The Confederate States of America lost the Civil War in 1865, but organizations like Save Southern Heritage Florida fly their flag. Image: ddp
Ron DeSantis wants to be in the White House – and re-tell America’s history. This is evident at memorials to slavery and in libraries, from which numerous book titles are being removed. Resistance is now forming in Florida.
“I had no idea this was here,” says the driver as he pulls into the Gamble Plantation driveway. Here some prefer to say Gamble Villa, others find Plantation trivializing and speak of forced labor camps. In any case, the two-story house with the white columns is the focal point of the last surviving plantation in Florida where slaves lived in the nineteenth century.
The Manatee Region beaches on the west coast are 15 miles away and Sarasota is less than half an hour’s drive south. The town of Ellenton is named after the daughter of a later owner of the villa. Visitors like to head to the nearby mall on a thoroughfare. Only two middle-aged white couples are waiting on the porch of the main house for the tour to start. The heat is only just bearable in the shade, in wooden rocking chairs. Today the building is situated in a park, in which there are individual monuments and a covered cistern. Nearly two hundred enslaved people worked here around 1860, growing sugar cane.
2023-07-18 12:23:00
#Ron #DeSantis #Florida #Culture #War
