How the Whitney Plantation teaches the history of slavery
How the Whitney Plantation teaches the history of slavery
Museum director Ashley Rogers explains how the Whitney Plantation became the only former plantation site in Louisiana with an exclusive focus on slavery.
Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
Transcript
ASHLEY ROGERS: My name is Ashley Rogers. I'm the executive director of the Whitney Plantation in Wallace, Louisiana. Whitney Plantation is a historical sugarcane, rice, and indigo plantation that was established in 1752, and it was operational for over 200 years until 1975.
So it has a very, very long history that stretches from slavery into freedom. And it was a plantation that operated with slave labor. There were hundreds of people who worked in the fields on that plantation who were enslaved, either who had been captured and stolen from West and Central Africa and brought to Louisiana, or who had been born in the United States and brought there to the plantation.
We don't know the names of everybody. We don't know how many people there were. We know that there are between 350 to 400 documented people that we know about. But there are many, many more people who were enslaved there over the years.
And they would have been doing all types of labor that would have been necessary for running the plantation, which was principally to produce cash crops for sale. Indigo was the major crop which is used to make dye. And that was in the 18th century. They grew rice throughout the entire history of the plantation.
And it transitioned to a sugarcane plantation around the year 1800. And continued growing sugar and making raw sugar and molasses. So there was also a factory on the plantation, because converting sugarcane into what we put in our coffee is a very complicated chemical process that enslaved people were performing on the plantation.
The people who owned the plantation were Heidel family members. The Heidel family came from Germany and were living in French colonial Louisiana. So the people who lived on the plantation would have been speaking a range of different languages from Wolof, from the Senegambia region and many other West African languages to German to French and English, and even Spanish.
Whitney Plantation is very different from other plantation museums. Plantation museums are a type of museum that you see throughout the South. Usually, these were founded to kind of showcase the mansion where the enslavers live, and to showcase their lifestyle.
Whitney Plantation is really fundamentally different from that, because we are entirely focused on the history of slavery. Our mission is that we educate the public about the history and legacies of slavery in the United States. And so everything that we do in our operations, and everything we do in terms of how we talk about this history to the public is linked to that mission.
And there's a tremendous amount of research that our staff have done about people who were enslaved on the plantation. And we craft a narrative that fits the history of that plantation into a broader context. We understand that many people are undereducated about the system of slavery in the United States and about its centrality to our history.
And don't know a tremendous amount about how sugar plantations operated. We try to educate people not just about what people experienced on that plantation, but also what does this mean for the history of Louisiana? What does it mean for the history of the South, and for the United States? We fit that into this bigger context.
And we also help people trace those legacies and understand that just because we're talking about a history that is over 150 years in the past, in many cases, that there are still present day reverberations of that history, that there are concrete ways that we can tell that we are still dealing with the after effects of slavery.
Whitney Plantation, it's an interesting place. It's a place of extreme sadness and trauma. And a lot of bad things happened there. And yet, at the same time, many people who work there and are there all the time, and even people who visit often say that it's a place that feels peaceful today. It's counterintuitive that you could find peace in a place where so many people suffered.
And I think that part of that is because we are honoring those people instead of continuing to suppress their histories, that we're sharing their stories with people who come is a really special thing that we get to do every day. So there are many different places on the plantation where I can feel that sense of peace.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
So it has a very, very long history that stretches from slavery into freedom. And it was a plantation that operated with slave labor. There were hundreds of people who worked in the fields on that plantation who were enslaved, either who had been captured and stolen from West and Central Africa and brought to Louisiana, or who had been born in the United States and brought there to the plantation.
We don't know the names of everybody. We don't know how many people there were. We know that there are between 350 to 400 documented people that we know about. But there are many, many more people who were enslaved there over the years.
And they would have been doing all types of labor that would have been necessary for running the plantation, which was principally to produce cash crops for sale. Indigo was the major crop which is used to make dye. And that was in the 18th century. They grew rice throughout the entire history of the plantation.
And it transitioned to a sugarcane plantation around the year 1800. And continued growing sugar and making raw sugar and molasses. So there was also a factory on the plantation, because converting sugarcane into what we put in our coffee is a very complicated chemical process that enslaved people were performing on the plantation.
The people who owned the plantation were Heidel family members. The Heidel family came from Germany and were living in French colonial Louisiana. So the people who lived on the plantation would have been speaking a range of different languages from Wolof, from the Senegambia region and many other West African languages to German to French and English, and even Spanish.
Whitney Plantation is very different from other plantation museums. Plantation museums are a type of museum that you see throughout the South. Usually, these were founded to kind of showcase the mansion where the enslavers live, and to showcase their lifestyle.
Whitney Plantation is really fundamentally different from that, because we are entirely focused on the history of slavery. Our mission is that we educate the public about the history and legacies of slavery in the United States. And so everything that we do in our operations, and everything we do in terms of how we talk about this history to the public is linked to that mission.
And there's a tremendous amount of research that our staff have done about people who were enslaved on the plantation. And we craft a narrative that fits the history of that plantation into a broader context. We understand that many people are undereducated about the system of slavery in the United States and about its centrality to our history.
And don't know a tremendous amount about how sugar plantations operated. We try to educate people not just about what people experienced on that plantation, but also what does this mean for the history of Louisiana? What does it mean for the history of the South, and for the United States? We fit that into this bigger context.
And we also help people trace those legacies and understand that just because we're talking about a history that is over 150 years in the past, in many cases, that there are still present day reverberations of that history, that there are concrete ways that we can tell that we are still dealing with the after effects of slavery.
Whitney Plantation, it's an interesting place. It's a place of extreme sadness and trauma. And a lot of bad things happened there. And yet, at the same time, many people who work there and are there all the time, and even people who visit often say that it's a place that feels peaceful today. It's counterintuitive that you could find peace in a place where so many people suffered.
And I think that part of that is because we are honoring those people instead of continuing to suppress their histories, that we're sharing their stories with people who come is a really special thing that we get to do every day. So there are many different places on the plantation where I can feel that sense of peace.
[MUSIC PLAYING]