‘These stories are important’: Durham memorial to honor people NC plantation enslaved.






Charlie Innis
Mon, June 21, 2021

Ricky Hart grazed the crevices in the chimney’s rough, red bricks with his fingertips.

The small indentations were left by enslaved Black people who lived in the Stagville Plantation, a historic site roughly 10 miles north of downtown Durham.

To mold and fire bricks, and to build a chimney that has lasted over 150 years, you had to be skilled, Hart said.


“That’s significant. They let you know, that’s been there for a very, very long time,” he said.

Hart spoke beside the Holman slave quarters in Horton Grove, where four houses built for enslaved families before the Civil War remain standing, including the home where his ancestors once lived.

At the Stagville Plantation, at least 900 enslaved people worked against their will for the Bennehan-Cameron family. At over 30,000 acres of land, it was one of the largest plantations in North Carolina.

Now, a group of residents are planning a memorial in downtown Durham to honor those once enslaved at the Stagville Plantation.

Among the Stagville Memorial Project’s organizers and supporters are descendants of enslaved families, including Hart and community members in Braggtown, and Vanessa Hines, a former member of the city’s Racial Equity Task Force.

The memorial would go in front of the old Durham County courthouse at 200 E. Main St., near where protesters tore down a Confederate statue in 2017.

The artist selection and design process could begin this winter, according to the project’s tentative timeline.
Stagville Memorial Project

Hines proposed the public art project to the Durham County Board of Commissioners this month.

Organizers want to expand who gets included in the story of Durham’s beginnings, raise awareness about the Historic Stagville site, and bring its descendants together for a common purpose, she said.

It’s also for people who aren’t from Durham, but know they are descended from enslaved people in other parts of the country, she said.

“It’s for people like me to have a place to go to in the town that I’m living in to remember my own ancestors, and to think about them and to think about the legacy that I am living, and how I am showing up for them in my daily life,” she said. “I think that it can speak to people in the African diaspora in that way.”

“And then it’s also for white people,” she added. “To have something that is out there that is inviting them also to ponder how these legacies are still showing up.”

The East Main Street location is a short walk away from the county jail and the new Durham County Courthouse.

Since the summer of 2019, Hines has met with residents of the Braggtown community south of the former plantation to talk about the memorial project in coffee shops, people’s homes, and in Zoom conferences during the pandemic. They hope to design, install, and unveil the memorial by Juneteenth next year, according to the project’s proposal. The estimated budget is $237,000.

The county commissioners expressed unanimous support for the project.

“There are so many Black people that don’t even remember their history, because of the way in which we were brought to this country,” Commissioners Chair Brenda Howerton said during a meeting with Hines.

“I think about the movie that I’ve been watching, ‘Tulsa,’ and what happened there,” she added. “So, it’s a hard history, but it is our history.”
Memory and oral history

Georie Bryant’s great, great grandfather Will Holman was enslaved on the Stagville plantation. After emancipation, Holman’s son and his wife were prominent tobacco farmers in the area, Bryant said.

He said the key part of a memorial is in the word: memory.

“I think it’s super important that we do remember, as cities are being overturned in many places across the country right now, the individuals who lay the groundwork for those places to be,” said Bryant, a community organizer and chef. “Especially when you’re talking about places where African Americans could feel safe in the South.”

“That’s not by happenstance, a lot of people fought very hard for that to even be a reality,” he added.

Standing in front of his ancestors’ former home at the Historic Stagville site, Hart remembered a time when his father showed him the plantation.

“And we’d sit on the porch and he would smoke his pipe, and he’d sit there and tell me, he says, ‘Son, look out as far as you can see. All of that was tobacco.’

“You go on the western part of it, on this side,” he continued. “That was corn and other stuff, vegetables.”

Hart pointed to a short stump in front of the house that was partly concealed by grass. His father told him it had been a large tree that was over 100 years old. His great aunt had told his father about the tree, Hart said.

“They let him know that, ‘Hey, it was some slaves that was hung from that tree,’” he said. “’And they was not permitted to take them down.’”
Survival and resistance

That so much of the Stagville plantation’s architecture still stands is a testament to the expertise of the enslaved people who built it, Hart said.

“Whether it was dealing with the livestock, whether it was butchering, curing the meat, planting, everybody had their skill set,” he said. “Just like it is today.”

Vera Cecelski, a historian and the site manager for Stagville, said skilled craftsmen and artisans were among the enslaved people on the plantation.

“One way that that helps shift our understanding of the institution of slavery is that it helps us understand the ways that families, like the families that owned this plantation, profited not just from the physical labor of enslaved people, but from the minds, the skills, expertise and knowledge of enslaved people,” she said.

Cecelski guides visitors on tours through the former plantation, where she shares individual stories about enslaved people, drawn from surviving records, and talks about the craftsmanship of the buildings.

The essence of their work, she said, is about engaging with how the history of slavery has been remembered, mis-remembered, and obscured since 1863, the year of the emancipation proclamation.

