White Supremacy & Historic Preservation
Silencing and Erasure in Mississippi Tourism
By Shannon Evans
In the South, historic preservation and heritage tourism have historically been white-centric efforts to glorify the “the good old days” of settler colonialism and racial segregation. In Mississippi, it centered on pilgrimage events, which invited tourists to visit large antebellum homes and once-palatial plantations. Some of the more daring property managers even rent out the cabins of the formerly enslaved as shabby chic Air BNB lodgings. Others turn their mansions into destination wedding spaces, where happy couples and their guests play the part of southern elites, with the men wearing silk brocade waist coats or cavalier uniforms, and the women wearing hoop skirts with daring décolleté. Liveried catering staff–dressed in what the hosts perceive as time and position appropriate wear– dash around with mint julips and canapes in an effort to re-live, what they believe was, the “glory” of the Old South.
Plantation tourism is certainly alive and well in Mississippi, and it has received a boost since 2006 with the rising popularity of blues tourism, which employs similar mechanisms of erasure, nostalgia, and mythology as plantation tourism. Within blues tourism, memory is negotiated in pervasive and contrived, exoticizing and “othering” mythologies that characterize southern history. By relying on romanticized narratives that align with the expectations of white tourists, both blues tourism and plantation tourism are detached from the historical realities of the African American experience.[1]
To understand this subset of destination heritage tourism and the intersection with historic preservation, we need to examine its origins in the emergence of garden clubs in the 1920s. Garden tours were first conducted on the plantations and antebellum townhomes in the Tidewater region of Virginia and in Natchez, Mississippi and then hosted annually to great success. During the 1930s a hard late frost destroyed all the flowers just before the annual spring tours were to start. The Natchez Garden Club ladies decided that the “show must go on” so they opened their stately homes and brought in their Black maids to serve the tourists. Thus began the nostalgic plantation Dixie tourism marketing of the South as a region “dedicated to America’s pastoral traditions.” The fact that plantations were forced labor camps was swept under the carpet and the mythology of the genteel southern ladies and gentlemen was capitalized. The Azalea Festival in Mobile, Alabama and the pilgrimage in Columbus, Mississippi grew out of this romanization of The Old South. Tourists flocked to these destinations looking for magnolias, mammies, hoop skirted ladies, brocaded gentlemen planters, confederate pageants, and Disney’s version of Uncle Remus. The silencing of the African American lived experience by heritage tourism brokers and historic preservationists proffered a brand grounded in white supremacy [2].
Early American literature, such as Swallow Barn: Dreaming of Dixie (1832) by John Pendleton Kennedy, helped to popularize the bucolic myth of the Old South after the Civil War. Much the same as minstrel shows, novels, art, and plays propagated racial stereotypes in the characterization of Jim Crow, Zip Coon, and the Mammy figure [3]. The music of Tin Pan Alley also promoted the social construction of “Dixie” and “The Plantation.” Early radio and film also got in on the romanticized Old South money train. Irving Berlin and George Gershwin wrote popular “coon songs” and “back to Dixie” tunes. Margaret Mitchell’s novel Gone with the Wind was so popular that a movie was made resulting in a mad rush for every movie director to create their own plantation film [4]. By the end of the 1930s, in fact, Hollywood had released over seventy-five plantation films. Betty Davis’ portrayal of Jezebel was so popular that tourists visiting Natchez often asked in which home on the tour she had lived. By 1946, Disney produced Song of the South, a film (loosely based on the novel by Joel Chandler Harris) that glorified and continued to mythologize the lives of enslaved people and cotton culture as a time where everyone knew their ‘place’ and were happy and living fulfilled lives.[5]
Shabby Chic Movement
While plantation narratives have always maintained their appeal to white audiences, it does not make the reality of history change. Not looking at the lives of the invisible people who lived, worked, and died on these properties as enslaved individuals does not change the true history of a place. The cabins and quarters that once stood behind these stately homes are a critical part of understanding the full history of a place. Spending the night in former slave quarters does not give a visitor a glimpse into the lives of the enslaved who lived there. Ignoring history and putting a fresh coat of paint and some new curtains up does not make the real history of a place go away. It romanticizes and fetishizes the enslavement of human beings. The past must be acknowledged in its completeness in order to move forward and preserve these historic sites. Otherwise, we are merely preserving a newly whitewashed shabby chic myth that puts more money in the white homeowner’s pockets.
