Cornelia bailey biography of albert

In her own words, Cornelia Bailey was a Saltwater Geechee and a storyteller.

Cornelia Bailey (1929 - 1991) - Biography and Family Tree ...

Her research, writing, cultural, and environmental activism in her birthplace in Belle Marsh on Sapelo Island, part of the Georgia Sea Islands, defined her contribution to the folklore field. Bailey was eloquent in both the English taught on the mainland and in the language of her Geechee forebears. 

Born to Hicks Walker and Hettie Bryant in 1945, Bailey is recognized as a griot as well as a pioneer in the development of community directed agency in cultural tourism.

Bailey traced her lineage and that of her community back to West Africa, where her ancestor, Bilali Muhammad, a Fulbe Muslim, was born and later seized into slavery, ending up on the Thomas Spalding plantation in Sapelo in 1803.

In 1989, her research took her to Sierra Leone where she studied connections between Sea Island cultural practices that she practiced and their ancestral correlates on the African continent.

B Georgia’s Sapelo Island, the focus of a new documentary RETUS