Thanks for this excellent piece, Matthew!!!! I was born and raised in Charleston, SC 66 years ago and as I'm sure you know, we have more than our fair share of "plantation tourism" given the number of plantations still standing there which serve as wedding and tourist destinations. Last year there was a similar dust-up to the one above from some Northern tourists saying the same thing this woman said, but the Black tour guides pushed back saying our history mattered. They didn't change anything they were saying.

Now that they're finally building an African American museum in downtown Charleston it's gonna be interesting to see what tourists have to say then. I say finally because Charleston used to be a majority Black city for a very, long time until white Northerners started flocking in, buying up all the property they could, gentrifying all of our neighborhoods and pushing Black folk further to the north of Charleston proper.

From 1619 to 1808, nearly half of the enslaved West Africans shipped to America from Senegambia, Sierra Leone and Congo came through the city after first being quarantined and scrubbed down on the barrier island of Isle of Palms where the pest houses used to be to make sure they brought no infectious diseases into the settlement of Charleston where they were then auctioned off. It's now a very expensive place where white folk live and vacation but Fort Moultrie, a part of the Fort Sumter National Monument administered by the National Park Service is also there.