Today’s preservation groups and historic organizations have an opportunity to change that romanticized view of the South. The gorgeous homes and interesting architecture are important to celebrate and preserve; however, what is more important is preserving the complete history of the home and its builders. The uncomfortable history of the people who worked to help build and maintain that structure and the people who lived there is critical to a full preservation of the history of these places. The real danger is that these ‘preservationist’ groups are too fragile to have open, honest discussions about the complete history of a space.
In some places, organizations are trying to at least give a nod to the enslaved people who were the craftsmen and women who built these architectural beauties that dot the South. Yet they often fall short in their efforts or only give lip service to the contributions of African Americans with a single presentation or event. It is often left to individual homeowners to tackle how to address enslavement and the contributions of the enslaved. In many cases, rather than presenting the reality of the life of the enslaved, the topic is either glossed over or ignored or worse romanticized. They run the risk of becoming like the United Daughters of the Confederacy who edited out uncomfortable elements of Southern culture by rewriting history in more palatable and more white centric terms. As long as their white columned edifices built on the backs of enslaved people, an traveling (sometimes enslaved) artists and craftsmen are preserved, they have done their job as preservationists and can wear their hoopskirts and Confederate grays with pride. [6]
Why? Because people want to feel safe. We prefer nostalgia over facts. Americans have a deep-seated fear of discussing uncomfortable historical incidents. By ignoring historical fact, they can return to their comfort zone of romanticizing all those nasty bits and bobs of history. Unfortunately, history is messy, and the reality is that historical events and facts make them feel uncomfortable and ill-equipped to deal with the honesty and rawness of true history. Romanticizing history and removing or sanitizing the uncomfortable extracts the uncomfortable and dissolves it. Due to the history of historical organizations in many Southern towns, close alignment to the influence of the United Sons and Daughters of the Confederacy, these organizations feel they have a certain status or image to uphold of the former glories of the antebellum South. Lost Cause ideology unconsciously permeates so many historic preservation organizations to their detriment.[7]
So enamored by their parent’s and grandparent’s association with these pilgrimages, they are unable to see themselves outside the lens of upper middle-class Southern white society. Thus, they are willing to maintain their privilege at all costs.
This is not just an issue isolated to the South. Historically, African American history, structures, and institutions have been ignored much less preserved. Currently, between 2-3% of National Historic Register sites are related to African American history. It is important that this history be documented, and more groups represented in historic preservation.[8]
Historic preservation organizations are prone to perpetuating white privilege while acting as the gatekeepers of local history. White progressive preservation groups are even more likely to control Black history narratives. Their assumptions that “we’ve already covered that in prior presentations, work, etc” marginalizes new and unheard voices in the field of preservation. [9]
Urban renewal meant “negro removal.”
– James Baldwin [LINK]
Often local historic preservationists act paternalistic in their choices of what historic sites and neighborhoods they will invest their time, dollars, and energy. The places that they choose to preserve, and the modern development of new building spaces do not traditionally involve African landowners and includes no African American developers or city planners. Due to the lack of representation Black historic buildings get lost all the time. Majority/all white preservationist communities have made sure that the buildings important to white history and that NIMBYISM (Not In My Back Yard) has stayed alive and well in the decisions they make for urban renewal. Because of this, the decisions about what cultural buildings and lands to preserve and what not to preserve is usually white centric.
When all cultures are not valued by the decision makers it makes a difference in what is preserved and what is not. It is how buildings and homes are torn down instead of repurposed. It is how encroachment on cemeteries and burial spaces happen. It is how decisions are made about what people and events get recorded and preserved in local libraries and archives. It is how decisions are made where historic markers are written and placed.
Nihil de nobis, sine nobis
“Nothing about us without us” [10]
Historic preservation groups were originally designed, created, and sustained by whites to uphold a positive image of settler colonialism. In Mississippi, Dunbar Rowland found the Mississippi Department of Archives and History in the early 1900s to sustain the central myth of the Lost Cause–that freedom was not a legitimate outcome of the Civil War.
This allowed the erasure and misrepresentation of minority groups as these all-white groups were solely responsible for the recording and curation of historical records. Since there have historically been no diverse voices developing preservation guidelines and doctrines, it has been easy to prevent or silence serious preservation of diverse historic places. In recent times, there have been federal and private funds available to preservation groups in the South to preserve Black and Native American historically important sites and culture. Often in their rush to get funding for small pet projects that are tangentially related to these cultures, preservation groups capitalize on the historical significance of a place without reaching out to include descendent communities for inclusion in the decision making efforts of preserving their own history. Or worse, preservationists take funding away from those minority communities who often have the least resources to save their culture but who have the greatest interest invested in saving it. [11]
Historic preservation is not preserving beautiful buildings and places. It is about preserving how a building or space fits in context with the history of a people and that place. It is about contextualizing history to make it tangible to future generations. The lack of diversity among historians, archivists, city planners, and preservationists is resulting in the lack of preservation of history and historic places of non-white communities.
