Black History Month is officially over, but this New York Times Magazine story on the first (!) museum in the United States devoted to slavery is not time-limited. Other restored plantations in its Louisiana neighbourhood emphasize the genteel life of the Big House, but the white lawyer who has restored Whitney Plantation has gone in another direction:
As a descendant of Irish laborers, he has no direct ties to slaveholders; still, in a departure from the views held by many Southern whites, Cummings considered the issue a personal one. “If ‘guilt’ is the best word to use, then yes, I feel guilt,” he said. “I mean, you start understanding that the wealth of this part of the world — wealth that has benefited me — was created by some half a million black people who just passed us by. How is it that we don’t acknowledge this?”
