Searching For Justice In Tourism

Joanne Freeman: All across the south, there are hundreds of sites that were once plantations. The challenge today is what do we do with those spaces? Today, plantations have been repurposed into things like museums and even private event spaces, but how are these sites grappling with their complicated legacy?

Joanne Freeman: On today’s show, we’ll explore that question and take you to a few plantations that have radically different approaches to the past.

Ed Ayers: Today, there are approximately 375 plantation museums in the US, and each one chooses to represent the history of the space in its own way.

Amy Potter: These are important places of history. This is where culture is contested. We are certainly interested in what these places are putting forth in terms of history.

Ed Ayers: Amy Potter is a geographer with a team of researchers called RESET. They study inequality in the tourism industry and work with places to include the history of people that had been absent or ignored. The RESET team recently looked at plantation museums in the south and how they present and discuss the history of slavery during tours.

Amy Potter: As a geographer, I think these plantations have such a powerful opportunity to put people in place. It’s very powerful to be in place, so there’s the opportunity there.

Amy Potter: Our project sought a more holistic look at the plantations. Often you see more recent studies, it’s just a singular case study. What we sought to do was look at the whole thing. We wanted to talk to management and staff, and we wanted to speak with guides, we took tours, we interviewed visitors before they took their tour of the site and then after to just get this holistic picture in these three different regions in the south.

Ed Ayers: The team researched plantations along the James River in Virginia, in Charleston, South Carolina, and on River Road in Louisiana. Potter says when it comes to discussing slavery, many plantations still have lots of work to do.

Amy Potter: For example, at Charleston, even with our presence on these tours, only 70% of the tours that we participated in, 35 tours, discuss slavery.

Ed Ayers: Wow.

Amy Potter: Even then, you still have some of the problematic representations of slavery happening. So guides using passive voice, or using the word servant, or using the benevolent slavery tropes: the faithful slave and the kind, benevolent master. These things are still occurring even in these discussions of slavery.

Ed Ayers: How much of this is just giving the visitors what they want?

Amy Potter: I don’t think it is. One of the interesting things about our work that makes it different is that we did a pre-tour survey and visitors, in addition to their interest in grounds and gardens, they are also interested in slavery. When we did exit surveys with visitors, particularly in River Road and in Charleston, visitors ranked slavery as one of the highest level of interest, things that they are interested in.

Amy Potter: In some ways, it’s not maybe giving them what they want. You still have the romance, but they are definitely interested in slavery and they’re not afraid to hear about it.

Ed Ayers: You didn’t come to this purely from an academic perspective is my understanding. You have some personal experience on the ground?

Amy Potter: Yeah. In the summer of 2008, I actually worked as a tour guide at a plantation in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. It was interesting because I was able to see firsthand a plantation that was actually engaged in this reparative history work. I could see plantation management actively trying to incorporate stories of slavery throughout the entire plantation experience, but through that experience, I also learned just how much agency guides have in terms of telling these stories.

Amy Potter: I think one of my contributions to the team was really in thinking through how we approached our study of plantation and understanding that guides are not just reciting a script. When you look at these sites, you have to go on multiple tours, maybe with the same guide, also multiple tours with different guides to really get a sense of the types of narratives that are being put forth at these sites.

Ed Ayers: I’m a little surprised that management doesn’t enforce greater uniformity. Where does this agency of the docents come from?

Amy Potter: Well, at many of the sites where we did research, guides create their own tour. Of course, they’re given books and a variety of resources, but many have, again, quite a bit of agency in developing their own tour.

Ed Ayers: You had this idea of the plantation edutainment complex, which I think I’ve been to that, but tell me about the plantation edutainment complex.

Amy Potter: The plantation edutainment complex is essentially a multifunctional site that seeks to both educate and entertain. We’re really seeing this play out at plantations in that they are both educating, but they’re also creating a variety of tours. They could have nature tours, they could have a petting zoo, they are also hosting festivals and weddings, other events that are not at all related to the history that they purport to tell.

