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BIRMINGHAM, Ala. —
\nAntebellum Southern plantations were built on the backs of enslaved people, and many of those plantations hold places of honor on the National Register of Historic Places – but don\u2019t look for many mentions of slavery in the government\u2019s official record of places with historic significance.<\/p>\n
\nThe register\u2019s written entries on the plantations tend to say almost nothing about the enslaved people who picked the cotton and tobacco or cut the sugar cane that paid for ornate homes that today serve as wedding venues, bed-and-breakfast inns, tourist attractions and private homes \u2014 some of which tout their inclusion on the National Register like a gold star.<\/p>\n
\nThe National Register of Historic Places lists more than 95,000 sites that are important to the story of the United States. From some of the most famous places \u2014 such as George Washington\u2019s Mount Vernon estate \u2014 to scores of lesser-known plantation homes in the rural South, register entries often ignore the topic of slavery or mention it only in passing, an Associated Press review found.<\/p>\n
\nExperts blame a generational lack of concern for the stories of black people and, in many cases, a shortage of records. While some narratives have been updated to include information about enslavement, such changes aren’t mandatory and many have not.<\/p>\n
\nThe National Register\u2019s entry for Mount Vernon, approved in 1977, doesn\u2019t use the word \u201cslave,\u201d although more than 300 enslaved black people worked the first president’s fields, cooked his food and cleaned the house where tourists now roam.<\/p>\n
\nThe entry for Thomas Jefferson\u2019s mountaintop home, Monticello, notes that the third president owned as many as 200 slaves. Yet it generally avoids discussing them or the details of their ownership by the author of the Declaration of Independence.<\/p>\n
\nThe same is true for plantation after plantation across the former Confederate states.<\/p>\n
\nThose omissions likely contributed to the loss of slave housing and other structures linked to the economy of enslavement because no one deemed them important, preservationist Ashley Rogers said.<\/p>\n
\n\u201cThe problem is, the damage has been done,\u201d said Rogers, executive director of the Whitney Plantation Museum near New Orleans.<\/p>\n
\nThe Whitney, which documents slavery at a pre-Civil War plantation near New Orleans, draws tens of thousands of visitors annually and is known for discussing topics that other tourist plantations ignore. Yet even its entry in the National Register, completed in 1992 before the current owner purchased it, doesn\u2019t mention the slaves who toiled there.<\/p>\n
\nSimilarly, visitors to Mount Vernon or Monticello in Virginia can now hear stories and see exhibits about slave life \u2014 but those features were added long after the landmarks became some of the first sites listed in the National Register.<\/p>\n
\nThe National Register’s incomplete stories reflect the way the public ignores the topic of enslaved people, said Hasan Kwame Jeffries, an associate professor at Ohio State University who specializes in areas including African American history.<\/p>\n
\n\u201cIt\u2019s telling us what we have been valuing as a society and how we understand slavery,\u201d Jeffries said.<\/p>\n
\nCongress established the National Register of Historic Places under a 1966 historic preservation act aimed at coordinating preservation work and highlighting the nation\u2019s most historic sites.<\/p>\n
\nAlong with bragging rights, a listing on the National Register can help property owners financially. More than $160 billion has been invested in preserving 44,000 historic places nationwide under a tax credit program approved in 1976, according to the National Park Service, which oversees the program.<\/p>\n
\nProperty owners, local groups and government agencies nominate sites for inclusion on the National Register, noting architectural features, historic significance and other information. State preservation offices review the nominations and submit them to the Park Service for a final decision.<\/p>\n
\nThose nomination forms, available on government websites, make up the bulk of information that\u2019s publicly available about places listed on the register, the Park Service said. And they often ignore the enslaved people who provided the labor on antebellum plantations.<\/p>\n
\nMagnolia Grove, a state-owned antebellum plantation home dating to 1835 in Greensboro, Alabama, has a slave cabin that tourists can visit, plus displays about enslaved people, yet its 1972 entry on the National Register doesn\u2019t mention slaves.<\/p>\n
\nThe state-operated Kingsley Plantation near Jacksonville, Florida, was home to slaves, yet its National Register entry doesn\u2019t say who they were or how they were forced to work in the Southern heat. Instead, it describes tabby \u2014 a kind of concrete made of oyster shells \u2014 and the \u201ccolorful\u201d slave trader Zephaniah Kingsley, who gets credit for having \u201ccarefully trained\u201d enslaved people to farm his cotton.<\/p>\n
\nA historian who has researched the antebellum South, Clifton Ellis, said many National Register entries reflect a time when neither African American history nor the cultural importance of buildings were emphasized.<\/p>\n
\n\u201cYou might see that there\u2019s a relation between lack of information and when they were written,\u201d said Ellis, of Texas Tech University. \u201cIt was only during the \u201870s that historians were beginning to look at slavery more closely. That took time to work its way through the academy.\u201d<\/p>\n
\nMany plantation owners also kept poor records of slave life and did little to preserve reminders of it \u2014 another reason for the information void.<\/p>\n
\nThe civil rights movement drew attention to the need for inclusive history, Ellis said, and nominations have improved with time. Property owners and historical groups are allowed to update National Register entries with new information. Some have done so with information about slaves.<\/p>\n
\nToday, any new nomination of an antebellum site that doesn\u2019t discuss its ties to slavery would be rejected for more work, said Sarah David, who oversees the National Register program for North Carolina.<\/p>\n
\n\u201cYou can\u2019t talk about something that was built before the Civil War without talking about enslaved people,\u201d she said. \u201cThey were just in it. They may have built it.\u201d<\/p>\n
\nThe historical blindness about slavery and enslaved people isn\u2019t limited to plantations in the National Register.<\/p>\n
\nThe entry for Alabama\u2019s white-domed Capitol details its role as the place where delegates established the Confederate States of America in 1861, but doesn\u2019t cite slavery\u2019s role in the rebellion or Horace King, a onetime slave credited with building the elegant, curved stairways in the building\u2019s main entrance.<\/p>\n
\nJoe McGill routinely sleeps in old slave homes as part of The Slave Dwelling Project, which seeks to tell the forgotten stories of enslaved people. Sketchy accounts of slavery are a product of a decades-long period when white male historians primarily told the stories of white males, he said.<\/p>\n
\n\u201cIt needs to be corrected because it coincides with an incomplete narrative,\u201d said McGill, who has slept in about 150 slave dwellings in 25 states in the South and the North.<\/p>\n
\nBut updating all that outdated history would be daunting, historians said.<\/p>\n
\nWith hundreds of old plantations listed on the National Register and many preservationists focused on saving endangered sites rather than updating information about existing ones, rounding out the history of antebellum farms could take years.<\/p>\n
\n\u201cIt would take a massive effort,\u201d said Ellis.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n