{"id":403,"date":"2026-06-22T17:40:37","date_gmt":"2026-06-22T17:40:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/atlaslivingmedia.com\/?p=403"},"modified":"2026-06-22T17:40:37","modified_gmt":"2026-06-22T17:40:37","slug":"what-should-be-done-with-americas-slave-mansions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/atlaslivingmedia.com\/?p=403","title":{"rendered":"What Should Be Done With America\u2019s Slave Mansions?"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Looking at plantations, one sees all the ways that plunder outlives the plundered. Like oil rigs pumping fortunes from buried fossils, America\u2019s slave houses ceaselessly pump profits from their buried slaves. They frack our ancestors\u2019 memories to fuel a booming southern tourism industry, turning forced labor camps into luxury inns and idyllic wedding venues. They trivialize our trauma.<\/p>\n

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This is why Blacks tend to avoid antebellum sites. Why, whenever the \u201cBig Houses\u201d fall into ruin, we are filled with glee. When, during the Civil War, Robert E. Lee\u2019s plantation was destroyed, Frederick Douglass called it \u201ca righteous retribution.\u201d When, just last year, a fire engulfed Louisiana\u2019s Nottoway Plantation, a grueling forced labor camp where the enslaved once chopped and stripped sugar cane, Blacks again thought it a righteous retribution.<\/p>\n

And yet, despite over a century of relishing in their destruction, what many Black folks always truly wanted was the plantation\u2019s reclamation\u2014their redemption. When, in 1863, Douglass walked across the smoldering grounds of Lee\u2019s Arlington Heights, what he found more moving than the demolition was the retrofitting of the master\u2019s smokehouse into a schoolhouse.<\/p>\n

\u201cI wish you could see this school,\u201d Douglass wrote to a fellow abolitionist. \u201cWhen I was there there were a hundred children in it, the descendants of slaves, who held for many generations, going back more than two hundred years. The sight of these poor little children brought tears of joy, sadness, hope, and fear, and I know not what else. Three years ago to have taught these children in Virginia would have subjected the teacher to a heavy fine and to imprisonment. Now teachers and pupils are alike safe.\u201d<\/p>\n

Douglass\u2019s panoramic prose conjures scenes of children writing, teachers lecturing, and classrooms swelling into soaring melodies. \u201cThe teachers (Mr. and Mrs. Simmons) kindly asked me to address the children,\u201d Douglass recalled. \u201cI complied, and sang two or three hymns with them.\u201d<\/p>\n

Witnessing jubilee through Douglass\u2019s eyes, one sees a stirring vision of a plantation transformed from a devastating prison into a palace for deliverance. One sees a past vision of what the future could be.<\/p>\n

Founded two hundred and fifty years ago, the United States still fumbles over what to do with the plantations that financed the country\u2019s foundation\u2014some 375 of which still remain, according to the Equal Justice initiative. It is, perhaps, the ultimate irony of the American project that our mission of freedom was not merely born alongside oppression but enabled by it. Look at the front of a nickel, and you will see Thomas Jefferson, the politician who wrote \u201call men are created equal.\u201d Turn it over, and you will see Jefferson\u2019s plantation, Monticello, where he whipped and raped slaves. It is the project of the Black Freedom Struggle to reconcile both sides of this coin, to bring the \u201cLIBERTY\u201d etched on the front to the chattel toiling on the back, to bring democracy to the plantation.<\/p>\n

For most Black people, freedom has never meant flight; most of us did not run away during slavery or after. Even after the Great Migration, the large bulk of Black people continued to live in the South. For us, freedom meant reinvention. This is the reinvention Frederick Douglass wrote of when he described the transformation of plantation land into a school for education and the liberation of Black people. This is the reinvention that drove the work of civil rights\u2013era ventures like Fannie Lou Hamer\u2019s Freedom Farm Cooperative. As sociologist Sanjay Pinto writes, Hamer \u201csought to reclaim an agrarian landscape that [she] and others in her community had experienced as a site of violence and harm\u201d and \u201cto forge a place of refuge from the twin evils of racial oppression and economic compulsion.\u201d To this day, the reinvention continues, with organizations like New Communities, located on Georgia\u2019s massive Cypress Pond Plantation, which is converting that crime scene into a site for cooperation, education, and liberation.<\/p>\n

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New Communities uproots slavery\u2019s logic. Its owners have conducted ceremonies to honor enslaved ancestors and to bless the land. Its 200 acres of pecan trees have supplied their fruit to worker cooperatives like the Black, queer, worker-owned Pecan Milk Cooperative. These southern Black farmers conduct public education on cooperative economics and, year-round, advocate for \u201cthe development of co-ops and associations of farmers to develop economic synergies that help all involved.\u201d In this way, they advance an ethos of collective ownership\u2014or, in the words of their unofficial motto, \u201cCooperative living, learning, earning, and doing together empowers a collective group of people.\u201d<\/p>\n

This crusade of transforming forced labor camps into laboratories for worker democracy offers more than historical solace. The question of what to do with America\u2019s plantations is a question about what to do about the legacy of slavery and racial discrimination more broadly. Slavery still molds us. Plantation logics still drives patterns of wealth. White families still own plantations as sure as Black families still labor as wage slaves. As the Black Studies scholar Rinaldo Walcott notes, \u201cThe ideas forged in the plantation economy continue to shape our social relations, and those historic social relations, in turn, have consequences for how we encounter each other in the present and how we then process these encounters.\u201d<\/p>\n

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250 Years of Searching for a More Perfect Union<\/h4>\n