Four days after Christmas in 1928, dozens of Sapelo Islanders gathered around an oxcart on a dirt road that snaked through live oaks covered in Spanish moss and waited for the white man who was filming them to tell them what to do next. They had already sung “Old Time Religion,” “Steal Away to Jesus,” and performed a rendition of the minstrel tune that was named the Kentucky state song that year—“My Old Kentucky Home.” Each time the camera rolled, the filmmaker directed the Islanders to sing while riding in, or walking alongside, the ox cart. The solemn choral group likely included some of the men Howard Coffin hired to build roads, prepare crops, man his sawmill, tend his cattle, work in his greenhouse, or build boats and other structures. Likewise, several of the women in the chorus were either paid by Coffin to work in his shrimp and oyster cannery or in his fields, or were members of the domestic staff who cooked his meals and cleaned his mansion. Even though the filmmaker captured several “takes” designed to look like mundane and typical Sapelo scenes, that day was anything but ordinary. That day, Sapelo Islanders found themselves in front of cameras, recording equipment, and in the presence of a small crowd of newspaper reporters because their boss had recruited them to entertain the most powerful white man in America, President Calvin Coolidge.
Of course President Coolidge’s sojourn to the island made headlines in national newspapers, but articles chronicling the details of his trip also introduced Sapelo Islanders to the nation. Reports described the men, women, and children, who were descendants of the freedmen and freedwomen who fought for land on the island, as the 250 “negroes who” gratefully showed “their allegiance” to Coffin — the man who “permitted” them to remain on the “romantic and picturesque” island when he purchased it in 1912. News stories recounted the president’s and the millionaire’s hunting excursions led by “‘Old Pete’ Morgan, native black guide” during which “negro beaters” flushed birds from the brush so that Coolidge and Coffin could easily shoot their prey. Reporters wrote about Mrs. Coolidge’s attempts to befriend the island’s black children so that she could record them with her motion picture camera. And several papers featured the “sea island rodeo” that the island’s blacks performed on the beach to amuse the president and his entourage as one of the trip’s highlights. Articles announced that during the rodeo “excited negroes,” “the youthful descendants of African slaves” rode wild steers “bareback” on the beach, while “groups of negro girls . . . vied with each other in singing the spirituals of their race and gospel hymns.” Together, these brief descriptions presented Sapelo Islanders as a unique population of simple and exotic Southern black folk.