Over the past few years, I've looked for historical sites and museums related to civil rights or slavery where ever I am, particularly in the south. Last week, I visited Charleston, South Carolina. Charleston, because so many slaves came through its port, is considered the "Ellis Island of Slavery." Some 40% of all slaves in the United States came through there and according to the International African-American museum, 80% of African Americans today can trace their roots to Charleston. On Juneteenth day in 2018, the city finally issued an apology for its role (and a significant one, I might add) in slavery. Not all on the city council voted for it and my trip to this town, convinces me, like most places in our country, there is so much more work to do.
My first night in Charleston I thought it would be interesting to do a "ghost tour," this one titled "death and depravity." While this tour focused on all forms of demise, illness, murder, tragedy...pirates, prostitutes, crimes of passion, and serial killers...not once was slavery mentioned. As we stood outside the Old Exchange, in the very spot where slaves were sold, the story of the dungeon, where countless early (white) Charlestonians were drowned when the tide came in, was told with no mention of slaves. We were standing at this very spot, by these very signs...no mention of this brutality and these countless deaths.
This history of slavery, its stories, was harder for me to find. As I watched the horse drawn buggies of (mostly) white people tour through the streets of the town admiring the gorgeous historical buildings, I wondered how many of them were reflecting on whose hands built the town, whose backs were beaten open, so that Charleston could become a place of wealth and prosperity for its white citizens. I wondered how many tours even mentioned this side of Charleston. How many of them were reflecting on that through those beautiful streets?
To really reflect, I searched out a plantation. By doing my research, I found that many plantation tours do not even mention slavery or do so only in passing. This would not do. I found a tour "Slavery to Civil Rights" at the Magnolia Plantation where slave quarters still stand. Unfortunately, when I arrived the tours were sold out during my allotted time. No matter, I sought out the dwellings on my own.
Further down the path, I found the African American Cemetery. There were stones, little more than bricks but then there were many headstones with names and dates, people born post emancipation. Their names live on while countless others remain unnamed in their deaths.
As I walked the grounds, I, like all the other visitors, was in awe of the splendor of the grounds, its beauty. But for me, this beauty remains tarnished. These gardens only exist because of the free labor, the enslaved people who worked its fields, planted its gardens. Even in a place that acknowledges slavery, a plantation that hired and supported freed Black Americans, I cannot shake the ghosts of slavery. Magnolia Plantation does what many other South Carolinians and plantations do not - "we seek to honor and remember the men, women, and children who designed, planted and worked in the gardens, built and maintained the bridges, and labored in the house and the rice fields while enslaved." Yet, the majority of visitors won't go out of their way to take the separate tour that covers this history nor visit the tucked away cabins nor the hidden cemetery I stumbled upon because it wasn't even on the map. The wealth and the beauty of this area only exist because of the brutality of slavery and the wealth it brought its prominent white citizens.
I headed next to the Old Slave-Mart Museum. In 1856, the city banned the sale of goods (i.e. humans) outside the Old Exchange and this slave mart came into prominence as the place to sell and buy humans. Words cannot describe being in that spot. Tears cannot express the emotion.
What happened next, is my favorite part of my trip. As I was leaving the museum with my new book purchased ("Slave Trading in the Old South"), I mentioned to the three docents gathered in the entry way, that I was disappointed in how hard it was to find sites and learn about the history of slavery in Charleston. Well, "come with me" said an older gentleman. As I came to learn, Walter Boags is a native Charlestonian recently returned to work at the museum. He walks me to a few landmarks including into the Old Exchange where there hangs a painting of the open air slave sales that took place in the very spot I stood earlier in the week. Walter has both enslaved people and prominent white families in his family tree, a story I find fascinating but Walter assures me is so common in the area. The discovery of a slave trader in his lineage is a newer discovery to him something he hasn't shared with his cousins or his boss at the Old Slave Mart Museum yet....he's saving that conversation for a time he and the boss can have a beer because he doesn't feel like that's something he can spring on him within the walls of the museum.
I had stood outside the Old Exchange in downtown Charleston where enslaved people were sold in an open market. Crowds often overflowed into the streets during these sales. According to Fredric Bancroft in his book, "Slave Trading in the Old South," "this naturally irritated the better class of Charlestonians, who were highly intelligent, well-bred, hospitable, and rightly wished to be judged by their best qualities and not by the worst phase of slavery." The "worst phase of slavery." In reading that, I reflect on my trip and how it felt like this "phase" is being brushed over even as it is the very foundation of this city. The wealth, the grandeur, the beauty all exists because of slavery. I don't know how we ever come to terms with this past while moving forward into a better future for all Black Americans but I know leaning into and learning about the past is essential to any brighter future.
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