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Yahoo
21-05-2025
- General
- Yahoo
The Burning of Nottoway Plantation
Firefighters from Baton Rouge battle a blaze as flames burst from the roof of the Nottoway Plantation in White Castle, La., on Thursday, May 15, 2025. Credit - Michael Johnson—The Advocate/AP Years ago, I was having a long lunch with a group of graduate school classmates at one of the most legendary restaurants in New Orleans' French Quarter. Memorabilia hung on the walls nearby and inside rooms. While I enjoyed my gumbo, I noticed my friends kept looking over my shoulder. The paintings, old menus, and other objects told the story of a mythical south where happily enslaved people worked at the beck and call of the kindly landed class. I had seen these images my whole life, so I was desensitized to them. But my friends who were from other countries like Canada and South Korea lost their appetites. Louisiana, like much of the rest of the South, is dotted with former plantations. But on May 15, 2025, the largest surviving plantation mansion of them all burned to the ground, reportedly due to an electrical fire. All that's left is a portion of the façade. All else is ashes. Nottoway, like many plantations, took on a second life as a location for weddings and portrait taking. As of this writing, the website labels Nottoway as a 'resort' with amenities such as a gym, pool, and tennis courts. The history tab of Nottoway's website provides a detailed listing of the diameters of certain oak trees—but nothing about the history of the plantation, how it was built, or what went on there. Many people, myself included, see the Nottoway Plantation as little more than a former slave labor camp. A place where crimes against humanity went unpunished and many affiliated with those crimes were treated as noble heroes. John C. Calhoun, Vice President under Andrew Jackson, often argued that slavery was good for America because it created prosperity for those who were meant to rule. Slavery was lucrative for people like Calhoun. By 1863, many of the wealthiest Americans were from the so-called 'planter class' i.e. plantation owners. Calhoun also had the audacity to say that slavery was good for the enslaved because it provided them with food and shelter, which they weren't able to provide for themselves. Movies like Birth of a Nation and Gone with the Wind brought this propaganda into the 20th century by showing plantations as sites of human flourishing where the best people lived the good life and the enslaved were beloved members of the family. In the later film, Scarlett O'Hara had pretty dresses, more suitors than she could handle, and an enslaved caretaker who gave her motherly advice. But these depictions, as we know, were fantasies. No classic Hollywood film tells the story of plantation life from the point of view of the enslaved—that would have dispelled the myth entirely. Such films did not show how enslaved families felt being forced to increase the wealth of others and as their family members were sold off to other slave labor camps. There is no question, the enslaved workers at the Nottoway Plantation during the antebellum era were human chattel. They were unpaid and unable to leave. They had no property rights, no rights to their own children, and no rights to their own bodies. Nor could they appeal to the legal system for justice even if they or a loved one had been assaulted, raped, or killed. The question at hand: how do we treat the physical locations of such heinous histories? In Amsterdam, a short walk from the Rijksmuseum and a park full of blossoming tulips, sits the Anne Frank House. Anne Frank, of course, was the young woman who hid with her family from Nazi's in the attic of this home. Eventually, she was captured and murdered. And there are the two 'Doors of No Return' along the western coast of Africa. These memorials in Senegal and Benin mark the locations where Africans were shipped away from their homelands into chattel slavery. In 2023, I visited the Doorway of No Return at the House of Slaves on Gorée Island in Senegal, where expert tour guides gave detailed lectures about the deprivation experienced by humans held in the building. (Some people were kept in the space under the stairwells, an area no larger than a doghouse.) With this context, it was impossible not to be moved at the end of the tour where the guide cleared the way for me to stand at the threshold of the doorway. There were no tennis courts or facials offered at the House of Slaves. Between 2017 and 2022, I visited Amsterdam three times on research trips. I tried to go to the Anne Frank House repeatedly, but each time I arrived, the line of people queued up to bear witness to what happened there was down the block and around the corner. By all accounts, seeing the interior of the home is a moving experience. Herein lies the problem with America's attitudes towards its former slave labor camps: they are divisive because they ignore their own histories. While there are some plantations that attempt to provide context for their past (the Whitney Plantation in Wallace, Louisiana is an excellent example), there are far too many former plantations where the guides offer revisionist histories designed to make visitors feel unbothered by what happened there. This is especially damaging when many visitors believe they are taking an educational tour. Most people would not want to take glamour shots at the site of a human catastrophe. Most people would be appalled if someone threw a party in the place where their great great grandmother was imprisoned and abused. Any attempt to turn the World Trade Center site into a vacation resort would likely be met with widespread resistance from Americans. This is because the past must be contended with. Reconciliation cannot come before recognition and mourning. If Nottoway Plantation had been serving the community it was based in, I'd be the first one devastated by its loss. But as it stands, my face is completely dry. Contact us at letters@
