Sleeping with the Ancestors: How I Followed the Footprints of Slavery

With a new Afterword and Reading Group Guide exclusive to the paperback edition.

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.

Joseph McGill Jr. is a history consultant for Magnolia Plantation in Charleston, South Carolina, and the founder and director of The Slave Dwelling Project. Previously, as a field officer for the National Trust for Historic Preservation, Mr. McGill worked to revitalize the Sweet Auburn commercial district in Atlanta, Georgia, and to develop a management plan for the Mississippi Delta National Heritage Area. He is a former executive director of the African American Museum in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and a former director of history and culture at Penn Center, St. Helena Island, South Carolina. He has also served as a National Park Service park ranger at Fort Sumter National Monument in Charleston.

Herb Frazier is the special project editor at the Charleston City Paper. 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 Ukwell: Searching for Healing and Truth, South Carolina Writers and Poets Explore American Racism, with the late Horace Mungin. Frazier edited and reported for five daily newspapers in the South, including his hometown newspaper, the Post and Courier in Charleston. He has led journalism workshops in Sierra Leone, Zambia, Ghana, Suriname, Guyana, and The Gambia. He was a visiting lecturer at Rhodes University in Grahamstown, South Africa. Frazier is also the former marketing director at Magnolia Plantation and Gardens in Charleston.