Between green hills and hovering magnolias lies a small, wooden slave cabin, just behind an 18th Century plantation home. Inside the cabin – an exhibit devoted to the entire life of a southern slave.
“A Peculiar Institution: An Exhibit of Slavery in the South” opened this past Sunday at BREC’s Magnolia Mound Plantation, located on Nicholson Drive.
Unlike other exhibits, this exhibit focuses on all aspects of slave life, from cargo ships to emancipation, said Michael Walker, exhibit coordinator at Magnolia Mound.
“This is a chronological history of slavery in America,” Walker said. “It doesn’t bring you back 400 years or to anywhere else besides the southern states.”
While there was an existing slavery exhibit already in place at Magnolia Mound, Walker said it simply “wasn’t very good.”
Walker started with one concept and a mission statement and let the exhibit build almost on its own.
“I started off with that one piece of paper, and it just developed from there,” he said.
Trisha Person, public relations coordinator at Magnolia Mound, said the exhibit is valuable not only to Magnolia Mound and BREC, but to the entire community.
“This is living history. It’s not a book. It is an incredible ambiance of our history,” Person said.
Person said the exhibit is different because it shows slavery from the eyes of the slave.
“Most people only want to hear one side of the story,” she said. “Well we don’t tell stories and we don’t candy-coat it. We paint the entire picture.”
Erin Carter, a secondary education junior at LSU, assisted Walker in getting the exhibit together in time and made sure everything in the exhibit makes sense.
Carter said her classes at LSU came in handy when deciding how to design the exhibit.
“I was an interior design major before I switched to education,” she said. “So I knew things like what colors would go together and what would make the exhibit stand out.”
Carter said she hopes visitors to Magnolia Mound will walk away with a greater understanding and appreciation for their past.
“I want them to realize this wasn’t a happy place all the time,” she said. “There was a lot of work that went into living everyday life.”
Carter hopes the exhibit may also fill a void left by other larger museums, she said.
“You can go to all these places, but not many of them have any focus on the slave’s life,” she said. “They never go into what slave life was actually like.”
Working at Magnolia Mound has given Carter a new outlook on Baton Rouge and its past, and has helped her develop skills to use after graduation.
“I have a greater respect for history, for the Baton Rouge culture, and for everything that Baton Rouge is and will be,” Carter said.
The exhibit is set up in an actual slave cabin from Point Coupee and consists of eight walls and several displays.
Walker has worked on the exhibit for the past three months using a $2,000 budget.
Walker, an LSU graduate, asked for help from LSU with research and materials.
“I worked with professors from both LSU and Southern Universities,” Walker said. “I started doing an intense amount of image collecting, and most of it actually came from LSU.”