Travelers Going Back in Time to Probe America’s Deep Scar

Inferiority. Servitude. Racism. These are just a few of the words that Vonita W. Foster uses when she travels to middle schools and high schools to teach students about slavery -- a subject that, more than 140 years after its end, still makes many black students squirm.

“They’re kind of uncomfortable,” she said. “They’re embarrassed that their ancestors were slaves, because they don’t know the heritage.”

Foster is on a mission to change that. She has become a driving force in creating the country’s first national museum dedicated to slavery.

Interest in slavery studies has been growing over the last few decades, as people have sought the uncensored, unsanitized story of the transatlantic slave trade -- a topic that Foster, executive director of the forthcoming museum, says is often glossed over in classrooms, textbooks and movies.

“When you keep your citizens ignorant and you only share bits and pieces, people start to say, ‘Wait a minute.... Why wasn’t I told this in school? Why didn’t I know this?’ ” she said.

The history that many don’t know, she said, includes African Americans selling their own people, toddlers in shackles, and the country, including the North, benefiting financially from slave labor.

“It’s not as easy as ‘Gone With the Wind’ and ‘Miss Scarlett’ and all of that,” Foster said. “There are so many variables.”

The U.S. National Slavery Museum, with 290,000 square feet and a $200-million budget, is scheduled to open in Fredericksburg in 2008. The venture is a high-end example of a growing market trend as the tourism industry recognizes the popularity and profitability of reexamining one of the nation’s ugliest scars.

Former Virginia Gov. L. Douglas Wilder, the grandson of slaves, proposed the museum 14 years ago while on a trip to Africa. He wanted it in Virginia, the birthplace of slavery in the Colonies. He selected Fredericksburg because of its proximity to the nation’s capital (it’s about 50 miles south) and its availability of land (a developer donated 38 acres along the Rappahannock River).

Several smaller slavery museums and exhibits also have opened across the South, as the children and grandchildren of African Americans who migrated North trace their family histories.

“There’s this demographic of baby boomer African Americans with lots of leisure time and income returning to discover their roots,” said Rich Harrill of the International Tourism Research Institute at the University of South Carolina.

So-called heritage tourism, which spans ethnic groups, allows travelers to see how their individual identity fits into a broader cultural history. It is the second-fastest-growing segment of tourism behind nature-based excursions, Harrill said.

Local and state tourism agencies are spending more and more to market heritage tourism. They are particularly targeting African Americans, who increasingly have the resources to devote to such pursuits.

According to census data, the number of black middle-class households shot up 62%, to 3.4 million from 2.1 million, between 1990 and 1999. (White middle-class households, by contrast, increased 22%, to 37.5 million from 30.7 million.)

Last year the Virginia Tourism Corp. spent $450,000 -- 15% of its advertising budget -- to reach the African American market. The Missouri Tourism Commission spent more than double that on programs to encourage black tourism.

Such marketing efforts seem to be working. African Americans spent $30.5 billion on leisure travel in the United States in 2004, the Travel Industry Assn. of America estimates, and their travel volume increased 4% from 2002 to 2004.

The National Great Blacks in Wax Museum in Baltimore had more than 200,000 visitors last year, up from 100,000 a decade ago.

The National Slavery Museum has an annual marketing budget of about $100,000 and expects at least half a million visitors a year.

But fundraising is difficult, and some organizations struggle early on. So far, the Fredericksburg museum has raised about $50 million from wealthy individuals, such as comedian Bill Cosby, and corporations including Wal-Mart and Wachovia Bank. But it must raise another $50 million before construction can begin. The remaining $100 million in the budget is to furnish the building and establish an endowment for daily operations.

Plans call for 10 permanent exhibits, including a full-scale replica of a slave ship. About 6,000 artifacts have been collected, including slave deeds of sale, an 1840s census book with state-by-state slave listings, and torture devices such as collars, masks and wooden instruments, known as specula oris, used to force-feed captives who refused to eat on the voyage from Africa.

The rise in slavery-themed attractions has met some resistance, particularly among blacks who are not eager to revisit the past. But, Foster said, “More people are embracing the project than are not.”

In fact, the pain associated with slavery is a main draw of many sites, with images that are increasingly graphic and tours that attempt to recreate the slave experience.

“It’s the same principle that makes us look when we pass an accident,” said Teresa O’Bannon, assistant professor in the department of recreation, parks and tourism at Radford University in Virginia. “Somebody else has experienced a tragedy. It may have well been us. We want to know what that looks like.”

Visiting sites of gruesome events, such as Nazi concentration camps, the Cambodian killing fields or slavery museums, helps people realize what humans are capable of, O’Bannon added.

“This wasn’t some monster movie with computer graphics,” she said. “These were flesh-and-blood people.”

On a Missouri tour titled “From Fur-Trappers to Ragtime Millionaires,” travelers learn about black military history, visit plantations where slaves were “bred,” and even get a jolt of what it was like to be sold on an auction block in St. Louis.

For that, tour leader Angela da Silva steps out of her role as guide and becomes Bernard M. Lynch, the biggest slave trader in the upper South.

“I can’t tell you how many people have cried,” said Da Silva, whose travel agency, the National Black Tourism Network, specializes in African American history and culture trips.

In Selma, Ala., visitors to the Slavery and Civil War Museum can spend 90 minutes in the role of a slave -- kidnapped, frightened, screamed at and degraded. As museum director Afriye We-Kandodis leads the experience, she abandons her own delicate, angelic voice and adopts one of a male overseer -- twice her size and chillingly cruel.

“We do use the language that was used back then,” she said. “The ‘n-word’ is used quite a lot. Men are called ‘boys,’ and women are called ‘wenches.’ ”

Families are separated; individuals are inspected like cargo, not treated as human beings. We-Kandodis calls the visitors “godless” and “worthless” and remains unapologetic even when they cry.

We-Kandodis came to the Selma museum as a volunteer in October 2004, after finances forced it to close temporarily. She established the “Footsteps of Our Ancestors” program when the museum reopened the following April.

Offering such a personal view of slavery has both raised the museum’s profile and improved its finances, she said. This fall, she plans to extend the role-playing to an all-day event, including an afternoon of labor, such as yardwork or house-painting.

So far, she said, she has taken 147 groups of about 30 people -- black and white, adults and children -- through the slavery experience.

“It’s not about hating -- it’s about knowing that we all are capable of being vicious,” she said. “The whole world benefited from the enslavement of Africans. We’re not blaming anyone. We’re just putting it on the table.”