Time Magazine
21-05-2025
- Politics
- Time Magazine
The Burning of Nottoway Plantation
Years ago, I was having a long lunch with a group of graduate school classmates at one of the most legendary restaurants in New Orleans' French Quarter. Memorabilia hung on the walls nearby and inside rooms. While I enjoyed my gumbo, I noticed my friends kept looking over my shoulder. The paintings, old menus, and other objects told the story of a mythical south where happily enslaved people worked at the beck and call of the kindly landed class. I had seen these images my whole life, so I was desensitized to them. But my friends who were from other countries like Canada and South Korea lost their appetites. Louisiana, like much of the rest of the South, is dotted with former plantations. But on May 15, 2025, the largest surviving plantation mansion of them all burned to the ground, reportedly due to an electrical fire. All that's left is a portion of the façade. All else is ashes. Nottoway, like many plantations, took on a second life as a location for weddings and portrait taking. As of this writing, the website labels Nottoway as a 'resort' with amenities such as a gym, pool, and tennis courts. The history tab of Nottoway's website provides a detailed listing of the diameters of certain oak trees—but nothing about the history of the plantation, how it was built, or what went on there. Many people, myself included, see the Nottoway Plantation as little more than a former slave labor camp. A place where crimes against humanity went unpunished and many affiliated with those crimes were treated as noble heroes. John C. Calhoun, Vice President under Andrew Jackson, often argued that slavery was good for America because it created prosperity for those who were meant to rule. Slavery was lucrative for people like Calhoun. By 1863, many of the wealthiest Americans were from the so-called ' planter class ' i.e. plantation owners. Calhoun also had the audacity to say that slavery was good for the enslaved because it provided them with food and shelter, which they weren't able to provide for themselves. Movies like Birth of a Nation and Gone with the Wind brought this propaganda into the 20 th century by showing plantations as sites of human flourishing where the best people lived the good life and the enslaved were beloved members of the family. In the later film, Scarlett O'Hara had pretty dresses, more suitors than she could handle, and an enslaved caretaker who gave her motherly advice. But these depictions, as we know, were fantasies. No classic Hollywood film tells the story of plantation life from the point of view of the enslaved—that would have dispelled the myth entirely. Such films did not show how enslaved families felt being forced to increase the wealth of others and as their family members were sold off to other slave labor camps. There is no question, the enslaved workers at the Nottoway Plantation during the antebellum era were human chattel. They were unpaid and unable to leave. They had no property rights, no rights to their own children, and no rights to their own bodies. Nor could they appeal to the legal system for justice even if they or a loved one had been assaulted, raped, or killed. The question at hand: how do we treat the physical locations of such heinous histories? In Amsterdam, a short walk from the Rijksmuseum and a park full of blossoming tulips, sits the Anne Frank House. Anne Frank, of course, was the young woman who hid with her family from Nazi's in the attic of this home. Eventually, she was captured and murdered. And there are the two 'Doors of No Return' along the western coast of Africa. These memorials in Senegal and Benin mark the locations where Africans were shipped away from their homelands into chattel slavery. In 2023, I visited the Doorway of No Return at the House of Slaves on Gorée Island in Senegal, where expert tour guides gave detailed lectures about the deprivation experienced by humans held in the building. (Some people were kept in the space under the stairwells, an area no larger than a doghouse.) With this context, it was impossible not to be moved at the end of the tour where the guide cleared the way for me to stand at the threshold of the doorway. There were no tennis courts or facials offered at the House of Slaves. Between 2017 and 2022, I visited Amsterdam three times on research trips. I tried to go to the Anne Frank House repeatedly, but each time I arrived, the line of people queued up to bear witness to what happened there was down the block and around the corner. By all accounts, seeing the interior of the home is a moving experience. Herein lies the problem with America's attitudes towards its former slave labor camps: they are divisive because they ignore their own histories. While there are some plantations that attempt to provide context for their past (the Whitney Plantation in Wallace, Louisiana is an excellent example), there are far too many former plantations where the guides offer revisionist histories designed to make visitors feel unbothered by what happened there. This is especially damaging when many visitors believe they are taking an educational tour. Most people would not want to take glamour shots at the site of a human catastrophe. Most people would be appalled if someone threw a party in the place where their great great grandmother was imprisoned and abused. Any attempt to turn the World Trade Center site into a vacation resort would likely be met with widespread resistance from Americans. This is because the past must be contended with. Reconciliation cannot come before recognition and mourning. If Nottoway Plantation had been serving the community it was based in, I'd be the first one devastated by its loss. But as it stands, my face is completely dry.
