Spread out over 31-acres, 16 majestic oak trees used to stand tall over Nottoway Plantation in Louisiana, the South’s largest existing Antebellum mansion.
On Thursday, May 15, 2025, a fire completely engulfed the estate burning it to the ground. The 10 fire departments present on the scene couldn’t contain it. Officials say the cause was electrical but we know better. The ancestors have been working overtime.
I refuse to call it a resort. It was a plantation; a plantation that enslaved people built with their hands, and shed their blood for. The demise of Nottoway has been the subject of discussion and celebration. Some say it was a grave tragedy, but for many Black people, it feels like an act of justice.
For context, the Antebellum South was a period roughly between 1815 to 1861 characterized by agricultural production, including sugar, tobacco and, most particularly, cotton. The social structure at that time was deeply ingrained by the institution of slavery, and plantation owners experienced significant economic growth. However, the tension between the South and North eventually led to the Civil War.
The wealth and culture of the region were built almost entirely on the forced labor, suffering, and dehumanization of millions of enslaved Africans and their descendants. The southern economy thrived on the exploitation of Black people. Enslaved people were not only laborers but were also treated as property and traded like commodities.
The Antebellum era normalized white supremacy and codified it into law, culture, and religion. Enslaved people were stripped of identity, families were torn apart, and any resistance was met with violence. Enslaved Africans were often forbidden from speaking their native languages, practicing their religions, or preserving their heritage. This cultural genocide still affects Black identity and cultural memory today.
Built in 1859 by sugar baron John Hampden Randolph with the forced labor of slaves, the Nottoway Plantation in Louisiana was the largest standing Antebellum mansion in the South. Randolph enslaved over 150 people on the plantation. It sickens me that this place was marketed as a luxury tourist attraction resort, charging $25 for tours seven days a week. Yes, people were also married there in the wedding venue. Just to know that people actually celebrated there with weddings and parties is just unreal.
In June 2024, the Huston House at Butler Plantation in Darien, Georgia was also mysteriously destroyed by fire. Butler Island was a rice plantation dating back to the 1700s, linked to the Weeping Time—the largest recorded auction of enslaved people in United States history. In 1859, during a rainstorm in Savannah, Georgia, over 400 enslaved people from Butler Plantation were sold to help cover the gambling debts of slaveholder Pierce Mease Butler.
Before the Butler Plantation met its fate, a mysterious fire destroyed the Belle Grove Plantation located in Iberville Parish, Louisiana in 1952. It was said to have been one of the largest mansions ever built in the Southern United States, surpassing its neighbor Nottoway.
The truth is there are many other of plantations, where chattel slavery occurred, that have succumbed to “mysterious fires” over the years. I would like to believe that these were acts of poetic justice, and nothing mysterious about them. They were more than just structures but physical reminders of a time when Black lives were treated as property. Their destruction feels like a dismantling of that legacy.
Southern plantations are often romanticized as beautiful estates, erasing the violent reality of slavery. Slaveholders idealized plantations as these refined places, deliberately ignoring the brutality inflicted on enslaved people. Nottoway burning to the ground challenges false nostalgia. For many, justice involves not just progress but confrontation. The fire is like a cleansing of a painful symbol; a refusal to allow plantations to be preserved as celebratory landmarks.
This has been passed down through generations, as we are faced today with the struggle to preserve our historical memories. Battles over how slavery is taught in schools, the removal (or defense) of Confederate monuments, backlash against Critical Race Theory, and even trying to remove historical artifacts from our museums reveal a deeply-rooted discomfort with acknowledging systemic racism.
If we want to talk plantations, we don’t need to look any further than the White House. In 2016, First lady Michelle Obama delivered a powerful speech at the Democratic National Convention that reminded us how we can rise above a painful past.
“I wake up every morning in a house that was built by slaves,” she said. “And I watch my daughters, two beautiful, intelligent black young women, playing with their dogs on the White House lawn.”
Michelle Obama’s description of her daughters playing on the lawn of a White House built by enslaved people struck a chord with many of us. It was a stark reminder of the historical significance of Barack Obama’s serving as the country’s first Black president.
It’s ironic that the White House is often referred to as the people’s house, when it was slave labor that helped build it.
While many will see the burning of Nottoway as symbolic justice, there will be those that argue preserving plantations — truthfully and critically — can be powerful tools for education. The key issue is how these places are presented: as tributes to wealth and beauty, or as haunting reminders of human cruelty.
The history of chattel slavery plantations in the United States have been defined by the violent ownership, commodification, and exploitation of Black bodies. It casts a shadow over our current political climate. While the legal institution of slavery ended in 1865, many of its structures, ideologies, and legacies are deeply embedded in our society today.
The plantation system was not just an economic model — it was a blueprint for racial domination that has just evolved. Our current political climate still reflects the deep structures of that past. True justice requires a reckoning. That means facing the past honestly, dismantling the systems it created, and building new ones rooted in equity and accountability.
