Nottoway Burns
A short commentary on the end of a place with a long, ugly history
My stepdad, George, survived Auschwitz. A couple years after he died Magda, my dad, and I visited what remains of the camp in Oświęcim, Poland. It’s important it’s still there to remind people what horrors we humans are capable of. But it’s a museum today, run by the government of Poland, operated as a memorial to its millions of victims. Several concentration and extermination camps have been turned into museums for this purpose. There are many old plantations in America. In the antebellum South especially, these were often built by slave labor and then those enslaved people were housed in squalid conditions in the back of the plantation. If one of the many slave plantations that are still around today was a museum of the horrors of slavery I’d be thinking it was a shame if it burned, but the Nottoway Plantation held…(checks notes)…weddings?
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This is a slightly longer version of something I posted on Threads, the first person so comment wrote, “If a concentration camp were used for weddings, it’d be a shame if it didn’t burn.”
I concur.
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There is a plantation that is a museum that educates about the history of slavery in America. It is called the Whitney Plantation. It should be preserved and funded forever. Here is its website: