2025 Parade

For 2025, we are glad to have two powerful and important individuals in our community as our Grand Marshals.  

Mr. CHARLTON SINGLETON won a Grammy Award for “Best Regional Roots Album” in 2019 and served as the 2023 Artistic Director of the MOJA Arts Festival. A native of Awendaw, SC, Charlton Singleton began his musical studies at the age of three on the piano. He would then go on to study the organ, violin, cello, and trumpet throughout elementary, middle, and high school. In 1994, he received a Bachelor of Arts in Music Performance from South Carolina State University. Since then, he has taught music at the elementary, middle, and high school levels and been an adjunct faculty member at the College of Charleston. In 2008, he co-founded and became the Artistic Director and Conductor of the Charleston Jazz Orchestra, an 18-piece jazz ensemble of some of the finest professional musicians in the Southeast and the resident big band in Charleston, SC.

Mr. JOSEPH McGILL, Jr., founded the Slave Dwelling Project, and a member of the “I” Troop 54th Massachusetts Reenactment Regiment in Charleston, South Carolina. By arranging for people to sleep in extant slave dwellings, the Slave Dwelling Project has brought much-needed attention to these often-neglected structures that are vitally important to the American built environment. Mr. McGill has conducted over 250 overnights in approximately 150 different sites in 25 states and the District of Columbia. He has interacted with the descendants of enslaved communities and enslavers associated with antebellum historic sites. He speaks with school children and college students, with historical societies, community groups, and members of the public. Since 2016, Mr. McGill has expanded the Slave Dwelling Project to offer a living history program called “Inalienable Rights: Living History Through the Eyes of the Enslaved.” The Project has conducted 7 conferences since 2013.