Louisiana

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The Nottoway Plantation in Louisiana burned down, and social media users expressed a wide range of emotions in response.
The Nottoway Plantation in Louisiana, billed as “the South’s largest remaining antebellum mansion”, was devoured by a fire over the past weekend. The responses to the fire have been a mix of emotions ranging from jubilation over the destruction of a symbol rooted in the horrors of the enslavement of Black people, to some expressing sadness as it represented “the good old South” and their memories of weddings held there.

Located 65 miles northwest of New Orleans, the 53,000-square-foot mansion had been rebranded as the Nottoway Resort in recent years, featuring amenities such as 40 overnight rooms, a honeymoon suite, a lounge, fitness center, and an outdoor pool and cabana. According to the National Park Service, 155 enslaved people were recorded at Nottoway Plantation in 1860. The website for Nottoway doesn’t mention those people at all. And according to property owner Dan Dyess’ words in the New York Post, there is no intent to do so: “We are trying to make this a better place. We don’t have any interest in left wing radical stuff. We we need to move forward on a positive note here and we are not going to dwell on past racial injustice.”

That sentiment contrasts with how social media rejoiced in Nottoway burning down. One historian, Dr. Mia Crawford-Johnson, shared a selfie taken across from the site of the mansion burning down, which went viral. Others also shared videos celebrating the mansion’s destruction by fire as justice for those who were enslaved, with some using it as an Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response video and editing the video with background music choices like Usher’s “Let It Burn.”

Some historians have lamented the lost chance to preserve Nottoway as a site to illustrate the skill and ingenuity of Black enslaved people. “There are no perfect answers here,” writes noted author and chef Michael W. Twitty in an MSNBC article. “Nottoway could have gone the way of Whitney Plantation, also in Louisiana, which is a museum dedicated to helping visitors understand who the enslaved people were.” When contacted, Whitney Plantation Museum Executive Director Ashley Rogers felt that Nottoway’s chance to go that route was lost long before the blaze. “It was a resort,” Rogers said. “I don’t know that it being there or not being there has anything to do with how we preserve the history of slavery. They already weren’t.”

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