Plantations aren't the only destinations tied to slavery: What to know before visiting

Throughout the South, people can visit plantations and other destinations tied to slavery, but the connections aren’t always clear. They can be in surprising places and look nothing like expected.

“The most important thing for people to remember in much of the eastern seaboard of the United States and in much of the South is that enslaved people – literal captives forced to work under coercion, violence, and torture – contributed to the construction and functioning of more spaces than we regularly discuss,” Laura Rosanne Adderly, an associate professor of History at Tulane University, told USA TODAY. Her specialties include the history of the African diaspora and Black enslavement. “Enslaved people and the fruit of their suffering, the fruit of their literally stolen labor are all over the landscape in the United States and the rest of the Americas.”

Here’s what people visiting these spaces should know.

Plantations as destinations

Sprawling Southern plantations have long attracted visitors with their stately mansions and carefully manicured gardens.

“When you’re going through those massive houses and looking at the opulence, just think about what it meant for that to exist at that point in time,” urged Minkah Makalani, director of the Center for Africana Studies and associate professor of History at Johns Hopkins University. 

“These were actual sites of enslavement and all the evil and violence that came with it,” he said.

But not every plantation tour centers those experiences. Some former plantations also lean into their lush ambiance, doubling as bed and breakfasts and event venues.

In 2020, Blake Lively and Ryan Reynolds apologized for holding their 2012 wedding at a former plantation in South Carolina. The couple also donated $200,000 to the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and pledged to educate themselves after being “uninformed about how deeply rooted systemic racism is.”

“That soil is literally soaked in the blood of men, women, children,” Makalani said of plantations. “These places should be seen and held in the same regard as we would hold other sites of massive atrocities and human rights violations,” like Nazi concentration camps or Japanese American incarceration camps from WWII. 

‘Get out there’:This mom is using a never-ending road trip to inspire Black family travel

Hidden history

Of course, slavery wasn’t limited to plantations.

“I think there are loose ideas that Black enslavement was ‘mostly’ confined to agricultural plantations in certain parts of the deep South, or that enslaved people were either at their place of captive work or inhabiting some designated residence as a ‘slave cabin’ or ‘slave quarters.’” Adderly said.