(Johns Island). Located in the South Carolina lowcountry, Moving Star Hall provides an example of an antebellum \u201cpraise house\u201d that served the slave community, and later the freed people, as a center of social and cultural life. \u201cThe Hall,\u201d as the people of Johns Island referred to it, featured intense, all-night \u201cprayings\u201d in an expressive and egalitarian worship style. John Smalls, a longtime member of the Hall, told interviewers in the 1960s, \u201cWe don\u2019t charge nothing to come in Moving Star Hall . . . whether you are white, whether you are dark like myself, or different color, come in. . . . If you want to speak . . . you got the opportunity\u2013we give it to you.\u201d<\/p>\n
Following emancipation, the Hall served as the headquarters of the Moving Star Society, a fraternal order whose services included both a burial and a \u201ctend the sick\u201d society. Representing the ability of slaves and freed people to create cultural institutions under the most oppressive of conditions, Moving Star Hall continued to serve the people of Johns Island as a place of worship and a community center into the 1960s.<\/p>\n
As of 2001, Moving Star Hall provided a place of worship for an African American Pentecostal Church. This new congregation had not broken completely with older practices of worship at the Hall, as evidenced by the intermingling of modern gospel music and elements of the \u201cring shout\u201d tradition in their worship. The folkways of the people of Johns Island were also kept alive by the Moving Star Hall Singers, who have shared the music of the Hall, stories of lowcountry life, and African folktales at the Charleston Spoleto Festival and the national festival of Afro-American Arts in Atlanta.<\/p>\n
Carawan, Guy, and Candie Carawan. Ain\u2019t You Got a Right to the Tree of Life? The People of Johns Island, South Carolina\u2013Their Faces, Their Words, and Their Songs. <\/em>Rev. ed. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1989.<\/p>\n Cooper, Nancy Ashmore. \u201cWhere Everybody Is Somebody: African American Churches in South Carolina.\u201d In Religion in South Carolina, <\/em>edited by Charles H. Lippy. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1993.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" (Johns Island). Located in the South Carolina lowcountry, Moving Star Hall provides an example of an antebellum \u201cpraise house\u201d that served the slave community, and later the freed people, as a center of social and cultural life. \u201cThe Hall,\u201d as the people of Johns Island referred to it, featured intense, all-night \u201cprayings\u201d in an expressive […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":-1,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","template":"","class_list":["post-8857","entry","type-entry","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","ecms-a-z","ecms-african-americans","ecms-charleston-county","ecms-encyclopedia","ecms-lowcountry","ecms-m","ecms-religion"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n