Denmark Vesey’s Garden: Slavery and Memory in the Cradle of the Confederacy

The history of slavery has been told by historians for many decades, especially with the rise of the Civil Rights movement. Most of the works focused on slavery in the pre-Civil War era, with some touching on Reconstruction—though most historians view that as separate. This wide ranging, and well put together, book looks at the memory of slavery after slavery was abolished in the one place where it became notorious: Charleston, South Carolina. This book gives us a quick introduction of how slavery rose in South Carolina, but the entire point of the work is to look at Charleston after the Civil War and how the era of slavery was remembered as time went on, when Jim Crow arrived, and then ending with the Civil Rights movement.

This is a fascinating book. The authors have done an excellent job bringing a difficult subject to life: the idea of remembering the past. They show that Charleston never gave up the idea of slavery. They developed the Jim Crow system to keep African Americans in line. Hopefully, this book will open up this area of research and we can get more like it.