Posted on 09/08/2019 3:22:20 PM PDT by Drew68
CHARLOTTESVILLE — A Monticello tour guide was explaining earlier this summer how enslaved people built, planted and tended a terrace of vegetables at Thomas Jefferson’s estate when a woman interrupted to share her annoyance.
“Why are you talking about that?” she demanded, according to Gary Sandling, vice president of Monticello’s visitor programs and services. “You should be talking about the plants."
At Monticello, George Washington’s Mount Vernon and other plantations across the South, an effort is underway to deal more honestly with the brutal institution that the Founding Fathers relied on to build their homes and their wealth: slavery.
Four hundred years after the first enslaved Africans arrived in the English colony of Virginia, some sites are also connecting that ugly past to modern-day racism and inequality.
The changes have begun to draw people long alienated by the sites’ whitewashing of the past and to satisfy what staff call a hunger for real history, as plantations add slavery-focused tours, rebuild cabins and reconstruct the lives of the enslaved with help from their descendants. But some visitors, who remain overwhelmingly white, are pushing back, and the very mention of slavery and its impacts on the United States can bring accusations of playing politics.
“We’re at a very polarized, partisan political moment in our country, and not surprisingly, when we are in those moments, history becomes equally polarized,” Sandling said.
The backlash is reflected in some online reviews of plantations, including McLeod in Charleston, S.C., where one visitor complained earlier this summer that she “didn’t come to hear a lecture on how the white people treated slaves.”
The review sparked shock as it made rounds on the Internet. But stories of guests’ discomfort are familiar to many on the front lines at historical sites steeped in slavery...
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
If Monticello must be attributed to the Africans that built it, where are the Monticellos of Africa?
So they are indeed lucky their ancestors was brought over in bondage because they are now here
I have yet to see one return since it’s so bad here
This historical emphasis on white misdeeds is political power being forced on folks nothing more
...
I don’t think we have been stating this correctly. I think the best way to look at this is blacks in this country the slavery ancestry should be thankful to be here and not in Africa. That said they should also be thankful that they were not the ones brought over in captivity but rather their ancestors were. However one can still say , no are not lucky to have been brought over here in captivity there was nothing good about it.
+1.
No. They were Aztecs and Native Americans.
The Irish and Scots followed much later.
So some stupid people go to a historical site and are offended when they encounter history
“No. They were Aztecs and Native Americans.
The Irish and Scots followed much later.”
How many of those folks were freed from slavery by the Emancipation proclamation or the XIII Amendment.
“One could conclude that blacks just don’t seem to have any natural curiosity or intellectual interest in anything like most normal people. But that would be rayciss...”
No, that would just be retarded, but you think because this is FR that we would be like “Yup! They totally dont have “natural curiosity or intellectual interest in anything like most normal people”?
A black gal who lived at a seedy hotel and worked go-go bars in town would tell me racial jokes I would get banned for repeating. She was sweet and a great tipper and would often ask for me by name. All because I let her steer the conversations and mostly just listened.
The plants didn’t just pop up without someone tending them.
My ancestors had a handful of slaves who had been passed down. GG-grandma said she was glad they were set free because they were like little helpless babies needing constant care. She also said they and the family ate out of the same bean pot.
I toured the Civil Rights Museum twenty years ago where they tried to make me feel bad for being white. I grew up poor so it didn’t take. Now I think blacks should be happy their ancestors got on the boat. Even Ali agreed.
If it’s part of history, I don’t mind hearing it. If it’s a lecture, then that’s different.
I do remember there was some mention of the slaves at Monticello some 30 years ago when we were there. 10 years ago, they were having a naturalization ceremony so we couldn’t see everything in the house and nothing in the gardens. The tour was cut short nevermind we paid full price so I won’t be back.
If it’s part of history, I don’t mind hearing it. If it’s a lecture, then that’s different.
I do remember there was some mention of the slaves at Monticello some 30 years ago when we were there. 10 years ago, they were having a naturalization ceremony so we couldn’t see everything in the house and nothing in the gardens. The tour was cut short nevermind we paid full price so I won’t be back.
So they are indeed lucky their ancestors was brought over in bondage because they are now here.
Which would be your choice. A free man in your own land, or a life time. as a slave, picking cotton in Mississippi.
The WaPo is on the front line of white washing America’s history. May be the WaPo owners descendents, owned slaves and they are trying to protect themselves by condemning others. Those sneaky leftist.
One of Sally's children was named Madison Hemings. In 1870 he was living in Ohio. The census taker wrote in the margin next to his name: "This man is the son of Thomas Jefferson." Obviously that's what Madison had told him.
Well, aren’t you kind - I’m always glad when someone finds something I said worth repeating, no attribution needed......
I don’t think people are going to places like Monticello to hear about the slaves. They are going to see a place where one of our great founders lived, and may be how his servants served him. They can do without the tear jerking about the slaves.
I’ve noticed American Blacks are famously disinterested in the role of Africans and Arabs in the slave trade.
In the 1830 census, Sally Hemming and her two sons, living near Charlottesville, were listed as white.
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