History Of Slaves Research Articles

Breaking the Back of Words: Sound and Subversion in Toni Morrison's Beloved*

Breaking the Back of WordsSound and Subversion in Toni Morrison's Beloved* Jonquil Bailey (bio) I wanted … the books … to have an effortlessness and an artlessness, and a non-book quality, so that they would have a sound. —Toni Morrison, Interview with Toni Morrison To find the words to speak the unspeakable about slave experience and memory in her novels, Toni Morrison infuses her writing politically with sound, producing an aural literary aesthetic that challenges master narratives. Indeed, she reimagines the narratives of slave men and women that have been lost to history, recovering what Karla F.C. Holloway calls "the language of creative generation" by appropriating and reformulating the English language to challenge its discursive power.1 As Morrison conveys in her groundbreaking study Playing in the Dark, language is inseparably bound up with the dominant ideology, making it particularly difficult for othered writers to employ interventions that challenge its "hidden signs of racial superiority, cultural hegemony, and dismissive 'othering' of [marginalized] people and language."2 Morrison argues that such othered writers must "free up the language" in imagination (which is inextricably tied to words) to prevail over the Eurocentric tendency to employ literary conventions that reinforce racial hierarchy.3 In her own work, Morrison attempts "to unhobble the imagination" by giving prominence not to words, but to sound.4 As she gathers, reimagines, and rearticulates fragments of [End Page 28] slave experience in her novels, she employs an aural writing practice to create narratives of slave history that resist prevailing interpretations of the past. In her 1987 novel Beloved, Morrison applies her aural literary strategy to reveal the danger of words and the hope of sound, the raw material of language. Recent critics of the novel attend to the function of sound in Baby Suggs's sermon in the Clearing, which generally has been interpreted as liberating and consonant with other instances of restorative sound initiated by other women characters.5 As productive as this scholarship has been for understanding the relationships among community, spirituality, and the transgressive power of sound in Morrison's work, such interpretations gloss over the significant problems of Baby Suggs's theology, including how it provokes resentment among her friends and neighbors and informs their conspicuous failure to warn her ahead of Schoolteacher's raid. Baby Suggs's social isolation and lethal emotional breakdown following the community's betrayal reveal that her theology—particularly her Call—is ultimately a failure. Although Baby Suggs challenges white Christian discourses in her sermon and attempts to create a new model of grace for the Bluestone community, her rhetoric of love is not far enough removed from white biblical language and its racialized ideologies. Alert to the danger inherent in white doctrine yet unaware of its tenacity, Baby Suggs advances a passive, romantic approach to resistance that grossly underestimates the full scope and scale of oppression against her community. If we treat Baby Suggs's Clearing theology as a problem rather than a solution, it becomes clear that Ella's ruthlessly anti-white supremacist and unromantic spirituality—which succeeds in exorcising Beloved—is much better suited to empower blacks and combat internalized white theology. I argue that Ella's intervention at the exorcism is thematically designed to expose and correct the problems of Baby Suggs's romanticized vision of grace. Tellingly, Ella acts rather than sermonizes and uses sounds rather than words when she confronts Beloved. Juxtaposing Ella and Baby Suggs's theological outlooks as they concern white patriarchal religious language, I advance a critique of Morrison's "auditory subversion" that reveals the sociopolitical complexities and risks of adopting a white hegemonic discourse. I am not suggesting that Morrison uses Baby Suggs and Ella to make a blanket claim against the use of language (the author, after all, has chosen the written English language as her mode of communication). Rather, I argue that Morrison employs auditory subversion to register the hidden pitfalls to which any attempt at challenging the dominant discourse is vulnerable. Ella's theological approach is ultimately more effective than Baby Suggs's, if only because she recognizes the magnitude of white supremacist ideology and seeks to survive rather than transcend it. At...

Haile Gerima’s Sankofa experience: Man, mission, movie, movement

Abstract The collective memory of the slave experience is imprinted on the minds and hearts of many African descendants in the Americas. However, many do not recognize or acknowledge this memory until it is pricked by an image, story or an experience. Sankofa, the 1993 slave narrative film by Ethiopian director Haile Gerima, did just that. Drawing on press accounts, oral history and critical analysis of Sankofa, this study adopts a Third Cinema framework to explore the distribution and reception of Sankofa with its primarily African American audience. This study asserts that Sankofa’s institutional dynamics contributed to an activist movement around the film. Further, the film’s narrative and form, specifically Gerima’s adoption of five key cinematic strategies, privileged the black spectator in a dialectical exploration of slave history.

