Note: I have capitalized “Plantation” to refer to the emerging sentiment that new terminology, such as “forced labor camp,” should be used for greater historical accuracy. I leave it in for familiarity here but mark it for its controversial status as I continue to fully understand. In some contexts, eliminating the word makes sense, but as of yet, I don’t feel equipped to completely remove it from a discussion of the institution of slavery.  

This past summer, with support from Duke School’s John Watson Moore grant, I visited Plantation sites throughout the South. I wondered what narratives these sites would assert and how they would vary from place to place, state to state. And though I didn’t realize it going in, I needed to be on those sites and gain a sense of place. 

The JWM grant supports the core value of lifelong learning, an integral tenet of Duke School’s ethos. We want our students to embrace this concept, and for them to do that, we need to embrace it ourselves. As a White social studies teacher, this value carries extra and significant weight. 

Over the course of a week, I visited Plantations from Louisiana to Virginia to South Carolina, as well as the Old Slave Mart Museum in Charleston and the Legacy Museum, and The National Memorial for Peace & Justice in Montgomery, AL. My plan was to immerse myself in the story of slavery and its enduring impact on Black Americans, indeed on American history itself. My goal was to further my understanding of it as not just a thing of the past but as something that impacts society today, myself very much included. To teach any subject without this level of personal understanding compromises depth and authenticity. 

What I learned was too vast to adequately report in this post. Surely, my initial goal around narrative was met: I heard brutal stories about the dangers of extracting sugar from the cane at Whitney, and observed the near-complete omission of the role slavery played in Frogmore’s still thriving cotton-producing operation. In between these extremities were opportunities for more critical analysis of the curatorial choices made by these sites, and the Legacy Museum is, in my opinion, a required visit, not only for its location of Montgomery, AL, home of both the first Whitehouse of the Confederacy and the Bus Boycotts. 

And so, here’s where that sense of place comes in. 

The education I received on these tours that gripped me most occurred when they were over. We were allowed to walk around the grounds ourselves, and I used that time to revisit certain stops and take videos of trees, plants, bricks, and structures built by enslaved people, structures that were still standing after all this time. The sense that I was standing in the same places where people experienced things I’d been taught and assured would never happen to me — and lived lives of strength and courage beyond anything I can conceive of — was palpable, especially in temperatures approaching one hundred degrees. As a cis, White male, certain truths can feel abstract; striving for proximity is a way to correct that. I don’t know how to say it without diminishing the lived experiences of the people I learned about, so I won’t try to. And that wasn’t the point anyway; the point was to gain a better understanding of why I teach what I teach the way I teach it, and then do it better.

My second to last stop was the McLeod Plantation. Towards the end of our tour, our guide spoke about life for the formerly enslaved after emancipation. These stories are often heartbreaking, people choosing to remain on the Plantations they were forced to work for years rather than leave for fear of something worse, uncertain that they’d ever be able to see their families again. The guide pointed to a row of small buildings, the dwellings where enslaved people lived, and told us that people had been living in them as recently as the late ‘80s. It was a poignant reminder of why this history is essential to learn, to say the very least, the fact that as much as we’d like to believe that the institution of slavery is fully behind us, it reverberates deeply today, from the lasting impacts of the racial construction conceived to justify the dehumanizing practice, to the ways in which our society continues to systematically and institutionally strip Black and Brown bodies of their basic human rights. Again, it is one thing to learn this; it is another thing to stand where it began. 

About the author: Ben is a social studies and project teacher in the eighth grade. Ben graduated from the Bank Street College of Education in 2013 with a MSEd in Childhood General & Special Education and taught in the South Bronx for several years before relocating to North Carolina and joining Duke School in 2015. In addition to being a classroom teacher, Ben serves as a Diversity, Equity, and Belonging Liaison on the DEBJ committee and is a co-founder of the Anti-Racism Study Group (2017). Outside of school, Ben is a writer, as well as a musician and sound artist. He records and releases records and performs regularly.   

About the John Warson Moore Grant: The J.W. Moore Faculty Endowment Fund enables Duke School to fund a grant for teachers to pursue individual development projects of personal interest off campus that also benefit their students and the school. The fund, begun by Duke School parents Ann Stuart and John Watson Moore and supplemented by other donors, is named for John Watson Moore’s father, an educator who believed that teachers need reflective time to make their work more meaningful and rewarding.