Jumping the broom

James Catnach - The Marriage Act Displayed in Cuts and Verse (British Library)

I'm not going to go into the history of this tradition other than to repeat something said in one article about it:

Parry writes that despite the racial animus which characterized the US South during the nineteenth century, poor white Southerners (many of whom were descendants of people who had irregular forms of matrimony in Britain) and enslaved African Americans had more cultural exchange than is commonly acknowledged.

But the reason I bring it up is that one of the institutions which was prohibited to slaves was marriage and a stable family life. A lot of the criticism about Nottoway is that it was used for weddings, which was something prohibited to slaves. On the other hand, no one has mentioned if blacks were prohibited from celebrating their marriages there in recent times. I'm not going to get into a discussion of "jumping the broom" or the institution of marriage during slavery since it would take a lot more than a blog post.

On the other hand, what would be a better form of revenge than for black people to get married on a place where it was prohibited to their ancestors?

I see way too much boohooing and handwringing that "slavery was bad" without too much introspection on what has been lost to future generations. The concentration camps have been kept as memorials. The only people who wanted them destroyed were the people who committed the crimes to hide the evidence. 

Have you ever heard of Belzec? No, it was destroyed to hide the evidence. If you are going to mention concentration camps--then you should mention that.

This place was up for sale not too long ago: why didn't people buy it to turn it into another Whitney Plantation where slavery is addressed honestly?

To be honest if reparations are going to happen, they probably won't monetary, or just focused on one race: they will only come from an honest and open discussion of race in America.

And destroying the places which are painful really isn't the answer.