Louisiana and other southern states are home to many former plantations. Some become plantation museums, while others are used as wedding venues and homes.

Actors Blake Lively and Ryan Reynolds faced criticism from fans after getting married at the Boone Hall Plantation in South Carolina. While they eventually apologized, it raises the question – what should the South do with its former plantations?

John Bardes is an LSU history professor who teaches courses on the Antebellum South, and when looking at the way plantations are viewed today, Bardes said it’s important to look at their past.

“[White people] wanted to find a way to present slavery in the Civil War that de-emphasized the role of slavery and racial strife and instead emphasized a mythologized image of the planter elite as this noble chivalric lost society,” Bardes said.

Bardes said that presenting plantations as romantic and chivalric places was part of a “broader cultural project” that was used to harm African Americans.

“It was directly used to legitimate Jim Crow, on the logic that…the South were this noble race of people who had the best interests of Black workers at heart, and who could be trusted to benevolently dominate the Black working class,” Bardes said.

Bardes doesn’t want old buildings with a plantation past to be torn down, but he realizes that there are too many to be turned into museums. He doesn’t have a solution to what should become of the South’s former plantations, but he says he is opposed to all efforts that romanticize the sites.

While the South can’t get rid of all its plantations, Bardes emphasizes the importance of honoring the people who were enslaved there and not forgetting history.

History graduate student and president of the Society of African and African American Studies Justin Martin has lived in the South his whole life and believes that having weddings at a plantation ignores history.

“[Plantation weddings] reinforce this old idea that there’s this idyllic past where there were these fancy houses, and slavery wasn’t there. You know, these horrible atrocities weren’t involved,” Martin said. “And so when you’re having these weddings, you’re really glossing over that true history.”

Martin has heard of different celebrities facing backlash for having plantation weddings, but he believes these conversations can be used as an opportunity to educate people and change the way they view these sites.

Martin has noticed that many plantation museums don’t cover the full history of what took place. He believes it’s crucial that museums teach all aspects of the history, even if it may be hard to hear.

“[A lot of plantation museums are] very kind of sanitized, and you don’t really have that learning experience…teaching about the horrors of slavery is really important,” Martin said. 

Martin thinks that plantation museums should go more into African American traditions, such as jumping the broom. Jumping the broom is a Black wedding tradition where the bride and groom hold hands before jumping over the broom as a symbolic way to seal the marriage. 

“Thinking about these plantations, it’s a good opportunity to also say, okay, while we’re teaching about the horrors of slavery, can we also talk about how, you know, Black people had these very creative responses to trying to live their lives under these really horrible conditions,” Martin said.

Martin thinks a way people can begin to have conversations about plantations is through education. According to Martin, many people in the South aren’t taught the full history of the land. By taking school field trips to local plantations, younger students could learn more about the history of their surrounding environment.

“It has to be this kind of slow process…that starts by having conversations about, you know, what it was really like, what these plantations actually mean, versus what people have kind of been told as they’ve grown up,” Martin said. 

History doctoral student Ashley Rogers is the director of the Whitney Plantation, a museum and memorial that educates people on slavery and its legacies.

While many former plantations serve as house museums, Rogers said the Whitney Plantation is the only plantation museum in Louisiana that exclusively focuses on slavery.

Rogers said other museums don’t always cover the entire scope of what happened at the site.

“Plantation tourism was invented by and for white people,” Rogers said. “So you know, it’s their stories about the grandeur of the old South…in many cases, kind of packaged and sold to northerners who kind of wanted to see this, you know, romantic ideal of the 19th century.”

While the way plantation museums present history is changing, Rogers said many of them have previously glamorized the experience. Historically, interpreters would wear hoop skirts or focus on the house and the plantation owners rather than the people who were enslaved.

Rogers said using plantations as venues creates an “erasure of the past.” She doesn’t allow any weddings or events to take place at the Whitney Plantation, with one notable exception. A staff member who was a descendant of the site was allowed to get married in the Freedmen’s Church at the plantation.

“For her, that was like, a really meaningful story. And it wasn’t about glorifying the plantation South,” Rogers said.

It’s not uncommon for people in the South to live in former plantations. While Rogers doesn’t think it’s wrong for people to privately own these homes, she thinks they should be properly honored, even if it’s just with a simple plaque, so people don’t forget.

“If you were to not allow people to live in homes where people were enslaved, you’d have to kick everybody out of the French Quarter, because the entire French Quarter is still to this day full of slave cabins…I do think that those places should be appropriately commemorated in some way,” she said. “We have a culture of misremembering…because we think of these as shameful stories.” 

Rogers said it’s especially important to learn about the history of slavery in order to understand how it affects the South today.

“If you do not understand how central slavery was to our past, there is no way to understand the present day that we’re living in, there’s no way to understand present day conversations about race and equity,” she said.