Bluesky

Looking at plantations, one sees all the ways that plunder outlives the plundered. Like oil rigs pumping fortunes from buried fossils, America’s slave houses ceaselessly pump profits from their buried slaves. They frack our ancestors’ memories to fuel a booming southern tourism industry, turning forced labor camps into luxury inns and idyllic wedding venues. They trivialize our trauma.

This is why Blacks tend to avoid antebellum sites. Why, whenever the “Big Houses” fall into ruin, we are filled with glee. When, during the Civil War, Robert E. Lee’s plantation was destroyed, Frederick Douglass called it “a righteous retribution.” When, just last year, a fire engulfed Louisiana’s Nottoway Plantation, a grueling forced labor camp where the enslaved once chopped and stripped sugar cane, Blacks again thought it a righteous retribution.

And yet, despite over a century of relishing in their destruction, what many Black folks always truly wanted was the plantation’s reclamation—their redemption. When, in 1863, Douglass walked across the smoldering grounds of Lee’s Arlington Heights, what he found more moving than the demolition was the retrofitting of the master’s smokehouse into a schoolhouse.

“I wish you could see this school,” Douglass wrote to a fellow abolitionist. “When I was there there were a hundred children in it, the descendants of slaves, who held for many generations, going back more than two hundred years. The sight of these poor little children brought tears of joy, sadness, hope, and fear, and I know not what else. Three years ago to have taught these children in Virginia would have subjected the teacher to a heavy fine and to imprisonment. Now teachers and pupils are alike safe.”

Douglass’s panoramic prose conjures scenes of children writing, teachers lecturing, and classrooms swelling into soaring melodies. “The teachers (Mr. and Mrs. Simmons) kindly asked me to address the children,” Douglass recalled. “I complied, and sang two or three hymns with them.”

Witnessing jubilee through Douglass’s eyes, one sees a stirring vision of a plantation transformed from a devastating prison into a palace for deliverance. One sees a past vision of what the future could be.

Founded two hundred and fifty years ago, the United States still fumbles over what to do with the plantations that financed the country’s foundation—some 375 of which still remain, according to the Equal Justice initiative. It is, perhaps, the ultimate irony of the American project that our mission of freedom was not merely born alongside oppression but enabled by it. Look at the front of a nickel, and you will see Thomas Jefferson, the politician who wrote “all men are created equal.” Turn it over, and you will see Jefferson’s plantation, Monticello, where he whipped and raped slaves. It is the project of the Black Freedom Struggle to reconcile both sides of this coin, to bring the “LIBERTY” etched on the front to the chattel toiling on the back, to bring democracy to the plantation.

For most Black people, freedom has never meant flight; most of us did not run away during slavery or after. Even after the Great Migration, the large bulk of Black people continued to live in the South. For us, freedom meant reinvention. This is the reinvention Frederick Douglass wrote of when he described the transformation of plantation land into a school for education and the liberation of Black people. This is the reinvention that drove the work of civil rights–era ventures like Fannie Lou Hamer’s Freedom Farm Cooperative. As sociologist Sanjay Pinto writes, Hamer “sought to reclaim an agrarian landscape that [she] and others in her community had experienced as a site of violence and harm” and “to forge a place of refuge from the twin evils of racial oppression and economic compulsion.” To this day, the reinvention continues, with organizations like New Communities, located on Georgia’s massive Cypress Pond Plantation, which is converting that crime scene into a site for cooperation, education, and liberation.

New Communities uproots slavery’s logic. Its owners have conducted ceremonies to honor enslaved ancestors and to bless the land. Its 200 acres of pecan trees have supplied their fruit to worker cooperatives like the Black, queer, worker-owned Pecan Milk Cooperative. These southern Black farmers conduct public education on cooperative economics and, year-round, advocate for “the development of co-ops and associations of farmers to develop economic synergies that help all involved.” In this way, they advance an ethos of collective ownership—or, in the words of their unofficial motto, “Cooperative living, learning, earning, and doing together empowers a collective group of people.”

This crusade of transforming forced labor camps into laboratories for worker democracy offers more than historical solace. The question of what to do with America’s plantations is a question about what to do about the legacy of slavery and racial discrimination more broadly. Slavery still molds us. Plantation logics still drives patterns of wealth. White families still own plantations as sure as Black families still labor as wage slaves. As the Black Studies scholar Rinaldo Walcott notes, “The ideas forged in the plantation economy continue to shape our social relations, and those historic social relations, in turn, have consequences for how we encounter each other in the present and how we then process these encounters.”

In recent years, our national discourse on racial reconciliation has revolved around the question of reparations. The case for reparations is self-evident. The American landscape is pocked with buildings fortified by slave bricks, steel made from slave coal, and wooden beams crafted from slave lumber. It is ludicrous that Blacks folks are asked to bear the burden of proof when we are surrounded by the proof of our burden.

Still, reparations alone do not go far enough. Reparations would not alter the nature of the oppression we live under. They would not change the systems that have created the need for repair. We all know it is an insidious American tradition to merely pay a fine, then continue committing crime. To sell opioids, pay a fee, then sling more dope. To run over people with 18-wheelers, pay a settlement, then release more reckless drivers. Payments alone wouldn’t dismantle the structures of American economic domination; they woud only succeed, at best, in endowing Black people with enough capital to dominate others. What is needed is remuneration and transformation. Returning slave lands to slaves’ descendants is not only about compensation. It is a charter to plot a democratic economy based on consent as opposed to cannibalism.

To escape the manacles of chattel slavery’s legacy, Americans must rediscover our national democratic birthright. We must remember that democracy is slavery’s inverse. As Abraham Lincoln once wrote, “As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master. This expresses my idea of democracy. Whatever differs from this, to the extent of the difference, is not democracy.”

Follow Lincoln’s thought to its logical end, and you’ll see that economic democracy is the opposite of slavocracy—just as the ballot is the whip’s antithesis. Whereas slave quarters confined people, union halls bring them together for collective action. Whereas plantations inflicted coercion, cooperatives share control. There is no better place to rekindle our love for republican liberty, no better venue to build libraries and lecture halls on land trusts and codetermination than in the crucibles of oppression, than in the pit of the plantations themselves.

Today, Americans still cower in shame over the blood our economy shed 250 years ago. The fear that Americans harbor about their history isn’t just about what we did, but about what we haven’t done. We fear slavery still because we never made it right. The longer we wait, the more the weight will crush us. Now is the time to reclaim our nation’s slave mansions. It’s time to alter the functions of these altars of whiteness. Converting forced labor camps into cathedrals of cooperation, reimagining them as sites of economic justice would not only help us confront the past but also produce a blueprint for the future.