New York Times
15-02-2025
- Politics
- New York Times
Nelson Johnson, Labor Leader Wounded in Greensboro Massacre, Dies at 81
The Rev. Nelson Johnson, a labor activist in North Carolina who was injured in the 1979 shooting in which white supremacists in Greensboro killed five protesters and wounded 11, and who later formed a commission to help his community process the tragedy, died on Sunday at his home in Greensboro. He was 81. His wife, Joyce Johnson, said the cause was complications of kidney failure. What came to be known as the Greensboro Massacre unfolded on Nov. 3, 1979. Mr. Johnson and his wife were local leaders of the Communist Workers Party, a Maoist group that had split from the Communist Party several years earlier, and they had increasingly focused their efforts on fighting an upsurge in white supremacist activity in their state. That summer, they had led a confrontation with members of the Ku Klux Klan in China Grove, a town near Charlotte, where the Klan was sponsoring a screening of 'Birth of a Nation,' the 1915 film that casts the hate group in a positive light. As a follow-up, the Johnsons organized a 'Death to the Klan' march through Greensboro, the city where the anti-Jim Crow sit-in movement had begun in 1960. Camera crews from local television stations were on hand, and several marchers were armed. As the marchers gathered outside a public housing complex, about 40 members of the Klan, as well as members of the American Nazi Party, arrived in a caravan of cars and began harassing them. Fights broke out, and someone began shooting. Within just 88 seconds, four marchers lay dead and another 12 were injured, one of them fatally. Mr. Johnson suffered a knife wound to his arm. The police had been standing nearby, but they did not intervene until the shooting stopped. (The event captured national news, but only briefly; the next day revolutionaries took 53 Americans hostage in Tehran, the beginning of a 444-day crisis.) Two criminal trials of the Klan and Nazi Party members followed, one at the state level and one federal. In both cases, juries found for the defendants. A civil trial in 1985 found eight defendants liable in the death of a single marcher, Michael Nathan. By then, Mr. Johnson had begun to move away from his radical beliefs and toward a religious calling. After earning an undergraduate degree in political science from North Carolina Agricultural and Technical University in 1986, he received a master's in divinity from the Virginia Union School of Theology in 1991. He returned to Greensboro to preach, and in 1991 he helped found the Beloved Community Center, a nonprofit dedicated to community empowerment and social justice. Inspired by the efforts of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in post-apartheid South Africa, Mr. Johnson and his wife spent years calling for a similar program to look into the Greensboro Massacre. But government and many private groups resisted, worried that it would reopen old wounds. Mr. Johnson and his wife pushed ahead and finally formed the seven-member fact-finding commission in 2005. The real risk, he said, was leaving those wounds unexamined. 'These deep wounds live just beneath the surface,' he told The Washington Post in 2005. He added that 'it's really not recognizing why this city hasn't come to terms with racial oppression and the treatment of people. Here's an opportunity to be truthful.' After taking testimony from a wide range of witnesses, including former members of the Klan, the commission released its final report in 2006. It placed most of the blame for the violence on the Greensboro Police Department. 'The majority of commissioners,' the report said, 'find the single most important element that contributed to the violent outcome of the confrontation was the absence of police.' Nelson Napoleon Johnson was born on April 25, 1943, in Littleton, a town northeast of Raleigh near the Virginia border. His parents, James and Zelma (Thorne) Johnson, were farmers. After graduating from high school in 1961, he served in the Air Force for four years and then enrolled at North Carolina A&T, a historically Black institution in Greensboro. He quickly became involved in local civil rights and labor activism. He led organizing efforts for campus cafeteria workers and founded the Greensboro Association for Poor People, a group in sync with efforts by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to expand the Black rights struggle to economic inequality. In 1969, one of the members of the group was elected senior class president at a city high school. The school denounced the student as a radical and refused to seat him. Mr. Johnson and his association turned out to protest, and the situation escalated, to the point where the mayor called in the state's National Guard. Violence ensued, and one protester, Willie Grimes, was killed, though it was unclear where the shot came from. Several high school and college students, including Mr. Johnson, were arrested in what came to be known as the A&T Uprising. Mr. Johnson married Joyce Hobson a few days afterward. Along with her, he is survived by their daughters, Akua Johnson-Matherson and Ayo Samori Johnson, and two grandchildren. The city of Greensboro did not participate in or support the truth and reconciliation commission, and it long resisted Mr. Johnson's call for an official recognition of the event. Finally, in 2015, it relented, placing a historical marker near the site.
