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Whitney Plantation: Memorial to those who were Enslaved

Content note: slavery, racism

When I saw a news story about the Whitney Plantation, I was reminded of the conversation we had here about Ani DiFranco’s obnoxious and ill-conceived idea to have a retreat at a plantation, about how, if at all, a plantation could be used as a proper memorial to the black slaves on whose suffering such places depended upon. It seems that John Cummings has spent years in an effort to do just that. The website has not only pictures but links to various news articles about the restoration and Cummings’s decision to make this museum as a memorial/tribute to those who were enslaved.

From what I can tell, the museum’s admission and tours are free–no fees are listed on the website, and apparently Cummings’s is wealthy enough that he wouldn’t need to charge admission anyway. The articles are a little over-focused on the heroism of the white man in charge and not as much on the black scholars whose work inspired him and with whom he worked for my taste, but I’m guessing that’s not the museum’s fault.

What do you all think? Did Cummings do well? I was quite moved by many of the photographs, particularly those of the infants’ memorial and the wall dedicated to memorializing the slaves by name and I think that incorporating recordings of slaves’ own narratives of their lives was a vital step, to allow people so often silenced to speak for themselves. Apparently Cummings is also working with scholars to produce a database that would aid African-Americans in genealogy research. But I’ve been wrong before. I’m interested to hear the opinions of others here.


9 thoughts on Whitney Plantation: Memorial to those who were Enslaved

  1. up in my folks town in the Berkshires (in Massachusetts) we have a much smaller but similar plantation – the Colonel Ashley house in Ashley Falls. Of course, most people don’t think of Massachusetts as being particularly “plantation”-esque, but the town (Ashley Falls) has been built around the town and the House has spent a lot of time dedicating itself to the story of Mum Bett (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Freeman), who was a slave at of Colonel Ashley’s and who sued for her freedom (which helped end slavery in Massachusetts).

  2. If he truly was, as he claims, inspired by Black scholars to take on this project in the first place, and he isn’t turning the museum into a glorification of white allyship (i.e. isn’t showing signs of white savior complex), then I don’t see a problem with it.

  3. A noble enterprise for sure, but it’s hard to determine, one way or the other, how this will be executed. I hope he’ll be able to bring on museum educators, and is budgeting for the development of curriculum materials, in partnership with local teachers and professors.

  4. As long as things are handled in a sensitive and tactful way*, I don’t see any problem holding events or on former slaveholding plantations, because that is where people lived, worked, were born, and died.

    Just as you can’t separate the economy of the southern US (and indeed, at the time of the civil war, the whole world) from the economic system of slavery, you can’t separate the people who were slaves from the places that held them in bondage.

    *You can have something be brutally honest about what slavery is and was, and make painful things obvious for everyone to see, and still handle the topics in a sensitive and tactful way.

  5. I’m from Germany. For a long time I thought plantations where treated the way concentration camps are treated here, as memorials and museums – including mandatory school visits. Apparently not?

    1. Unfortunately not. They are largely, to my understanding, run as fancy bed and breakfasts where you can hold celebratory events, is my understanding. Some of them have a historical angle, focused mostly on the white family who, you know, treated black people like chattel, stole their labor, and caused immense misery.

  6. I’m currently reading Edward Baptist’s The Half Has Never Been Told, and one of the things I appreciate is that he doesn’t use the euphemism “plantation” but instead uses the more descriptive “slave labor camp”….

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