The Bench by the Road on Sullivan's Island is a black steel bench, six feet long, placed by the Toni Morrison Society beside the Intracoastal Waterway behind the Fort Moultrie Visitor Center and dedicated on July 26, 2008. It answers a remark Morrison made in a 1989 interview with The World magazine: that there was no memorial, no plaque, not even a small bench by the road for the enslaved Africans brought to America. The plaque honors those who died in the Middle Passage and those who arrived at Sullivan's Island, which it calls a major point of entry for Africans in the transatlantic slave trade. The island's part in that trade was quarantine. Between 1707 and 1799, according to the National Park Service, four pest houses were built on Sullivan's Island to hold arriving enslaved passengers who carried infectious disease, though never more than one stood at a time. Their exact sites are unknown; all of them lay between Fort Moultrie and the western end of the island.
Morrison, then 77, sat on the bench at the dedication, which drew about 300 people. It was the first bench of a project the society launched on her 75th birthday, February 18, 2006, and the society has since placed 20, from Walden Woods in Massachusetts to Paris and Martinique.
Getting there
32.7624, -79.8564
Locations are approximate and may be inaccurate, on private land, or otherwise inaccessible. Check before you travel.
Hear it from the road
Whistlestop is an audio tour guide app that tells you this story automatically when you drive past. No searching, no tapping, nothing to ask.
