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Past seven small cypress wood cabins, which at one time slept dozens of slaves apiece, Seck stopped the cart at the marble Wall of Honor, which displays the names of over 350 people who were once enslaved at Whitney, plus how much each sold for and why. Seck, who originally gleaned all this information from documents found on the property, pointed out enslaved people who were deemed less valuable: a one-armed driver, a mentally-disabled woman, an old man with a hernia. Their prices were lower, but their fate was the same."Mentally-disabled or old slaves might be assigned to watch the master's toddlers or something," Dr. Seck said. "They sold for less, but were never retired. You worked till you died."There is no fiction here. There is nothing you can deny here. — Dr. Ibrahima Seck
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Seck joined this project out of desire to see Americans' vague knowledge of slavery made precise, and to help make history's words—so easily dismissed, especially by those who wish to—into haunting visuals."Everything we provide here is based on real people and very specific things. You find the real people, where they came from, what were their skills, their diseases. You can find them also being taken to court because they run away. You see them being punished. You see some of them in revolts. There is no fiction here. There is nothing you can deny here."On VICE News: Road-Tripping to South Carolina With the 'New' KKK
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Seck then led us to the lagoon where Whitney plans to host another more brutal monument dedicated to the slaves of the "German Coast Uprising" in 1811. Dressed in faux military outfits, the 125 enslaved people marched along River Road toward New Orleans until confronted by militiamen who killed 95 of them. As a lesson to future dissenters, several dozen of the slaves were decapitated and their heads posted on spikes in the vicinity of the plantation as well as in world-famous Jackson Square, the jewel of New Orleans's French Quarter. Artist Woodrow Nash is almost done creating the 60 ceramic heads that will sit atop spears at Whitney.You go around to many plantations around here and they have only pictures of the masters. Here, we have no pictures of the masters. — Dr. Ibrahima Seck
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At one point during my tour, I'd overheard a guide telling a group that Seck had been working on the project for over ten years, and would be here for another ten. I asked Seck if this was true, and if it was, what he hoped to accomplish in the coming decade."I expect to stay here ten more years because we want to make sure and go beyond the museum and build a real research center for slavery, like they have the Schaumburg Center in New York," he replied. "We have a lot of room here, and we want to repopulate the plantation, but with researchers and students and summer camps. We want to have a music festival, like a Congo Square at Jazz Fest, but bring all the music from Africa." He paused and smiled. "I want to bring music back to this place."Even in the project's relative youth, Seck considers Whitney one of the first American examples of reparations. "After maybe 200 years of slavery, then 100 years of Jim Crow, there have never been real reparations," he pointed out. "Even the meager Civil Rights people got from the struggle, in some places it has been taken away from them. If you have more places and textbooks where people are really willing to talk about slavery, that's how we get enough people who would understand the problem and who would be willing to do something about it."Follow Michael Patrick Welch on Twitter.Read: The Case Against the Confederate Flag Is Also the Case Against the Washington NLF Team's Nickname