Mr. Joseph McGill, Jr., is the founder of the Slave Dwelling Project. 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. Joseph 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. He also served as the Executive Director of the African American Museum located in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, is a former history consultant and interpreter with the Slavery to Freedom program at Magnolia Plantation and Gardens. Joseph is also the former Director of History and Culture at Penn Center and was also employed by the National Park Service. Penn School was the first school built during the Civil War for the education of recently freed slaves. Mr. McGill is a Civil War Reenactor who participates in living history presentations, and lectures.
Sleeping with the Ancestors: How I Followed the Footprint of Slavery, was co-written by Herb Frazier and Joseph McGill Jr., founder of the Slave Dwelling Project.
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. His forthcoming book is Crossing the Sea on a Sacred Song, that tells the story of a West African funeral song that links a woman in Sierra Leone and a family coastal Georgia.
“Thought-provoking… [Sleeping with the Ancestors] searingly describes dirt-floored cabins besieged by mosquitoes and creaky, airless attics, and it delves into the biographies of the properties’ past inhabitants. As Mr. McGill’s teams spent largely sleepless hours in these quarters, they grew hyper-observant…. Mr. McGill has paid particular attention to brickwork; the clay, he writes, remains textured with ‘finger-shaped impressions’ from enslaved brick makers.” ― The New York Times
