Denmark Vesey's garden : slavery and memory in the cradle of the Confederacy
Ethan J. Kytle (Author), Blain Roberts (Author)
A book that strikes at the heart of the recent flare-ups over Confederate symbols in Charlottesville, New Orleans, and elsewhere, Denmark Vesey's Garden reveals the deep roots of these controversies and traces them to the heart of slavery in the United States: Charleston, South Carolina, where almost half of the U.S. slave population stepped onto our shores, where the first shot at Fort Sumter began the Civil War, and where Dylann Roof shot nine people at Emanuel A.M.E. Church, the congregation of Denmark Vesey, a black revolutionary who plotted a massive slave insurrection in 1822. As early as 1865, former slaveholders and their descendants began working to preserve a romanticized memory of the antebellum South. In contrast, former slaves, their descendants, and some white allies have worked to preserve an honest, unvarnished account of slavery as the cruel system it was. Examining public rituals, controversial monuments, and whitewashed historical tourism, Denmark Vesey's Garden tracks these two rival memories from the Civil War all the way to contemporary times, where two segregated tourism industries still reflect these opposing impressions of the past, exposing a hidden dimension of America's deep racial divide. Denmark Vesey's Garden joins the small bookshelf of major, paradigm-shifting new interpretations of slavery's enduring legacy in the United States. --inside jacket
History
1 online resource : illustrations, maps
9781620973660, 1620973669
1029207105
Prelude: Slavery's capital
Part I: Emancipation and Reconstruction
The year of jubilee
Reconstructing Charleston in the shadow of slavery
Part II: Jim Crow rising
Setting Jim Crow in stone
Cradle of the Lost Cause
Part III: Jim Crow era
Black memory in the Ivory City
America's most historic city
The sounds of slavery
We don't go in for slave horrors
Part IV: Civil rights era and beyond
We shall overcome
Segregating the past
Conclusion: Denmark Vesey's garden
Afterword: The saving grace of the Emanuel nine?