Amy Potter: So this becomes really problematic in terms of engaging meaningfully and deeply with slavery in that visitors can go to these sites and not at all hear this history and engage with this history.

Ed Ayers: I know that interest in plantations has ebbed and flowed over the years. When have the plantations been really popular, and when have they faded, and where do you think we are on that cycle now?

Amy Potter: Magnolia Plantation outside of Charleston, South Carolina, it opened in 1870, it opened its gardens.

Ed Ayers: Wow.

Amy Potter: That shortly after the Civil War. People have been visiting these sites for a long time. I think we often think of Gone With the Wind, and certainly, that was a really important impetus for plantation tours, but it was happening long before Gone With the Wind.

Amy Potter: Speaking to Charleston, 1920s tourism in the city, you have white, elite Charlestonians really putting forth this lost cause mythology and really promoting the beauty of the city. You have, in the 1930s, the city promoting the Azalea Festival, a 1930s National Geographic Magazine featuring two plantations, Middleton and Magnolia and their gardens. You have people really engaging in this beauty, the landscape before Gone With the Wind.

Amy Potter: Most of our plantations, you see them really opening to the public in the 1970s, which is interesting, post-civil rights, I don’t know, this reaction to civil rights. You have these moments, but before Gone With the Wind, it was already set in motion.

Amy Potter: I would say more recently, our research shows maybe this is more longterm, but we were thinking that 12 Years a Slave and Django Unchained would maybe start to put a dent in some of maybe the mythology, but interestingly, when we surveyed visitors, when we asked what media comes to mind, it was overwhelmingly still Gone With the Wind. However, the majority of visitors are generally older. It’ll be interesting to see, 10, 15 years, how those different movies and other things maybe will have an impact on the tourism.

Ed Ayers: You saw this on the ground in 2008, so that means you’ve been watching this for over a decade. Are we making progress?

Amy Potter: Well, I think that we are seeing more incorporation of slavery into traditional plantation tours. However, I think where we’re really seeing the progress and just the forward thinking is that sites like Whitney of Louisiana and McCleod in South Carolina, these are new plantation tourism sites. They opened just a few years ago, and they’re not, I think, burdened by this traditional representations that some of these other sites feel that they need to uphold: magnifying the oaks, and the beauty of the site.

Amy Potter: However, at some of the more traditional sites, again, our research shows for Charleston, 70% of tours did discuss slavery, but we have to be very critical and thoughtful and think carefully about how they are talking about slavery.

Amy Potter: At the Charleston sites and why we call them a plantation edutainment complex is they have these additional tours. They essentially are segregating slavery to these alternative tours or presentations. So a visitor, it can be quite possible that they can go to these sites, and if they just do the house tour, they have not meaningfully engaged with slavery if they don’t have time to do the self-guided tours or alternative tours. At one site, you have to pay extra money for the slavery-centric tour.

Ed Ayers: Right, right. So how do we fit the story of slavery into the larger story of African-Americans at these sites?

Amy Potter: Well, again, I look to McCleod and I look at how, at this site, the discussion doesn’t just end with the end of the Civil War, with emancipation; they actually look more longterm. Their slave cabins were lived in until 1990 by black tenants. They really connect slavery to longer term struggles that have their roots in slavery. The conversation doesn’t just end with emancipation. They look more longitudinally at the story of Charleston, civil rights, incarceration, and onward.

Ed Ayers: So the idea, the name of your project being RESET, is there kind of a hopeful purpose behind it?

Amy Potter: Yeah. One of the things that we did with the visitor survey data is that a few months after we did our fieldwork, we went back to the management and owners to discuss visitor interests. Particularly for two out of the three regions, visitors are interested in slavery. They want to hear about it. So our hope was that these plantation managers would really say, “Oh, we don’t have to be afraid to talk about slavery, that it’s going to ruin somebody’s vacation, that they want to hear about it and they want to think about these histories.”

Ed Ayers: Amy Potter is an Associate Professor of Geography at Georgia Southern University. She’s also a member of the Tourism RESET team promoting equity in the tourism industry.