Go, Visit the Whitney Plantation
Posted on | January 17, 2018 | Comments Off on Go, Visit the Whitney Plantation
I’m delighted to see that the Whitney Plantation, just upriver from New Orleans, is getting the attention it deserves. Shortly after it opened, I wrote about the plantation devoted exclusively to telling the story of slavery in my EdWeek column ‘On California.’
Now the Whitney is making lists of “must-see” places for 2018. “These destinations may inspire you,” the L.A. Times headlines.
Cast aside thoughts of soft-accented guides in period costume providing testimony to what promotional material calls the South’s Golden Age. At the Whitney Plantation there is noromanticism, no glorification of the Confederacy’s “lost cause”. Expect to be moved, educated, horrified, and perhaps motivated.
Long before #MeToo, the young lady represented standing by her master’s bed became the origin of the dual family tree of the plantation’s 19th Century owners. One family tree is black; the other white.
This story, and many others, await you.