties with Florida and Lowcountry South Carolina.

Frazier also has reported on the military conflict in Sierra Leone and the historical and cultural ties that bind West Africa and Gullah Geechee people of coastal South Carolina and Georgia.

Frazier is a former member of the Gullah Geechee Cultural Heritage Corridor Commission, established by Congress in 2006. He also served as secretary of the Jazz Artists of Charleston, which supports the Charleston Jazz Orchestra.

He has published four books. He is the author of “Behind God’s Back: Gullah Memories,” co-author of “We Are Charleston: Tragedy and Triumph at Mother Emanuel” with Marjory Wentworth and Dr. Bernard Powers Jr., and co-editor of “Ukweli: (pronounced – you ̶ quail – lee) Searching for Healing Truth, South Carolina Writers and Poets Explore American Racism” with the late Horace Mungin.

Frazier’s most recent book, “Sleeping with the Ancestors: How I Followed the Footprint of Slavery,” was co-written with Joseph McGill Jr., founder of the Slave Dwelling Project. His forthcoming book, “Crossing the Sea on a Sacred Song,” is the story of an African funeral song that links a Georgia family with a woman in Sierra Leone.

Event Details

This event is FREE and open to the public. Pre-registration is encouraged.

Registration