Public Memory, Race, and Heritage Tourism of Early America

Cathy Rex,Shevaun E. Watson

• Editore: Routledge
• Anno: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000463446
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: History
• Categoria: African American History

This book addresses the interconnected issues of public memory, race, and heritage tourism, exploring the ways in which historical tourism shapes collective understandings of America's earliest engagements with race.

It includes contributions from a diverse group of humanities scholars, including early Americanists, and scholars from communication, English, museum studies, historic preservation, art and architecture, Native American studies, and history. Through eight chapters, the collection offers varied perspectives and original analyses of memory-making and re-making through travel to early American sites, bringing needed attention to the considerable role that tourism plays in producing—and possibly unsettling—racialized memories about America's past. The book is an interdisciplinary effort that analyses lesser-known sites of historical and racial significance throughout North America and the Caribbean (up to about 1830) to unpack the relationship between leisure travel, processes of collective remembering or forgetting, and the connections of tourist sites to colonialism, slavery, genocide, and oppression.

Public Memory, Race, and Heritage Tourism of Early America provides a deconstruction of the touristic experience with racism, slavery, and the Indigenous experience in America that will appeal to students and academics in the social sciences and humanities.

1 Revisiting the Gateway to Bondage

A comparative study of the landscape preservation and touristic interpretation at Sullivan’s Island with Ellis and Angel islands

Barry L. Stiefel

DOI: 10.4324/9781003102830-1

Most Americans are aware that Ellis Island in New York Harbor and Angel Island in San Francisco Bay were the points of entry for millions of immigrants from Europe and Asia, and the throngs of tourists who flock to these historic sites every year come precisely to see this history told to them. However, most Americans are unfamiliar with Sullivan’s Island, near Charleston, South Carolina, where roughly between 200,000 and 360,000 enslaved people from Africa were forcibly brought to North America during the transatlantic slave trade of the eighteenth century (Clyburn 8, 176). By some estimates, 40 percent or more of Africans who were brought to North America entered through Charleston’s port. An additional number of enslaved Africans were also brought to Charleston into the 1860s through the intercoastal slave trade and transatlantic slave smuggling. While Ellis Island was nicknamed the “Gateway to Freedom” (Disposal of Ellis Island 16) and Angel Island designated “the Ellis Island of the West” (Bamford), in a literal sense Sullivan’s Island can be dubbed the “Gateway to Bondage” for the role it played in American history, and few tourists come to Sullivan’s Island to learn about this past because it is so unknown.

While there have been previous histories of Ellis Island, Angel Island, and even Sullivan’s Island, none have explored the interplay between the trio regarding their preservation, heritage value, and tourist experience. Sullivan’s Island has been grossly understudied compared to the other two arrival locations of American ancestors and is significant for representing the African contribution to the country’s population. According to the 2010 census approximately 42 million people in the United States have at least some African ancestry (Locke and Bailey 105). Indeed, as Toni Morrison commented in a 1989 magazine interview:

[t]here is no place you or I can go, to think about or not think about, to summon the presences of or recollect the absences of slaves … no wall, or park, or skyscraper lobby … There’s no 300-foot tower, no small bench by the road that I can visit or you can visit.

(Morrison and Denard A44)

Even today, few tourists visit Sullivan’s Island to think and reflect on this bench, which was installed by the Toni Morrison Society’s Bench by the Road Project in 2008 as a response to Morrison’s harsh critique, let alone engage in other activities related to this episode of the island’s African migration history. Instead, visitors come to Sullivan’s Island to enjoy South Carolina beach island recreation and are oblivious to the historical significance of this place for people of African descent. Thus, this chapter reveals the neglect of preservation and heritage interpretation of the African arrival experience when there are peer historic sites representing European and Asian immigrant groups as a comparison. The story presented here complicates conceptions of identity, race, and the way public memory related to the greater American arrival experience is presented to tourists, underscoring some of the economic inequality and social injustice in heritage tourism.

Contextualizing Sullivan’s Island vis-à-vis Ellis and Angel islands

Athinodoros Chronis and Ronald D. Hampton have found that the public interpretation of places like Charleston is constructed to suit the tourist-based economy, itself based on a romanticized interpretation of the colonial and antebellum periods, ending with the Civil War (111–26). According to Stephanie E. Yuhl, the political elite of Charleston (who came from white privileged backgrounds) were the ones to articulate and shape the historical legacy of Charleston during the 1920s and 1930s, molding it from a private to a public memory that influenced the way visitors and other outsiders came to conceptualize the city. Only in recent years has there been an honest effort to recognize that what the public perceives as what is great about Charleston—the historic ambiance, the cuisine, southern charm, and hospitality—was built on the backs of enslaved Africans and maintained for many decades under Jim Crow rule.

