Historical Significance the Whitney Plantation and Its Present Condition
An American trial attorney from New Orleans called Mr. John Cummings founded the Whitney Plantation; he spent nearly sixteen years of his life and eight million dollars of his fortune to establish the plantation that was eventually made accessible to the public in December 2014. It is situated at the south of the United States in St' John Baptist Parish, Wallace in Louisiana. It has a French Creole house that was built in 1803 and another outbuilding that makes the museum significant, especially in the African American history because it is the only preserved slave museum in the country.
The main purpose Cummings established the museum was to help people understand the role and the impact of slavery towards American liberation today since the majority of the US history are rooted in slavery. Cumming saw that the sacrifices that the slaves made for the sake of their race were so great that it had to be documented. Cummings also saw that Whitney Plantation was the only avenue, which lay emphasis on the importance of the American history.
It is pertinent to note that Cummings built the museum with one mission, and that was to critically examine the American history and figure out what the white people did and did not do before the arrival of the black people. He puts it that, when slavery is looked in a much more liberal point, it would be easier to understand what people look for while slipping through the history books and documents. He built the place to educate all the Americans on racial backgrounds and the dark chapter of the America's history that continues to resonate down throughout the centuries.
Present Condition of the Whitney Plantation
The Whitney Plantation was built without altering most of the sites, which were initially there including some of the houses, apartments, and stores. It is a walk through history at the present as one may describe the plantation. Developments made were meant to make the place more attractive and accommodative to the visitors and at the same time ensuring that the history of the plantation is preserved. Its location is perfect especially during summer where one would just require a handful of items to visit the place.
The land is fertile and with oak trees and a sugar plantation in its vicinity. Cummings installed exhibits and memorials about slavery that he conceived with the collaboration of artists, researchers, and scholars as he transformed the structures inside the Whitney Plantation. With the milky-white Antioch Baptist Church, donated pieces from Paulina Town filled with realistic ceramic statues of slaved children that wore tattered clothing. Cummings commissioned them to make more stirring, lifelike experience from those pieces. His idea behind this commissioning was to make a white person appreciate and listen to their black counterparts.
A clay bust was also commissioned, and it was placed near the altar; it depicts Pope Nicholas V, who passed and edict that suctioned Portuguese people the right to enslave the black Africans. Cummings also added tons of indication in perpetuity as he went through the history of papal. Cummings did not have to add narratives to explain the plantation as it was done in Laura Plantation and Oak Alley. Rather he preferred it to remain singular because he believed that slavery had to be placed at the center and the front because he saw it a story worth telling in itself.
With the influence of the Veterans Memorial in Washington D.C, designed by Maya Lin, Cummins designed slave tributes, and he manufactured it on-site using their engraving machine. He is in the process of printing plaques, and he plans to document over 400,000 names of the African slaves that existed in the Louisiana State from 1985. Cummins also did some polishing on the panels he proposed inserts of quotations from the oral history between names of the Louisiana slaves that were found documented in the Library of Congress. However, from Cumming's findings very little was documented about how it look like, how it tasted and how it felt to be a slave during those times.
The "Fields of Angels" is a memorial in the plantation that features a description of enslaved children who died at the St. Johns Parish, who may not have lived to see their third birthdays. It brings out a memorable yet a very painful picture of what the African children went through during slavery. It depicts how harsh life was for them that they could not survive long enough in their environment.
In conclusion, Cummings saw a very great importance of recognizing slavery as part of the American history and he worked so hard to ensure that it yielded fruits. He wanted to bring out the neglected yet very crucial part of the black history in the American soil to live so that people can appreciate the black skin in the midst of the white skin. He wanted to preserve the history of slavery and ensure that the information is passed from one generation to the other. His achievement has been recognized worldwide, and his legacy continues to inspire many who want to dig deep into the black history.
Bibliography
Amsden, David. "Building the First Slavery Museum in America." The New York Times. 2015. Accessed March 07, 2016. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/01/magazine/building-the-first-slave-museum-in-america.html?_r=0.
Courtauld, Sarah. The Story of Slavery. Tulsa, OK: EDC Pub., 2008.