Rethinking Historiography in Russel Brownlee’s <i>Garden of the Plagues</i>

This paper asserts that, when it comes to approaching previously silenced South African histories (for example, those personal histories that are written out of the official record by colonial practices of archive and documentary record-keeping), literary attempts at historical reimagining can better gesture towards a felt connection with a lived historical moment. This is precisely because creative literary offerings can take as springboard, rather than boundary, the documentary evidence upon which the discipline of History must rely. Russel Brownlee’s novel Garden of the Plagues provides a useful case study in unpacking this premise. The novel adds to a body of South African contemporary re-imaginings of slave histories during the Dutch occupation of the Cape. It can be said to fall into the generic category of ‘historiographic metafiction,’ meaning, fiction which self-consciously engages and critiques the realist literary foundations of traditional nineteenth-century historiography. Brownlee, by using various postmodern literary devices, is able to foreground the Enlightenment epistemologies informing colonial discourse and so generate the grounds for a useful literary-historical dialogue.

Холопство в России XVII в.: институт, не породивший касту

The article deals with the history of slaves in Russia in the 17th century: it traces the evolution of the legal status of this group from the Time of Troubles to the reforms of Peter I. The bondage book of Veliky Ustyug (1619–20) provides new data on Russian slavery. The institution of slavery originally drew from all social strata, including nobles and knights; however, the enslavement of these individuals was prohibited in the 1640s. From 1641 onwards, it was forbidden to turn peasants and townspeople into slaves. The law sharply separated Zhiletskie ludi, whom some historians consider a variety of slaves, from serfs: they thus constituted a particular social group. Before the 1630s, when the ownership of slaves became a noble monopoly, members of all social strata owned slaves. This is demonstrated by the Ustyug bondage book. Slaves formed an extremely diffuse social group: therefore, R. Hellie’s definition of Muscovite slaves as a caste is erroneous. After 1649, the number of zadvornye ludi grew rapidly. This group included both slaves and persons of uncertain legal status: in reality, their position was akin to that of the peasantry. Thus, the road to the abolition of slavery was paved by processes of social stratification in Russia.

Cwbr Author Interview: The Long Emancipation: The Demise Of Slavery In The United States

Civil War Book Review (CWBR): Today the Civil War Book Review is happy to speak with Ira Berlin, Distinguished Professor of History at the University of Maryland. Professor Berlin previously authored, Slaves Without Masters: The Free Negro in the Antebellum South; Generations of Captivity: A History of Slaves in the United States; as well as Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in Mainland North America. Today we get to talk about his most recent book, The Long Emancipation: The Demise of slavery in the United States. Professor Berlin, thank you for chatting with us today. Ira Berlin (IB): I'm delighted to be joining you.

