Slavery and Public History

This week’s reading, Slavery and Public History: The Tough Stuff of American Memory edited by James Oliver Horton and Lois E. Horton (2006), centered itself on the legacies of slavery and how public historians and their guests exhibit and relate to those difficult memories. James Oliver Horton states that this anthology is about the contradiction of “the history of American slavery in a country dedicated to freedom (Horton, vii). All of the chapters attempt to understand the contested public memory and its relationship to history.
The clash of historical ownership and debated interpretation most often takes place at sites of public history. Because memorials, museums, and other public spaces are often linked to various groups’ heritage and national identity different interpretations of history can be seen as points of power as well as pride. However, with the topic of slavery and the history of one group of people owning and oppressing another distinct group the contemporary public often expresses reluctance at hearing histories that can call into question the country’s past. Because sites of public history are often seen as locations of ancestry and family they can be places of continued debate.
The feelings that much of the white public audience, especially in the South, expresses towards discussions of slavery is predictable, even understandable. In National Parks and museums across the country white guests continue to prefer histories that minimize African American experiences and contributions to our nation’s past. Much of this is not perhaps because white audiences continue to choose nostalgia over sources or narratives of white supremacy but rather because many white Americans would like to forget the sins of their ancestors. History that forces white audiences to confront slavery can reinforce a public memory of shame that many white visitors would choose to forget rather than seek forgiveness and understanding.
Perhaps some of the most interesting work in this book is John Michael Vlach’s chapter “The Last Great Taboo Subject: Exhibiting Slavery at the Library of Congress.” This essay discusses an exhibit called “Back of the Big House” that Vlach took part in creating. The exhibit displayed a variety of pictures, testimonies, and architectural recreations so as to depict a Southern plantation from various slaves’ points of views. Within minutes of opening the African American employees of the Library of Congress protested the exhibit and before noon the museum had completely dismantled the displays and locked them in storage (Vlach, 58). This article goes on to explain that the legacies of slavery are too troubling for many black audiences who correctly continue to link slavery to contemporary racism. There are similar reactions in James Oliver Horton’s research on Colonial Williamsburg’s recreation of slave auctions. Protested by the NAACP, the auction was seen as trivializing and insulting to the African American experience. Edward T. Linenthal adds an interesting interpretation to these chapters. He argues that when African Americans boycott or protest such displays they choose to “inhabit therapeutic history that would support their … acceptable identity for themselves as well as their ancestors,” (Linenthal, 216).
The fact that both white and black Americans choose to participate in histories that minimize or quiet slave experiences is telling of just how much the past continues to shape the present. This book eloquently examines how slavery and sites of violent history struggle to fit into a national narrative of democracy, freedom, and battles legitimized by “just causes.” Slavery and Public History argues that sites of great violence and oppression must be remembered. Indeed, just as the Holocaust museum and the Enola Gay controversy emphasize, violent histories cannot be dismissed as inconvenient lest they be repeated.