“That is history, that for a very long time as a nation, we have been refusing to look in the eyes, and to hold honestly and truthfully and fully and complexly with us,” she said.

All of the site’s programming strives to tell the stories of enslaved people through their perspectives. On a guided tour, visitors can step into different rooms in the Holman house and imagine the kinds of conversations families had about freedom and survival, she said.

“Those are places where people might have been strategizing together about how to resist,” she said. “How to sabotage work, how to fight back, how to escape from their houses for a few hours at night to trade, or barter, or pass information, or visit somebody they loved.”

Historic Stagville is open 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., Tuesday through Saturday. Call the site at 919-620-0120 to schedule a guided tour.

Shuttered NC plantation ‘whitewashed’ history, protesters say




Shuttered NC plantation ‘whitewashed’ history, protesters say

Joe Marusak
Sun, June 20, 2021

Despite the closed gate at Historic Latta Plantation on Saturday, Karla Jensen, Christian Cano, Isabella Patterson and Richard Lu joined a few dozen other Carolinians to denounce the way the living history museum promoted a since-canceled Juneteenth event.

“There’s been a lot of history erasure, and we’re here to point out that history involves all colors,” Patterson, a 19-year-old UNC-Chapel Hill student, told The Charlotte Observer.

Patterson held a placard that read, “Hands off our History.”

Saturday was Juneteenth, which commemorates the end of slavery in the United States. President Joe Biden on Thursday signed a bill making Juneteenth a federal holiday.
Latta Plantation event canceled

Controversy surrounded Historic Latta Plantation this month over the site’s planned event, pegged to Juneteenth. The event’s promotional material promised to tell the story of “white refugees” and defeated Confederate soldiers. Latta Plantation’s manager later defended the event and said his intent was never to glorify white supremacy or slavery.

“To tell the story of these freedmen would be pointless if the stories of others were not included. Many of you may not like this but, their lives were intertwined, the stories of massa, the Confederate soldiers, the overseer, the displaced white families,” said Ian Campbell in the June 12 statement, which has since been blocked from view as Latta Plantation’s website has been made private.

He went on to say, “I, Ian Campbell, as an American man of African descent and the new site manager at Historic Latta Plantation, will lift the veil of ignorance.”

NC plantation: No apology, slams mayor and other critics of Juneteenth event promo

But the event description didn’t acknowledge the significance of June 19 and called those who were enslaved “former bondsmen,” without any mention of the 250 years Black people were forced into slavery in the United States. Instead, it inaccurately minimized an unnamed slaveowner to an “overseer” and referred to him as “massa,” the Observer previously reported.

On Thursday, Mecklenburg County Park and Recreation officials said the plantation was closed until further notice.

Park and Recreation Director W. Lee Jones said his department will evaluate “the best path forward for Latta Plantation and its programming” over several months.

The department wants to ensure that the site is used “in an appropriate, forward-thinking manner,” Jones said.

Earlier in the week, Jones told county commissioners he was concerned about summer programs training children to be like “young Confederate soldiers” and “Southern belles.”

Jones also said the county wouldn’t renew its contract with plantation, which ends June 30.
Living history museum under scrutiny

Protesters on Saturday said more change is needed at the living history museum and farm that offers year-round educational and school programs.

Stephanie Gardner, a 48-year-old from Charlotte who participated in Saturday’s protest, called the plantation’s literature “a Confederate whitewash.”

“My concern is, (the plantation grounds on Sample Road) should be held sacred for the Black descendants of those who were enslaved here, or those closest to them,” she said.

Cano, a 54-year-old who grew up in Texas and lives in Charlotte, held a “Latinx for Black Lives” poster.

“It’s important that we stand up to this,” he said. “When we stay silent, injustices happen.”

Kari Giles, who is white, drove from Fort Mill.

“Stop! White Washing Black History,” her placard read.

“This is not a day for me to celebrate,” the 44-year-old said, “but how I can support my Black neighbors.”
‘Time we showed them respect’

Karla Jensen, 70, of Charlotte, said what the plantation did “was just morally wrong.”

She held a placard that said: “Listen to Black Voices.”

“This country was built on the backs of Black people,” Jensen said. “It’s time we showed them the respect they deserve.”
Activist led protest

Civil rights activist Kass Ottley, founder/CEO of Seeking Justice Charlotte, planned Saturday’s peaceful protest when the plantation’s Juneteenth event was still a go for that night.

She said it was important to still show up, and put word out on social media.

The gathering in part celebrated how public reaction led to the cancellation of the plantation event, Ottley said.

“We’re out here celebrating,” she said. “We shut down the event.”

The protest also highlighted how more needs to be done at the plantation, she said, for example, inclusion of Black people on the board of Latta Place Inc., the nonprofit whose mission is to preserve the circa-1800s plantation.

“We need to stay on top of the county commissioners and the city, so we have a voice at the table,” she said.

The plantation, for instance, needs to tell the stories of “the slaves who worked here in bondage,” Ottley said.

“At some point, we’ve got to take a stand,” she said. “How are we telling the generations about racism and coming together if we’re lying about it?"