In Memoriam Michael Craton, Historian

In Memoriam Michael Craton, Historian Bridget Brereton, Ph.D. Introduction Michael Craton, who died in September 2016, was an English/Canadian historian who made a major contribution to the historiography of the English-speaking Caribbean. He was born in London in 1931, and educated at Christ's Hospital in Horsham, West Sussex, and at University College London, where he graduated with a B.A. in History in 1955. He spent six years after graduation teaching at the Government High School in Nassau, The Bahamas, before emigrating to Canada in 1963, obtaining his M.A. and Ph.D. degrees at McMaster University in Ontario. In 1966 he joined the faculty at the University of Waterloo, also in Ontario, and stayed there until his retirement in 1997. He was named a Distinguished Professor Emeritus in 1998. Click for larger view View full resolution Michael Craton The History of Small Islands It was the stint teaching high school history in Nassau which brought Craton to the history of The Bahamas, and by extension, of the Caribbean. In the 1950s, little professional research on Bahamian history had been undertaken, and this group of small and scattered islands tended [End Page 215] to be left out of historical and other works on the Caribbean (strictly speaking, it is located in the Atlantic rather than the Caribbean). Over the next decades, books and articles by Craton—and by his frequent collaborator, D. Gail Saunders, and one or two other historians, notably Howard Johnson—transformed Bahamian historiography, bringing it firmly into the mainstream of the renaissance of professional historical writing on the Caribbean. Craton's A History of The Bahamas first appeared in 1962 and went through several revised and updated editions, the most recent in 2009. It remains the most important single-volume general history of that nation. In the 1990s, Craton and Saunders, the founding National Archivist of The Bahamas and his former Ph.D. student at Waterloo, co-authored the two-volume Islanders in the Stream: A History of the Bahamian People (1992, 1998). This was a deeply researched, detailed and comprehensive social history of The Bahamas from pre-Columbian times to the end of the 20th century; Volume 2 won the prestigious Elsa Goveia Prize of the Association of Caribbean Historians. After retirement, Craton continued to publish on The Bahamas: in 2002 his authorized biography of Lynden Pindling, the first Prime Minister of the nation, appeared, followed in 2007 by his A-Z of Bahamas Heritage, in the well-known Macmillan Caribbean series, which he was invited to write. No doubt his work on The Bahamas won Craton the commission to research the history of the Cayman Islands, a group of even smaller islands not far from the former. The result was Founded upon the Seas: a History of the Cayman Islands and their People (2003), a detailed and thoroughly professionally researched study of these little communities of fishing and sea-faring folk. Thanks in good part to Craton's work, these small islands can now boast of comprehensive and professional histories. This was reflected in his chapter 'The Historiography of The Bahamas, Turks & Caicos Islands, Cayman Islands and Belize' in Volume VI of the UNESCO General History of the Caribbean (1998). Plantations, Enslavement, Resistance From his initial interest in Bahamian history, Craton soon took up broader themes of the region's past, especially plantation society, enslavement and resistance. In 1970, with his other frequent collaborator, the British historian James Walvin, they wrote A Jamaican Plantation: The History of Worthy Park, 1670-1970. This pioneering study was based on rich plantation records from 300 years of continuous operation as a sugar estate; it was the first book-length history of a single Caribbean plantation. In 1978, Craton revisited Worthy Park in his Searching for the [End Page 216] Invisible Man: Slaves and Plantation Life in Jamaica. This book provided a detailed social history of Worthy Park's slaves and their descendants, including selected individual biographies and utilizing oral history as well as documentary sources. In the mid-1970s, Craton authored or co-edited two useful general works on British Caribbean slavery and emancipation. His Sinews of Empire (1974) was a good popular...

Sent From Afric Shore

Questions of tradition have formed a major theme of African American literature and its literary criticism since at least the eighteenth century. Phillis Wheatley's Poems on Various Subjects (1773), published twelve years after a Boston merchant purchased her as a child from the cargo of a slave ship, includes an encomium to Maecenas, patron of Virgil and Horace. In it Wheatley notes that Terence ‘was an African by birth’, but frets that he may be her only black model: For many black writers, the primary creative anxiety has not been of influence, but of unknown ancestry. In an article for Ms. magazine in 1974, Alice Walker asked where to look for ‘artistic great-grandmothers’ in the history of slaves, lamenting the creativity suppressed while ‘for most of the years black people have been in America, it was a punishable crime for a black person to read or write’. She noted Virginia Woolf's call for a ‘Room of One's Own’, but asked what then ‘to make of Phillis Wheatley, a slave, who owned not even herself?’ 2 Where Woolf resorted to imagining a forerunner, Judith Shakespeare, Walker noticed the quiet domestic channels into which the dammed self-expression of her mother's generation had been diverted: quilts, gardens, song.

Afro-Catholic Baptism and The Articulation of a Merchant Community, Agoué 1840–1860

AbstractThis paper analyzes the “Southern” Afro-Brazilian Catholicism which was brought to West Africa by former slaves from Brazil prior to the expansion of the “Northern” European Catholic missions. In examining two significant mass baptisms held in the town of Agoué in 1846 and 1855, this paper explores the religious history of the Aguda or Afro-Brazilian freed slaves, and how they built a network of ethnic, commercial, and affective relationships by means of Catholic baptism and godparenting. The Aguda’s Catholic affiliation (rather than conversion), beyond being coextensive with Brazilian identity, served to produce a merchant community whose main activity, in the early period, was the slave trade. The paper also discusses the methodological potential of cross referencing and fertilizing West African data with Bahian data in order to elucidate how the returnees’ appropriation of Catholic ritual was shaped by their previous Brazilian experience.

