Joseph Opala

Quick Facts

Full Name	Joseph Opala
Occupation	Anthropologist
Date Of Birth	Aug 4, 1950(1950-08-04)
Age	74
Country	United States
Birth City	Oklahoma City
Horoscope	Leo

Joseph Opala Biography

Joseph Opala is one of the most popular and richest Anthropologist who was born on August 4, 1950 in Oklahoma City, United States. Opala has also been instrumental in organizing many reunions between Gullahs together with Their Black Seminole cousins in Oklahoma, Texas, and Northern Mexico. They are the Black Seminoles are the descendants of Gullah slaves who fled to Spanish Florida in the 1700s which is where they joined forces against their fellow Seminole Indians. Following they fought in the Second Seminole War in the 1830s The Black Seminoles were removed to Indian Territory (now Oklahoma). A few later moved into Texas or Northern Mexico, where their descendants have retained the Gullah traditions and language up to today. Opala hosted an annual symposium at the Penn Center that brought Black Seminole leaders to the Gullah region for the first time and he also organized back-to-back visits by Gullah officials for Black Seminole communities in Oklahoma and Texas. Opala then submitted an update for the US Park Service suggesting ways to integrate Bunce Island and Black Seminole old sites into the Gullah Geechee Corridor in the coming years.

Opala along with computer engineer Gary Chatelain of James Madison University are currently developing a 3D digital model of Bunce Island showing how the castle first appeared in 1805. African American TV actor Isaiah Washington who found his ancestors’ roots in Sierra Leone through a DNA test, donated $25,000 for this project back in 2007. Opala and Chatelain’s computer models will be used for explaining the castle to visitors to the museum and on the site within the site. The model computer is part of an exhibit traveling around Bunce Island that Opala created. The exhibit was shown at museums and colleges across both the U.S. and Canada, as well as to the Sierra Leone National Museum during the country’s 50th anniversary Independence celebrations in 2011.

Joseph Opala was born in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma in 1950. His father Marian P. Opala (1921-2010) fought in the Polish Underground in World War II and immigrated to the U.S. in 1947. Opala’s father was imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp (Flossenbürg) during the war, and lost all contact with his surviving family in Poland during the Cold War period that followed. Opala grew up immersed in the effects of World War II and the separation of families. Later his father became an attorney and was appointed as an Oklahoma Supreme Court Justice.

Joseph A. Opala, OR (born August 4, 1950) is an American historian noted for establishing the “Gullah Connection,” the historical links between the indigenous people of the West African nation of Sierra Leone and the Gullah people of the Low Country region of South Carolina and Georgia in the United States.

Opala believes that approximately 25% percent of Black Loyalists (or “Nova Scotians” as they are known today in Sierra Leone today) were originally Gullahs from South Carolina and Georgia. A few Gullahs were also straight to their home in the United States to Sierra Leone in the early 1800s such as Edward Jones, a free black man from South Carolina. Jones was the first chief in the Sierra Leone’s Fourah Bay College.

Joseph Opala Net Worth

Joseph Opala is one of the richest Anthropologist from United States. According to our analysis, Wikipedia, Forbes & Business Insider, Joseph Opala 's net worth $5 Million. (Last Update: December 11, 2023)

However, his most lasting contribution is without doubt his knowledge of the significance of Bunce Island’s history to its place in the United States, and his years of study and public history efforts to help increase public understanding of this location. Bunce Island will likely become an important destination in African American heritage tourism in the years ahead due thanks to the efforts of Opala. However, Opala has also influenced other scholars to be interested in Bunce Island and, as time passes, increasingly, they are turning their attention to this place. Prof. Henry Louis Gates, the most well- known expert in African American studies, recently was featured on Bunce Island within his upcoming TV documentary about the story of African Americans, broadcast on PBS. Gates also included in the same film the tale of “Priscilla,” the enslaved child that was brought out of Sierra Leone to South Carolina in 1756. Opala’s assertion to the effect that Bunce Island has special importance to people in the United States appears to be slowly gaining acceptance.

A few Free Gullah people, also known by the name of “Black Loyalists,” migrated to Sierra Leone after American Independence. They were as slaves in South Carolina and Georgia plantations who escaped to British frontiers at the time of the American Revolutionary War. The British offered the freedom of these slaves in exchange for their military service, however after losing the war and the war ended, the British relocated them to Nova Scotia, Canada. Then, British philanthropists established a colony of freed slaves located in Sierra Leone, and arranged transportation for over 1,200 Black Loyalists to Canada into Sierra Leone in 1792.

Opala has traveled between Sierra Leone and the South Carolina and Georgia Low Country for 30 years, producing documentary films, museum exhibits, and popular publications on this historical connection. He is best known for a series of “Gullah Homecomings” in which Gullah people traveled to Sierra Leone to explore their historical and family ties to that country. He has drawn on his original research to establish these connections, and the work of earlier scholars, especially Lorenzo Dow Turner, an African-American linguist who in the 1930s and 1940s traced many elements of Gullah speech to West African languages.

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Opala is best known for the series of “homecomings” he organized, starting in 1988 with a visit by Sierra Leone’s President Joseph Saidu Momoh to the Gullah community on St. Helena Island, South Carolina. National Public Radio called that event the “Gullah Reunion.” He later organized three homecoming visits for Gullahs returning to Sierra Leone, each based on new and more specific information Opala and other scholars had discovered on the links between Sierra Leoneans and the Gullahs. He organized these events in collaboration with the Sierra Leone Government, the U.S. Embassy in Sierra Leone, and Gullah community leaders in the U.S. He also helped produce the documentary films that chronicle the first two homecomings: Family Across the Sea (1991) and The Language You Cry In (1998). These videos generated a good deal of public discussion in both countries on family lost in the slave trade; and after seeing them, some Sierra Leoneans and African Americans traveled across the Atlantic on their own to renew lost family ties. These documentaries also highlight the role of Bunce Island in the slave trade links between Sierra Leone and the US.

Facts & Trivia

Joseph Ranked on the list of most popular Anthropologist. Also ranked in the elit list of famous people born in United States. Joseph Opala celebrates birthday on August 4 of every year.

Gullah Homecoming (1989) — The first homecoming was led by Emory Campbell, Director of Penn Center, the foremost Gullah community organization, and it included Gullah community leaders and cultural activists. The Gullahs had learned of Opala’s research on the slave trade links between Sierra Leone and South Carolina and Georgia, and they wanted to see Sierra Leone for themselves. The visitors were hosted by Sierra Leone’s president on a state visit; they toured traditional African rice fields; and they paid a poignant visit to Bunce Island. The documentary Family Across the Sea — made by South Carolina Public Television — documents this historic homecoming and President Momoh’s groundbreaking visit to South Carolina the year before.