Real people lived and worked here.
The legacy of enslavement is all around us, especially in the Deep South. The influence of enslaved African people is evident in the food we eat, the colors of our doors and porch ceilings, our sayings and practices, and even in our superstitions, religious practices, and oral traditions. Slavery did not just build the mansions and plantations. Enslaved people built the communities they lived in. They built the roads, the bridges, the walkways of the towns and villages where they lived and worked.
Instead of Southern tourism and historic preservation organizations focusing just on the magnificent structures, they should talk to visitors about how difficult it is to fix and repair those items built by expert craftsmen: woodworkers, glazers, blacksmiths and ironworkers, stone masons, etc. because so many of the skills and techniques are now lost to history. That mantle, that curved staircase, the pintucking of the brick wall, the manufacture of the bricks used in the buildings and walkways, and the carved scrollwork at the top of the mighty cypress columns the buildings Dixie tourism touts were built by skilled and unskilled enslaved labor. Education of volunteer and paid interpretive docents of these crafts people is critical to accurate and respectful interpretive historical presentations.[12]
Both blues tourism and plantation tourism are intimately involved with negotiating the lived experience of African Americans in the South, and both avoid acknowledging or engaging with the contemporary lived realities of that experience. Since white tourists enjoy the luxury of indulging in and then leaving the exoticized South, tourism brokers can avoid making serious commitments to historic preservation as well as avoid forging meaningful and trusting relationships with African American communities.
Yet, we must make overt efforts to include the long-silenced voices of descendant communities in historic preservation groups, historical societies, and tourism boards. It is important to tell the stories of people who lived and worked on the plantations. What was life like there 20 years ago? 75 years ago? 100 – 200 years ago? Indeed, we must first ground these stories in historical context and then connect them to the realities of the present. We must offer a more rich, more honest presentation of history, however, if we ever hope to reckon with the ways the past still affects us today.
NOTES
[1] Neshan Tung, “Defining Dark Mythologies of Southern Cultural Heritage: Delta Blues Tourism as the ‘Photographic Negative’ of Plantation Tourism,” The iJournal 7:2 (Summer 2022): 33-40.
[2] Karen L. Cox, ed, Destination Dixie: Tourism and Southern History (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2012), xii, 315.
[3] John Pendleton Kennedy, Swallow Barn: A Novel (Philadelphia, PA: Library of Southern Civilization, 1832), 74-81.
[4] Karen L. Cox, Dreaming of Dixie: How the South Was Created in American Popular Culture (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 81-83.
[5] Alisa Y. Harrison, “History as Tourist Bait”: Inventing Somerset Place State Historic Site, 1939—1969,” in Destination Dixie: Tourism and Southern History, edited by Karen L. Cox (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2012), 113–36.
[6] Karen L. Cox, Dixie’s Daughters: The United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Preservation of Confederate Culture (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2012), 109-112.
[7] S. T. Falck, Remembering Dixie: The Battle to Control Historical Memory in Natchez, Mississippi 1865-1941 (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2019).
[8] J. C. Wells, 10 Ways Historic Preservation Policy Supports White Supremacy and 10 Ideas to End It (College Park, MD: University of Maryland, 2021), 1-43.
[9] Lizzie McKonnen, “Integrity and Racial Inequity: Case Studies from the Field,” National Trust for Historic Preservation: Preservation Leadership Forum (October 2, 2021) [LINK]
[10] James I Charlton, Nothing About Us Without Us: Disability Oppression and Empowerment (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2020). While this book is about disability oppression, the slogan means that no policies should be decided without the full and direct participation of members of the group(s) affected by that policy.
[11] McKonnen, “Integrity and Racial Inequity,” [LINK].
[12] E. Arnold Modlin, Stephen P. Hanna, Perry L. Carter, Amy E. Potter, Candace Forbes Bright and Derek H. Alderman, “Can Plantation Museums Do Full Justice to the Story of the Enslaved? A Discussion of Problems, Possibilities, and the Place of Memory,” GeoHumanities 4:2 (2018). [LINK]