Old Story, New Audience
Christine King Mitchell is pushing Charleston’s slave history from obscurity to prominence at a small, city-owned museum tucked off a cobblestone road.
On a recent morning, she stood with her back to a row of windows that look out over what once was a four-story brick fortress, a barracoon called the “jail” where enslaved people for sale were housed. The complex included a “dead house,” a morgue. Today, the site is a private parking lot.
Mitchell works at the Old Slave Mart Museum, where many auctions moved after the city banned them at the Exchange and surrounding streets in 1856. From the dimly lit second floor, she tells an unvarnished story of slavery here and across Charleston. Record numbers of people are coming to hear it.
She began working at the Slave Mart a decade ago — and annual visitors have skyrocketed since, from about 30,000 to more than 80,000 last year. They now narrowly surpass visitors to the Exchange, one of the most historic colonial public buildings in the country.
Mitchell’s first audience of the day was a class from a private school in Greenville, a city three hours away in upper South Carolina. They listened with quiet intensity as she explained how slavery infused every vein of the city’s economy.
“You’re talking insurance companies making money, the shipbuilding industry making money…”
A big screen beside her projected an 1856 document titled: SLAVE POLICY. In it, Aetna Life Insurance Co. had insured a 24-year-old enslaved woman named Sebina for $600. “This city was built on the backs of Black people,” Mitchell said. “You can start to understand the tentacles.”
When she first read the policy about five years ago, she cried. For white people, slavery might seem distant. But to her, it feels very near. She remembers her first freeborn grandfather, “and I’m not 100 years old yet.” Now 67, she grew up in the 1960s picking cotton with her mother.
This history plays forward today. Mitchell, who wrote a new book, “The Business of Slavery,” noted the generational wealth gap that persists between Black and white people. The education disparities. The Black women paid 52 cents for every $1 a white man is paid in South Carolina.
After the class left, while waiting for the next one to file in, she explained the importance of her work. “If you understand the past, you understand the present.” She pointed an index finger and moved it in a circular motion toward the museum’s display panels, the chains under glass, the bricks in the walls with enslaved people’s fingerprints still pressed into them.
“It’s all of this.”