Scholarly interest in the history of Africans arriving at Sullivan’s Island during the eighteenth century emerged during the 1980s, as presented by Elaine Nichols in her paper “Sullivan’s Island Pest House: Beginning an Archaeological Investigation” given at the Digging the Afro American Past: Archaeology and the Black Experience Conference, at the University of Mississippi. Local historian Suzannah S. Miles also discusses the experience of Africans at the Sullivan’s Island pesthouse in multiple works that she self-published from the 1990s to the early 2000s. A “pesthouse” (short for pestilence house) was used to protect a community from infectious diseases, sometimes called a lazaretto. Most histories of Sullivan’s Island focus on other stories of the island’s past, only briefly mentioning the place’s role within African migration history (Miles, The Island 1–10). The exceptions are Blain Roberts and Ethan J. Kytle, Ana L. Araujo, and Yuhl who present landscape histories of slavery and the built environment, either focusing specifically on Charleston or comparing Sullivan’s Island to other significant places where enslaved people were imported, such as Rio de Janeiro, Salvador, and Recife, Brazil; New York City (not Ellis Island); and Jamestown, Virginia. These studies were published between 2012 and 2014, reflecting the growing and continued interest in African American studies. As of yet, no study has compared the preservation accomplishments (or the lack thereof) and visitor experiences of Sullivan’s Island with Ellis or Angel islands together. Charles River and Emmy E. Werner have edited books that were inclusive of Ellis and Angel islands as a pair, but these were not peer-reviewed histories and underscore that scholars have not taken this history very seriously.

River’s publication presents an important observation regarding the two better-known immigrant stations:

Angel Island is often referred to as the Ellis Island of the West, but many argue that they are extremely different in their preservation of immigrant histories. For one, Angel Island took much longer to preserve, and the preservation of Ellis Island focuses on the positive reception of European immigrants on the East Coast, which plays well to corporate sponsors and the American story. Historian John Bodnar explained that Ellis Island represents “the view of American history as a steady succession of progress and uplift for ordinary people.” Ellis Island fits nicely into the narrative of the American Dream, because even though the immigrants who came through there were subject to racism, they were predominantly white. Angel Island was a much more multiracial experience, and when recounting its history, the tensions of exclusiveness and xenophobia that existed in the late 19th century and early 20th century are laid bare for all to see.

(River cover abstract)

River does not discuss Sullivan’s Island, but his critique has equal relevance to an expanded case that is inclusive of this historic arrival site. Moreover, the preservation and public history interpretation at Ellis and Angel islands have not always been a successful story, with both enduring their own challenges of intolerance. Tourism to Angel Island began in 1954 when a portion of the island was given by the federal government to the California State Park Commission, followed by much of the rest of the island in 1962, but the tourist experience emphasis was at first on outdoor recreational activities. Until 1970, the Angel Island immigration station was under consideration for demolition (Lai 4–5; “Angel Island History Timeline”). After a couple of years of preparation, Ellis Island opened to visitors in 1976, with more than 50,000 tourists in the first year (“Bicentennial: ‘Where the Action Was’” 101; “Ellis Island Timeline”). The saving of the Angel Island immigration station and the creation of the Ellis Island tourist experience both coincided with American Independence bicentennial celebration preparations, where preserving historic places and visiting them became increasingly popular during this decade (Rymsza-Pawlowska 139–64). However, many years of political struggle, financial investment, and touristic development would ensue before the creation of the experiences tourists feel today when visiting these sites. In contrast, Sullivan’s Island was completely ignored during the 1970s regarding the African arrival history, focusing instead on beach recreation and the American Revolution and Civil War history of former Fort Moultrie. Together, the hardships encountered in the preservation and public history interpretation at all three locations reflect a shortcoming within mainstream American society to embrace peoples who have come here and are culturally different. Additionally, other peoples, such as Indigenous Americans who were here prior to European settlement for thousands of years, as well as Latin Americans who arrived overland across what is now the southern border with Mexico (or experienced a border shift following the Mexican–American War after 1846–8) do not have an officially recognized site that honors their experience of arrival or origins.