DNA reveals history of buried slaves

DNA reveals history of buried slaves

African-American Women in Reconstruction in the Shenandoah Valley

American History textbooks and public history sites of the eastern United States are replete with fact and fiction about the American Civil War (1861-1865). The Shenandoah Valley region of Virginia, in the northwestern part of the state, for example, saw its share of conflict and the presence of “great” military leaders during the war, and the historic sites in the area focus on these topics. Over the past twenty years or so, this region has even embraced the exhibition and interpretation of African-American history. This paper contributes to the dearth of this African-American scholarship by looking at the history of African-American women in the Reconstruction period in the Shenandoah Valley--women who were free and women who found freedom upon the South’s surrender in the Civil War. What is crucial to this study is how Black women in the Valley, both during and after enslavement, experienced slavery and freedom similarly and differently from other regions in the South. Thus, the dominant paradigms and mythologies of large plantations overseen by single white patriarchs do not adequately describe the entirety of slave history in America and denies African American women the agency they deserve as historical actors. Further, during the Reconstruction period, racist depictions of African American women appeared on written advertisements and postcards, promoting a false and romanticized imagery of Blacks in the South. I will look at some of these images in my paper, but concentrate on the Freedmen’s Bureau records to show the power Black women in the Shenandoah Valley gained, painting a richer picture of their experiences in the Reconstruction Era.

Escaping bondage: a documentary history of runaway slaves in eighteenth-century New England, 1700-1789

Escaping bondage: a documentary history of runaway slaves in eighteenth-century New England, 1700-1789

On Failing to Make the Past Present

A good deal of recent scholarship into the slave past proclaims that the past’s political significance resides in its continuity with our present, finding both ethical moment and critical motivation in a recovery imperative that seeks to continue, reanimate, or complete the political projects of those who were defeated by history. This ethic of recovery has at times gone by the name “melancholy historicism,” and its paragon text has been Toni Morrison’s Beloved. This essay questions whether recovery predicated on such assumptions is the only way to either have or do slave history, and it ponders the possibility that the unforthcomingness of the past may be the fount of its deepest political (if not human) significance. The essay seeks to make the case for the writing of a history of discontinuity, the model for which is again provided by Morrison, in A Mercy, which by way of its ungenial textual effects expresses the author’s apparent turn away from the affective history project she earlier so capably inspired.

Witchcraft in Early North America (review)

Reviewed by: Witchcraft in Early North America Adam Jortner Keywords Salem, witch, witch trials, witchhunt, North America Alison Games . Witchcraft in Early North America. New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2010. Pp. xvi + 217. No undergraduate course in American history can avoid the 1692 crisis at Salem, yet the semester demands of periodization often preclude the investigation of legal, linguistic, and social shifts in early modern Europe's haphazard patchwork of witchcraft trials that might shed light on the crisis. Salem's late entry into witch hunts is therefore something of a chore for those teaching American history, requiring a great deal of contextual explanation, which takes time away from investigation of other colonial American developments. In such a situation, American historians usually give short shrift to Salem as an extrusion of the medieval bizarre into an otherwise sensible American story. Allison Games's Witchcraft in Early North America aims to change this state of affairs: witchcraft can instead serve as an introduction to the complexities of American history, including the history of slaves, Native Americans, and Atlantic empires. Intended as an undergraduate primer on witchcraft, Witchcraft consists of about ninety pages of contextual and explanatory essay, followed by twenty-nine primary-source documents. Games takes witchcraft as a lens through which "to explore the colonial encounters and occupations that transformed much of the continent." In order to do so, she suggests a reperiodization and a new geographic focus for Salem. North America, Games argues, had its own era of "witch hunting," from 1616 to 1806, and extending from Mexico to Quebec. According to Games, this periodization places Salem in the center of a story with several points of North American interest. The result is a text that manages to cover colonial regions and polities [End Page 99] (Mexico, Canada, and the Caribbean) often included in American history surveys, while avoiding deep investigations of areas (France, Holland, and the Holy Roman Empire) often excluded from those surveys. This intriguing thesis, however, fails to surmount some obvious hurdles. Games assumes, for instance, that "North America" is a useful and relevant geographic category for the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Despite the author's insistence that the text will "pay attention to difference," Witchcraft repeatedly skims over the differences of culture and geography in its effort to argue for a North American vision of witchcraft. In the most egregious example, the book invites students to compare differences and similarities in "Indian" beliefs in documents from 1616 and 1812—despite the fact that the former document derives from the Pueblo and the latter from the renegade Shawnee Tenskwatawa. Games also shifts freely between time periods to make her comparisons; in one extreme example, she moves from 1629 to 1733 to 1631 to 1708 in the course of three pages. Moreover, the book never justifies its novel periodization. It concludes with the Delaware witch hunts of 1806, but the text acknowledges that similar witch trials continued under Native American legal jurisdictions through at least 1821 in the eastern states, and through 1900 in the west. Witchcraft and spell casting remained a going concern in the American slave community for decades after 1806. Denmark Vesey employed a necromancer in his 1822 rebellion, and Nat Turner was accused of soliciting witch doctors in his 1831 attempt. Neither man is mentioned in the text. Indeed, while Witchcraft promises to cover the magical beliefs of Africans in the Americas, that area of investigation occupies a scant ten pages, much of which is devoted to the cases of poisoning, a practice with an unclear relationship to witchcraft in the slave community. The practices of hoodoo and conjure—with potentially stronger relationships to spell casting and witchcraft—receive one paragraph, approximately the same space Games allots to discussing the witchcraft beliefs of Sarah Palin and Pat Robertson. Indeed, Robertson's 2010 comments on the diabolical origins of Haiti's recent earthquake is the only mention of Haiti in the volume. This lacuna is all the more surprising given that Games does pull examples from Barbados and Brazil in her search for African-American magical practices. Looking in the opposite direction, why does Games pass over Moctezuma's slaughter of suspected witches' families in...

