Slavery on a field trip? Sites try to portray the truth
FORT MONROE, Va. – On a scraggly rock outpost in eastern Virginia 400 years ago, a ship came to Fort Monroe with colonial America’s first Africans, forced against their will to land in the New World. That moment inaugurated the racist slavery that set the course of the black experience in this country.
But travel to modernday Fort Monroe and you’d hardly know it – there’s more Confederate and military history than black history. An arch spelled “Jefferson Davis Memorial Park” in large letters, until their recent removal. A museum preserves the Confederate president’s prison cell following the Civil War. You can see where future Confederate General Robert E. Lee was stationed as a U.S. lieutenant.
One plaque, erected four years ago, commemorates the arrival of the first Africans.
For decades, many of the country’s celebrated historic monuments similarly glossed over the cruel realities of slavery and racism that define American history.
Sites from Virginia to Kansas are now grappling with how to portray the harsh truths of the past, from former presidents’ enslavement of other humans, to the violent efforts to spread slavery in “free” states, to the historic presence of hundreds of enslaved people at well-loved tourist attractions.
But those attempts to change how Americans view history have met plenty of pushback: Some people, it seems, prefer a sanitized retelling of America’s past.
When Terry Brown took over the national monument at Fort Monroe three years ago, the absence of black history — his history — bothered him. In fact, black history was missing at an awful lot of historic sites.
“We live in a great country, but we are going to be even better when we figure out that the true part of our history involves a number of mixed cultures,” said Brown, a National Park Service superintendent.
Brown started a black cultural tour of the site, which will run from July to October every year. He also spearheaded a visitor center in honor of 1619, which is expected to open next year, and is planning a new memorial for the arrival point.
“A great nation,” said Brown, “remembers its history and embraces all the complexities of it.”
Williamsburg, once 50% black
At Colonial Williamsburg, under an hour away from where the first Africans landed, the quaint, Revolutionary War-era town originally portrayed a largely white experience, ignoring that many of its historic residents enslaved black people.
Williamsburg’s living history museum now strives to present a realistic image of the lives of enslaved and free blacks in the 18th century. For example, Tab Broyles oversees a three-day program that informs America’s teachers about the 18th century black experience and how educators can bring it into the classroom.
“My hope is that people walk away knowing that many different people contributed to who we are as Americans,” Broyles said.
The defining characteristic of a day in the program is powerful emotion.
When librarian Doug Mayo opens a book featuring a fold-out design of the hold of an 18thcentury slave ship, with captured Africans packed in inhumane conditions, teachers gasp. Some take a seat or step away.
When a black character interpreter portraying an enslaved maid poignantly asks the room, filled with many teachers of color: “Have you ever given any consideration to what it means to be a slave?” there are few dry eyes.
Stephen Seals plays the role of a black spy working for Americans in the Revolutionary War. When Seals was a child, he never saw anyone in a museum who looked like him.
“I never want a black kid to come here and feel like they have to bow their head because of what their ancestors went through,” Seals said. “I want them to be able to look me in the eye and say: ‘I’m very proud of what they did, what they all did, in order for me to be able to be here today.’ ”
Despite its efforts, Williamsburg still has further to go.
Colonial Williamsburg was majority black, Seals said, but the modern reality doesn’t reflect that. Currently, roughly 30% of the character reenactors are black, but the site’s image as a white space is hard to shake.
But teachers say they’ve noticed a difference.
“The thought is, ‘It’s Williamsburg; It’s only going to be about white history,’ ” said Cynthia Georges, a social studies teacher from the Bronx, New York, who is black. “I’m like, ‘No, I learned more about Haitian history last year than I had done in my entire life.’ ” This summer, she came back for a second session.
Few have seen the shifts at Colonial Williamsburg as personally as Gregory Stallings, an elementary school teacher from Richmond, Virginia, who is black. As a child, he visited Williamsburg on a field trip in the 1960s.
“It’s amazing to see the African presence that is here right now. When I came before, as a kid, it did not exist,” Stallings said. Now, the teacher is writing a 5th-grade curriculum focusing on Virginian heroes.
After viewing the house of Peyton Randolph, the first president of the Continental Congress before his death in 1775, Stallings asked tour guide Edwin Cooke III whether he considered Randolph a hero. While fighting for American independence, Randolph enslaved 27 people — the most in Colonial Williamsburg.
“He’s probably a hero for many people,” Cooke said, diplomatically. “When you work at a house like this and you’re a descendant of Virginia slave-folks that go back to the 1670s, it becomes a skill to try to find positive things to say about Virginia slave owners, who are part of the government that pushed legislation to oppress more African Virginians.”
Black guides and interpreters like Cooke and Seals are vital to the future of Williamsburg, Seals said, if the site hopes to thrive in a diversifying nation and educate generations of Americans truthfully. But it’s hard to find people willing to play the role of an enslaved person or work at a site promoting American history, which has been so long sanitized. “It is really difficult to find black interpreters because of the way the history was treated when we were kids,” said Seals, who grew up in West Virginia in the 1980s. “We were not taught to be proud of our history, and we should have been.”
The crowds are changing too, said Brooklyn social studies teacher Sharon Gayle. Fifteen years ago when she visited briefly, she didn’t see any other black people.
“In walking around last year and this year, the number of African-American families that we’ve seen has really, really increased,” Gayle said.
Other national parks are trying to diversify, too.
In nearby Yorktown, the Colonial National Historical Park is launching an archaeology program exploring the life of one of the first enslaved Africans brought to Virginia in 1619. And Eola Dance, chief of resources management, hopes the National Park Service can attract employees of color like her through internship programs that reach out to urban high schools and students at historically black colleges and universities.
Confronting presidential history
But even amid a push to confront historical atrocities, some sites and museums still avoid giving prominent attention to slavery.
The museum at the Tennessee childhood home of Andrew Johnson, president from 1865 to 1869, glosses over his role in keeping America segregated and unequal after the Civil War, historians say.
Johnson, then Abraham Lincoln’s vice president, freed his eight personal slaves on Aug. 8,