Justice Prevails: Descendants of enslaved people at historic plantation win bruising battle to tell their stories

By Rhonda Sonnenberg, Southern Poverty Law Center

Set on a pastoral landscape at the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains outside Orange, Virginia, Montpelier is among the country’s premier historic plantation sites.

It was the home of James Madison, the so-called father of the U.S. Constitution and the nation’s fourth president.

It was also “home” to 300 enslaved people during Madison’s time, and their descendants are now boldly asserting the right to tell their stories.

For the past 18 months, Montpelier’s conservative, white leaders had been battling the Montpelier Descendants Committee (MDC) – an organization dedicated to restoring the narratives of enslaved African Americans on the plantation – over its demand for equal voting power on Montpelier’s board…

But in a stunning turn of events this week, MDC representatives took the majority of the Montpelier Foundation board seats for the first time.

Continue reading about this historic shift in power and what it could mean for the MDC.

Montpelier was just one part of the slavery machine that erased peoples’ roots and afforded white people generations of privilege.

People and organizations demanding recognition of slavery’s impact will continue to make breaking news.