In 2019, Color of Change, the country’s largest online racial justice organization, raised important issues regarding the practice of hosting weddings and other celebrations at historic slave plantation sites. In response, the National Trust for Historic Preservation hosted in December 2020 the Plantation Weddings Symposium, which brought together staff who work at the National Trust’s sites of enslavement, descendants of slavery, and public historians to work collectively to come up with new strategies, solutions, and questions on how to ethically steward sites of enslavement. The symposium was a collaboration between the National Trust's Historic Sites Department and the African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund.

Below is a list of further reading produced after the symposium. It is also available as an attached PDF file.  

Authors:

• Elon Cook Lee, director of interpretation and education in the Historic Sites Department at National Trust for Historic Preservation.  
• Lizzie Mekonnen a 2020 Mildred Colodny Diversity Scholarship recipient and a dual degree masters student in urban planning and historic preservation at the University of Maryland.
• Kristelle Hicks, the associate manager of special events & sales at Woodlawn and Pope-Leighey House in Alexandria, Virginia.

Color of Change Campaign -Tell the Wedding Industry There’s Nothing Romantic about Slavery 

 The Color of Change Campaign called on the country’s major wedding platforms to stop glorifying plantations as nostalgic sites of celebration today. 

News Articles 

• Clarissa-Jan Lim. “Pinterest And the Knot Will Stop Promoting Wedding Content That Romanticizes Former Slave Plantations.” Buzzfeed News, December 5, 2019. 
• Clarissa-Jan Lim. “Brides And Grooms Who Got Married At A Former Slave Plantation Are Speaking Out About Criticism Of The Venues.” Buzzfeed News, December 17, 2019 
• Danielle DeCourcey. "This Black Event Planner's Facebook Post Reveals a Disturbing Trend in Weddings" ATTN, January 8, 2017. 
• Heather Murphy. “Pinterest and The Knot Pledge to Stop Promoting Plantation Weddings.” New York Times, December 5, 2019. 
• Michael T. Luongo. "Despite Everything People Still Have Weddings at Plantation Sites" New York Times, Updated October 20, 2020 
• Theresa Singleton. "Slave Plantation Weddings Use Romantic Love to Romanticize America's Racist History" NBC News, January 5, 2020 
• Tiya Miles. "What Should We Do with Plantations." The Boston Globe, Updated August 8, 2020. 

  Books and Scholarly Articles 

•   Alan Dundes. “Jumping the Broom': On the Origin and Meaning of an African American Wedding Custom.” The Journal of American Folklore 109, no. 433 (1996): 324-29. 
• Amy E. Potter, Stephen P. Hanna, Perry L. Carter, and E. Arnold Modlin. “Give Them More and More for their Dollar: Searching for Slavery Amongst the Plantation Edutainment Complex.” Affective Architectures: More-Than-Representational Geographies of Heritage, Jacque Micieli-Voutsinas, Angela M. Person (Ed.): 19-39, New York: Routledge, 2020. 
• Ann Patton Malone. Sweet Chariot: Slave Family and Household Structure in Nineteenth Century Louisiana. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992. 
• Antoinette T. Jackson. Speaking for the Enslaved: Heritage Interpretation at Antebellum Plantation Sites.  Milton Park: Routledge, 2012. 
• Cherry Levin. Wedding Belles and Enslaved Brides: Louisiana Plantation Weddings in Fact, Fiction and Folklore (2012). LSU Doctoral Dissertations, 3506. 
• Emily West. Chains of Love: Slave Couples in Antebellum South Carolina. Champaign: University of Illinois, 2004. 
• Ewa A. Adamkiewicz. "White Nostalgia: The Absence of Slavery and the Commodification of White Plantation Nostalgia." Aspeers, no. 9 (January 2016): 13-31. 
• Dr. Frances Smith Foster (Ed). Love and Marriage in Early African America. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2007. 
• Dr. Frances Smith Foster. ‘Til Death or Distance Do Us Part: Love and Marriage in African America. Oxford University Press, 2010. 
• George Rawick (Ed.). The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography. Smithsonian Libraries. 1972. 
• Jennifer L. Eichstedt and Stephen Small. Representations of Slavery: Race and Ideology in Southern Plantation Museums. Washington DC: Smithsonian Books, 2002 
• Dr. Karen Cox. Dreaming of Dixie: How the South Was Created in American Popular Culture. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2011. 
• Dr. Karen Wilkes (January 2013). “From the Landscape to the White Female Body: Representations of Postcolonial Luxury in Contemporary Tourism Visual Texts.” Mediating the Tourist Experience: From Brochures to Virtual Encounters. 33-55 
• Dr. Karen Wilkes. Whiteness, Weddings, and Tourism in the Caribbean: Paradise for Sale. Palgrave Macmillan, 2016 
• Katherine McKittrick. “Plantation Futures.” Small Axe 17, no. 3 (November 2013): 1-15. 
• Katherine McKittrick. “On Plantations, Prisons, and a Black Sense of Place.” Social and Cultural Geography 12, no. 8 (2011): 947-963. 
• National Trust for Historic Preservation. Engaging Descendant Communities in the Interpretation of Slavery at Museums and Historic Sites – A Rubric of Best Practices Established by the National Summit on Teaching Slavery. 
• Rebecca J. Fraser: Courtship and Love among the Enslaved in North Carolina. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2007. 
• Resmaa Menakem. My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending our Hearts and Bodies.  Las Vegas: Central Recovery Press, 2017. 
• Stephen P. Hanna, Perry L. Carter, Amy E. Potter, Candace Forbes Bright, and Derek H. Alderman. “Following the Story: Narrative Mapping as a Mobile Method for Tracking and Interrogating Spatial Narratives.” Journal of Heritage Tourism 14, no. 1 (2019): 49-66. 
• Steven Hoelscher. “The White Pillared Past: Landscapes of Memory and Race in the American South.” in Landscape and Race in the United States, edited by Richard Schein, 39-72. New York: Routledge, 2006. 
• Tyler D. Parry. Jumping the Broom: The Surprising Multicultural Origins of a Black Wedding Ritual. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020.   

Videos & Podcast Resources   

• Wedding Belles and Enslaved Brides: Plantation Weddings Fact, Fiction, and Folklore (YouTube) 

A pre-recorded symposium session with Dr. Cherry Levin, who teaches at the College of Marin and additionally owns and operates Frances Lane, a boutique event rental studio located in the San Francisco Bay Area. She earned her doctorate from the Louisiana State University where she concentrated on various aspects of plantation culture, ultimately focusing on the plantation as a site for both white and black marriages. 

• The Nightly Show – Planning a Plantation Wedding (Comedy Central, March 1, 2016) 

Robin Thede and Mike Yard go undercover in Kentucky to investigate the growing phenomenon of plantation weddings 

• "Those Were the Days: Nostalgia in American History" (BackStoryRadio, January 3, 2020) 

White Columns, Southern Fantasies - This segment includes a discussion of nostalgia and southern "neoplantation architecture" with Dr. Philip M. Herrington. 

• "I Asked My Friend WHY She Had a Plantation Wedding \\ Tips on How to Have an Anti-racist Wedding" (NotYourMommasHistory on YouTube) 
•   “When White People Say Plantation” (The Sporkful Podcast with Dan Pashman, June 1, 2020) 

An exploration of how the term plantation has been used to market a variety of foods, recipes, products, and restaurants. 

General Online Resources 

What is a Plantation? (National Humanities Center Toolbox Library)