Ambivalent mimicry in Enomoto Kenichi's wartime comedy: His revue and Blackface

ABSTRACTThis article discusses blackface performance used by Japanese comedian Enomoto Kenichi, also known as Enoken, in late 1920s and mid-1930s theatre and film. I examine his blackface performances, giving two examples — Negro Comic Dance, one of the varieties danced to the newly imported American jazz in his first troupe Casino Folies; and his musical comedy film, A Millionaire-Continued (1936). I ask why Enoken adopted blackface, a form of racist caricature by white people emphasizing stereotypes of black people, in his wartime comedy. I question whether Enoken's mimicry of Euro-American-born blackface, though using himself as the laughing stock, is inculpable due to his ignorance of slave history, the absence of American social memory in his mind, or a more productive, cross-cultural representation of the black diaspora celebrating blackness. The article also pinpoints Japan's racial mimicry and Japanese orientalism, associated with its imperialist goals in war propaganda theatre and still active in the contemporary Japanese show business industry.

A Beloved Performance: Reading between the Lines

American author Toni Morrison won the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction (1988) and the Nobel Prize in Literature (1993) following the publication of Beloved in 1987. Based on a true story, the novel is laced with magical realism that brings shocking aspects of American slave history to light. Morrison’s unforgettable character “Beloved” was later explored through British actress Thandie Newton’s haunting interpretation in a controversial cinematic version directed by Jonathan Demme in 1998. This article suggests that in spite of criticism leveled at the film for exceeding the boundaries of Morrison’s text, Demme’s adaptation remains justified and hints that echoes of the deeply-entrenched attitudes that fostered the institution of slavery in the United States still linger nearly a century-and-a-half after abolition.

Rituals of Belief, Practices of Law

This essay brings law more fully into the rituals of terror, the fictions of slavery that Brown portrays so powerfully in *The Reaper's Garden.* In tracking the ghost-ridden traces of persons and property, I consider how palpable and visible remain the deposits of slave history, how natural become the uses of the supernatural. What are the limits of legal thought, and how deeply did it impress and transform the understanding of the sacred, not only for slaves but also for masters?

Lincoln, Slavery, and the Nation

After returning to Illinois from a visit to Kentucky in 1841, Abraham Lincoln described a memorable experience on the otherwise tedious boat trip home: By the way, a fine example was presented on board the boat for contemplating the effect of condition upon human happiness. A gentleman had purchased twelve negroes in different parts of Kentucky and was taking them to a farm in the South. They were chained six and six together. A small iron clevis was around the left wrist of each, and this fastened to the main chain by a shorter one at a convenient distance from the others; so that the negroes were strung together precisely like so many fish upon a trot-line. In this condition they were being separated forever from the scenes of their childhood, their friends, their fathers and mothers, and brothers and sisters, and many of them, from their wives and children, and going into perpetual slavery where the lash of the master is proverbially more ruthless and unrelenting than any other where; and yet amid all these distressing circumstances, as we would think them, they were the most cheerful and apparently happy creatures on board. One, whose offence for which he had been sold was an over-fondness for his wife, played the fiddle almost continually; and the others danced, sung, cracked jokes, and played various games with cards from day to day. How true it is that “God tempers the wind to the shorn lamb,” or in other words, that He renders the worst of human conditions tolerable, while He permits the best, to be nothing better than tolerable. Readers of Ira Berlin’s Generations of Captivity: A History of African-American Slaves will recognize immediately that Lincoln had just witnessed the defining experience of slav ery in its “Migration Generations.” From 1812 to 1860 vast movements of slaves to the booming cotton and sugar plantations of the Southwest replicated the horrors of the original Middle Passage across the Atlantic Ocean. Lincoln had also seen, we might say, the makings of the plot of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s brilliant book Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which memorably indicted slavery for the horrors of this new migration—separation of families and removal to unfamiliar and harsher conditions. Yet Lincoln did not react as Stowe did. 1 In Matthew Pinsker’s able and comprehensive essay we do not always get a sense of the historiographical trends, such as the developments in the history of slavery, that generally

