The Washington Post has an article on how the descendants of slaves are impacting how plantation museums tell their stories. From the article:
Bellinger, a historian and researcher from Boston, was on his way to Middleton Place, a former rice plantation in the Ashley River Historic Corridor. Today, Middleton Place is a national historic landmark and museum, and it is home to the oldest landscaped gardens in the United States.
Bellinger learned about his family’s connection to Middleton Place decades before deciding to make the trip. In 1983, his cousin Mamie Garvin Fields, then 90 years old, published “Lemon Swamp and Other Places: A Carolina Memoir,” which recounts the family’s generational connections to the low country, including stories about Fields’ enslaved grandfather. His own family research helped Bellinger find ancestors at Middleton dating back to 1790.
He also learned that Middleton Place hosted descendant reunions every few years, gathering both Black and White descendants for a weekend of on-site research presentations, history lectures and informal dialogues. With some trepidation, he decided to attend.
The past two decades have seen a shift among plantation museums across the south. Previously, the majority of tours focused on the architecture of the main house, the landscapes and the economics of slavery. But today, a growing number of these sites are making efforts to confront slavery head-on, emphasizing the narratives of the enslaved and often requesting the help of their descendants.
At Middleton Place, it began with Earl Middleton, a noted civil rights leader and Tuskegee Airman from Orangeburg, S.C., who in 1997 became the first Black descendant asked to join Middleton Place’s board of trustees. Earl Middleton’s grandfather, Abram, was enslaved there until the end of the Civil War. After emancipation, newly freed Black families needed a surname to be counted as citizens by the government; some families adopted the surname of their former masters, making today’s search for descendants easier for historians.
Middleton Place had previously hosted two reunions for White descendants, and in 2001, Earl Middleton was integral in the board’s decision to find and invite Black descendants as well.
“When a plantation comes to a Black family, there’s often suspicion, rightfully so,” said Tracey Todd, president and CEO of the Middleton Place Foundation. “But with the help of Dr. Earl Middleton acting as a liaison, as well as our continued genealogy research, we had a turnout of about 350 people at that first combined reunion in 2006.”
Another great article – it’s high time the descendants of slaves were included. I toured the Hermitage, where one of Andrew Jackson’s freed slaves stayed and gave tours to visitors. The slave experience is becoming a larger part of the tour – finally.