Last week, Nottoway Plantation in White Castle, Louisiana mysteriously burned to the ground. Just the names of the plantation and city should be enough to bring pause, but the fact that it burned down of mysterious causes is wildly intriguing. There have been a myriad of responses from non-Black communities about whether the building should have been preserved, beginning with the fake concern about the preservation of history. As a Black woman, from the Black community, I am grateful that nobody did anything, but the energy of these trying times burned that plantation to the ground. After all, preserved history tells a tale, and the only story that plantation told was how evil rebranded itself for profitability, and everyone was supposed to be distracted instead of horrified.
Black slavery is the only thing consistently discussed in this country because it is the story of subjugation, and people are entertained by Black struggle. For example, Tulsa is the only story consistently told for two reasons. First, it was a vibrant community that thrived in segregation and managed to be competitive with its counterparts. Second, it burned to the ground in such a way that nothing like it has ever been reproduced. There were numerous Black communities all over the country, and they were not all terrorized out of existence, but people use Tulsa as a warning to Black people who get “too uppity,” as it were. The White Reign of Terror during the Reconstruction Era destroyed a lot of Black communities, but even though few were elevated to the level of Tulsa, many of them stayed alive for decades. However, Black autonomy is not the story that people want to tell, because that would eliminate the need for the dominant narrative to control Black communities.
In Austin, there is one Black site that has been truly preserved for all to see, which is the home of Henry G. Madison. Everyone smiles when told that it was the home of a Black family, and several Austinites pat themselves on the back when discussing how the City worked hard to preserve that home. By the way, Henry G. Madison was a police officer with the Austin Police Department, indicating his subservience to the dominant narrative. What almost nobody talks about is the only Black firehouse, which was not only destroyed for a carwash, but nobody can find a picture of Fire Station 5, only a spot on the Sanborn maps. This firehouse was the site of a free daycare offered by Community United Front, a Black activist group in the 1970s. While the focus was placed on Fred Hampton, he was the face of the movement, not the only person in it, as he himself said. To quell Black radicalism, the City made consistent attacks, encouraged people to make complaints, and shut the daycare down. Then, the firehouse was sold, and turned into a carwash, and the only place anyone can find the actual history is chasing people down, searching through archives, and in the City Minutes. Again, Black subservience to the dominant narrative is preserved, but Black autonomy is destroyed.
Constantly throughout the imperial United States, education evolved around changing history to promote the “goodness” of the dominant narrative, not the truth. People lived in segregation from the consequences of the creation of the middle class, so the idiotic notion of “keep building to lower housing prices” gradually destroyed multiple ecosystems. Everyone kept telling non-white people to get jobs and spreading statistics, but there was very little discussion about how resources were denied to failing school districts–and why. Now that people are exposing more truth about how the empire functions, suddenly AI can take away people’s jobs and the “need” for writing anymore. It is almost as if history itself knows that the imperial United States was founded on evil, and time has run out for denialism.
There are people who are unemployed at Nottoway Plantation, but very few of them were scholars, because the point was to lie and create a fantasy, like that of the Founding Fathers. To truly preserve history, fund scholars who expose the actual truth about a location, not something that sells well among the gullible. Continuing to pretend that nothing is wrong is the reason why people have finally stopped listening to the comforting lies that were taught for making violence palatable.
* Cabin image taken by Larry D. Moore, posted in Wikimedia Commons. Map exert taken from Sanborn Archives maintained by the Austin History Center.
Chasing A Dying Empire 