White cargo: the forgotten history of Britain's white slaves in America

Introduction: In the Shadow of MythChapter One: A Place for the UnwantedChapter Two: The Judge's DreamChapter Three: The Merchant PrinceChapter Four: Children of the CityChapter Five: The Jagged EdgeChapter Six: 'They Are Not Dogs'Chapter Seven: The People TradeChapter Eight: Spirited AwayChapter Nine: Foreigners in Their Own LandChapter Ten: Dissent in the NorthChapter Eleven: The Planter from AngolaChapter Twelve: 'Barbadosed'Chapter Thirteen: The GrandeesChapter Fourteen: Bacon's RebellionChapter Fifteen: Queen Anne's Golden BookChapter Sixteen: Disunity in the UnionChapter Seventeen: Lost and FoundChapter Eighteen: 'His Majesty Seven-Year Passengers'Chapter Nineteen: The Last HurrahNotesSelect BibliographyIndex

(In)Visibility of the Enslaved Within Online Plantation Tourism Marketing: a Textual Analysis of North Carolina Websites

Tourism landscapes are constructed and marketed in selective ways that reaffirm long‐standing patterns of social power and inequality and thus influence whose histories and identities are remembered and forgotten. The purpose of this article is to conduct an analysis of plantation tourism marketing in North Carolina, measuring the degree to which the history of slavery and the enslaved are (in)visible within online promotional texts. Previous research has found that the slave experience is frequently ignored in promoting the Southern plantation, although the analysis of North Carolina has been limited in the past and no studies to date have examined the promotional images found on plantation websites. An analysis of 20 websites for historic plantations in North Carolina does not reveal a universal exclusion of the enslaved but it certainly shows an uneven treatment both in terms of the absolute number of textual references to slavery and the frequency of these references relative to other themes used in marketing the plantation landscape. Among those plantation websites that show a sensitivity to slave history, two discourses are employed that still run the risk of misrepresenting the enslaved even as they devote needed attention to this marginalized population. They are the discourse of the individual (a)typical slave, and the discourse of the good master/faithful slave. We conclude by highlighting two representational strategies used by some plantation websites that could serve as exemplars for other destinations inside the state and beyond. These strategies include documenting the different identities and histories of many slaves rather just a few, and discussing the hardships and resistance that often characterized the slave experience. The authors gratefully acknowledge the helpful comments of the article's two anonymous reviewers and the support of the Center for Sustainable Tourism at East Carolina University. Derek dedicates the article to his wife Donna and son Tyler. Arnold dedicates the article to his son A. J. and daughter Onyx.

Debating Race through the Tourist Plantation: Analyzing a New York Times Conversation

On June 22, 2000 Ginger Thompson's "Reaping what was sown on the old plantation" was published in the New York Times (NYT) as part of a series of articles on race relations in America. That article examined a controversy manifested through two people, one representing the history of the old white establishment and the other representing the history of former slaves at a tourist plantation. With the Critical Race Theory tenet of storytelling as theoretical background, a qualitative content analysis of the feedback from "Reaping what was sown. . ." was completed. From the NYT message posting forum, 419 messages were archived, classified, and interpreted. While there are differences in how blacks and whites view tourist plantations, there is ample commonality, with many nuanced online responses that defy common generalizations. These recorded responses challenge the impression that blacks and whites view tourist plantations entirely differently. In this respect, museums and historical sites related to slavery have an impact on public dialogue and debate well beyond direct visitation. As illustrated here, the very mention of these sites and the range of feelings they evoke serve as an important springboard for a much broader discussion of race and race relations in America.