In a story we published four years ago, the author Michael Twitty told us, “My job is to bring to life what the life of an enslaved person looked like so that you can take a picture of it with your iPhone and share this knowledge.” In those days, Twitty was known primarily for his work at Southern plantation museums, where he still frequently appears as an interpreter — demonstrating the cooking methods and the living conditions of people enslaved on such plantations. His work has gone much deeper in the past four years. In 2017, he published “The Cooking Gene,” a book that won the James Beard Award for its portrayal of African American culinary history in the South.
One month ago, his work took on additional importance. A tweet from an Indian American activist in Colorado named Saira Rao called attention to the resistance of certain plantation visitors to hearing true stories about slavery. Her tweet went viral and brought on a wave of national stories — about how, as some of the more than 50 antebellum plantation museums in the South began to address slavery more directly and specifically in their tours, with no sugar-coating, they met resistance from many white visitors.
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