Programs & Projects
callmynamecu@clemson.edu
(864) 656-8855
Previous Programs
Clemson University Black History Month Celebration, February 2022
February 1-28, 2022
February 1, 2022
February 17, 2022
February 20, 2022
Tours
Call My Name currently offers African American Heritage walking tours of the Clemson University campus that include these stops:
- Memorial Stadium
- Fort Hill Plantation House
- Trustee House
- Old Main (Tillman Hall)
- Sikes Hall
- Hardin Hall
- SC Historical Marker for Fort Hill Quarters for the Enslaved and Stockade for Convicted Laborers
- Woodland Cemetery
The tour lasts approximately one hour.
To schedule a tour, please email callmynamecu@clemson.edu or call (864) 401-6216.
The Play CALL MY NAME Project
Image of the Brooks Center for the Performing Arts at Clemson University.
In May 2022, professional actors and Tectonic staff came to the Brooks Performing Arts Center’s teaching classrooms at Clemson University for the second phase of the project to engage in Moment Work, Tectonic’s trademark experimental and imaginative process of devising theater. Moment Work enables actors to create individual units in a space with the playwright, Dr. Rhondda Thomas, and then sequence the moments to create scenes for the play.
In the summer of 2022, a Tectonic staff member and an actor traveled to South Carolina to conduct research for the CMN Play. In August of 2022, Dr. Thomas spent 12 days in New York City working with Tectonic staff and an actor to develop the format for the play and select stories that will be included in the production. She will return in the fall of 2022 to engage in more Moment Work with professional actors and Tectonic staff and write the script for the play.
A reading of the CALL MY NAME play opened in the Bellamy Theater of the Brooks Center on January 28, 2023, the 60th anniversary of the day Harvey B. Gantt registered for classes after winning a class action lawsuit to desegregate Clemson. Two additional sold out were held on campus. Learn more about the performances here.
Dr. Thomas traveled to New York City to participate in a weeklong Moment Work lab with Tectonic Theater Project July 14-19, 2024. Professional actors presented a reading of the second half of the play in the lab on Friday, July 19.
To donate to support the production of the CALL MY NAME play, click the link below.
Call My Name Traveling Exhibit
Call My Name is currently developing a traveling museum exhibit, titled Call My Name: the Black Experience in the South Carolina Upstate from Enslavement to Desegregation. The exhibit will trace the trajectory of the Black experience beginning with free Africans and leading through enslavement, emancipation, segregation, and desegregation. It will follow roughly the path of the research project itself, leading participants thematically through the experiences of Generations 1 through 7.
The goal of the exhibit is to situate the stories of Black peoples at Clemson within a broader understanding of Black communities in America and the African Diaspora. In addition to the generations encompassed by Call My Name, which include individuals associated with Clemson University or the Fort Hill Plantation, the exhibit will also incorporate local communities, sites, and events, including the Calhoun and Cadillac Heights neighborhoods, the Silver Spring School, Calhoun Elementary School, Seneca Institute, chapters of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, sports clubs and organizations, and the desegregation of local public schools.
Key partners in this venture are the Call My Name Coalition, consisting of Shelby Henderson, director of the Bertha Lee Strickland Cultural Museum of Seneca, SC; Angela Agard, director of the Clemson Area African American Museum; and Nick McKinney, director of the Lunney Museum of Seneca, SC. Henderson and McKinney are serving as the exhibit’s designers. Other collaborators include Clemson University Libraries’ Special Collections and Archives, the Clemson University Humanities Hub, and the Upcountry History Museum of Greenville.
The exhibit is scheduled to open at Clemson University in August 2025. It will then travel to several sites in South Carolina and Georgia.
To make a donation to support the development of the traveling exhibit project, click here.
More Information
National Endowment for the Humanities
Public Humanities Exhibition – Implementation Grant, April 2020
Whiting Foundation Public Engagement Fellow, 2018-19 – exhibition project (previously named “Black Clemson: From Enslavement to Integration”)
Call My Name Video Project
From Civil War to Civil Rights in Clemson University's Black History
This project seeks to recover and present a public accounting of African Americans’ struggle for civil rights at Clemson University by using Fort Hill and Tillman Hall as a type of bookends to the story. Enslaved persons resisted involuntary servitude at Fort Hill during the antebellum period; Harvey Gantt desegregated Clemson when he registered for classes in Tillman Hall on January 23, 1963. Between and beyond these two pivotal moments, African Americans negotiated the tensions and transitions between being enslaved persons and freedmen and freedwomen, convicted laborers and wage workers, and entertainers and student-activists on the land upon which Clemson University was built. These educational videos will call their names and share their stories on campus and with the world.
This video series will expand and share information about African Americans’ struggle for civil rights at Clemson University in nine educational videos, eight 15-minute narrative videos and one music video, that trace this history from enslaved African Americans who labored at Fort Hill through African American students, beginning with Harvey Gantt, who desegregated and matriculated at Clemson. The videos will be presented as an educational resource for Clemson University’s Black Heritage Trail which is scheduled to open in January 2026. Both Fort Hill and Tillman Hall are stops on the trail. A distribution plan will also be created to ensure that educators, students, and the public have access to the videos locally, nationally, and globally through project websites and YouTube.
"Hush" Music Video Project
Call My Name has adopted “Hush, Hush, Somebody’s Calling My Name” as its theme song. The song was popularized in Roots, the highly acclaimed television series based on Alex Haley’s book titled Roots.
We are collaborating with Eric Young and Michael Young, members of the award-winning Donald Lawrence and the Tri-City Singers and descendants of Thomas and Frances Fruster who were enslaved on the Calhoun’s Fort Hill Plantation, to produce a music video of “Hush” that will include images of cultural and historical experiences of people from the seven generations of Call My Name and members of local Black communities.
The music video will be available for viewing on this web page and on the Call My Name social media sites in the fall of 2022.
To donate to support the production of the “Hush”, click here.
