A former plantation becomes a space for healing, art and reparative history

By Brianna Scott, NPR

Harpersville is a small town in Alabama.

It’s predominantly white. It’s located in Shelby County, which the local Republican Party calls the reddest county in America. It’s also home to a new museum exhibit about a particular chapter of Black history. About what happened in Harpersville after formerly enslaved people were emancipated, granted their freedom — and not much else.

NPR’s Picture Show spoke with Tyler Jones who is part of a narrative studio based in Birmingham called 1504. They have been collaborating with the Wallace Center for Arts and Reconciliation to recenter the stories of Black descendant communities through creative, embodied storytelling.

With a growing network of designers, historians and local leaders, they are exploring participatory forms of interpretation that invite people to feel, not just understand, the weight of this place.

What inspired you to take on this project, and what did you hope it would achieve? Why was this the right time and place for a reparative history project using art?

Across the South, antebellum sites are often romanticized, obscuring the brutal realities of enslaved labor that made that era — and its wealth — possible. But something remarkable is happening in rural Alabama, where a plantation from 1841 is being reimagined not as a monument to the past, but as a space for reparative history and healing.

At a time when so much public discourse is fractured and politicized, art offers a deeper, more human way in. What better time and place to try connecting with a new generation around the importance of seeing history as the story of our shared humanity?

How did local residents, particularly descendants of both the enslaved and the enslavers, engage with the project? Were there collaborative aspects in the creation of the installation?

[…]

The broader Healing History initiative brought together descendants of enslavers and the enslaved in dialogue to practice honest, often difficult conversation. Those exchanges revealed a deep hunger for acknowledgment and the importance of not minimizing the horrors of racial violence while also not reducing the Black experience to stories of trauma.

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