Of the three gateway islands for arrival to what is the United States, Sullivan’s Island is not only the oldest but also the longest serving, spanning from 1707 to 1799. Ellis Island’s immigration station was not established until 1892. It was utilized until 1954, though mass immigration was cut off after 1924. Angel Island served as an immigration station for three decades, from 1910 to 1940. In contrast to the history of Africans arriving at Sullivan’s Island, a substantial amount of scholarship exists on the migration experience at Ellis and Angel islands (Cannato; Lee and Yung). The facility at Sullivan’s Island was also very different from Ellis and Angel islands because it was a pesthouse and not an immigration station, by technical legal definition. Moreover, Africans did not make the voyage to escape persecution or to find new economic opportunity in America, which is the story that is told at Ellis and Angel islands, but were captives forced to make the Middle Passage for a new life in bondage.

New York and San Francisco were not the only ports of entry for people immigrating from Europe and Asia to the United States, and neither was Charleston for those coming from Africa. Algiers Point, on the opposite side of the Mississippi River from New Orleans’ French Quarter, was the point of disembarkation for enslaved Africans in French and Spanish Louisiana. According to Douglas B. Chambers, about 11,000 Africans were imported to New Orleans (186). Most enslaved people in Louisiana were brought from other French or Spanish colonies, or later, other parts of the United States. In the Chesapeake Bay region there was no urban center that slave traders brought Africans to for auction due to the dispersed agrarian settlement of the region. During the legalized transatlantic slave trade most Africans in Georgia came through Charleston/Sullivan’s Island, South Carolina, though some arrived directly through Savannah, by way of Tybee Island. Quantifying how many enslaved people were brought from Africa to Georgia is difficult due to the smuggling that occurred here. Between 1801 and 1820 more than 2,000 people from Africa were found illegally trafficked through Georgia’s Sea Islands, with the practice known to have lasted as late as 1858 (Morgan 33). Enslaved Africans were brought to mid-Atlantic and New England (and even Canadian) port cities too, but not in the same numbers as we find in the American South where there was a greater economic need for them in the cash crop economy of tobacco, cotton, sugarcane, rice, and indigo. While Sullivan’s Island was used from 1707 to 1799, the transatlantic slave trade to South Carolina first ended in 1787 when the state government temporarily outlawed the commerce (the trading of enslaved Africans was still permitted between states), with a brief renewal of the importation of Africans from 1803 to 1807 (Butler). This coincided with the federal government’s constitutionally mandated deadline of January 1808, permanently ending the transatlantic slave trade to the United States. In summary, the horrific number of Africans brought to North American ports in what is now the United States between 1619 and 1807 is estimated at 650,000, with the most significant harbor being Charleston, where 40 percent or more arrived (Northrup 460).

The pesthouse at Sullivan’s Island, 1707–99

During the eighteenth century the transatlantic trip from Africa to South Carolina lasted on average two months and the human cargo would likely have been dehydrated and malnourished upon arrival, not to mention terrified of the world they were about to enter and bereaved of the homes and loved ones that they would never see again. Quarantine was mandated to be at least 10 days, sometimes as long as 40 days, in order to ascertain who was sick, healthy, or dead. If the slave ship was too large to safely beach on Sullivan’s Island, the newly enslaved Africans who survived the Middle Passage would have been shackled and herded in groups onto smaller watercraft, and ferried from the ship that brought them across the ocean to the pesthouse (Miles, Island 11). Ships that brought over enslaved human cargo to the Carolinas and Georgia would vary in size, carrying from a couple of dozen to sometimes more than 500 people (Morgan 33). Quarantine could also take place aboard ship within one mile of the Sullivan’s Island pesthouse, w...

Indice dei contenuti

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgments
• New directions for research: Bringing together public memory, early America, and tourism studies
• 1 Revisiting the Gateway to Bondage: A comparative study of the landscape preservation and touristic interpretation at Sullivan’s Island with Ellis and Angel islands
• 2 Remembrance and mourning in the Native mid-South: Florence Indian Mound Museum’s past, present, and future
• 3 Remembering and forgetting plantation history in Jamaica: Rose Hall and Greenwood Great House
• 4 At the table or on the menu at Indiana’s Feast of the Hunters’ Moon
• 5 Slavery in the Big Easy: Digital interventions in the tourist landscape of New Orleans
• 6 Don’t mess with (Anglo) Texas: Dominant cultural values in heritage sites of the Texas Revolution
• 7 Bulloch Hall and the movement toward a well-rounded interpretation of antebellum life in Roswell, Georgia
• 8 Rendezvous with history: Grand Portage National Monument and Minnesota’s North Shore
• Afterword: Memory and heritage in the “era of just redemption”
• Index