The Architecture of American Slavery : Teaching the Black Lives Matter Movement to Architects by -

The spatial dynamics surrounding the murder of Trayvon Martin are rarely discussed in architecture schools. Yet, the racial biases in our landscape are key to the agenda of the Black Lives Matter movement. This article tells the story of how these issues found their way into a course on the architecture of American slavery.  As the semester progressed, students discovered how the remnants of slave spaces, along with the racial biases they embodied, have contributed to the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement.

hen I signed on to teach a course entitled The Architecture of American Slavery at Roger Williams University in spring, 2016, I did not expect the Black Lives Matter movement to be relevant.I thought the course would be about the infrastructure surrounding American slavery, and its present-day remnants.But as it turns out, the Black Lives Matter movement is tied to the architectural legacy of American slavery in more ways than I had thought.I spent the 2015-16 academic year filling in for a good friend and colleague as a Visiting Associate Professor in Historic Preservation at RWU, in Bristol, RI.I have taught preservation classes off and on during the fifteen years I have lived in Rhode Island.Outside academia, I am deeply involved in researching the history of Rhode Island's built environment, particularly its sites associated with African-Americans and women.As such, I am constantly searching for interesting projects with pedagogical applications.Relative to the depth of its history, Rhode Island is vastly under-researched.Finding things to study is not hard.Rhode Island's African-American spaces are especially under-researched.With a white population of 96.3%, Bristol, RI, is not particularly diverse.The next largest racial subgroup is Hispanic, at 1.3%.African-Americans make up 0.6% of the population. 1 As a result, whiteoriented architectural history tends to dominate.Yet, Bristol was ground zero for the RI slave trade and home to the DeWolfe family, who ran one of the most profitable slave-trading enterprises in the country during the Colonial era.DeWolfe buildings dot Bristol's landscape, creating an interesting and often uncomfortable relationship with present-day life.For example, the DeWolfe warehouse, where slaves and slave goods were stored, is now an upscale restaurant (Figure 1).The history of the DeWolfes themselves is well told, but the African-American side is left out.I have long thought that a class on Bristol's African-American architecture would be really interesting.
When it looked like my spring semester schedule would have room for a special topics class, I pitched the idea to my dean, Stephen White.Originally titling the course The Landscape of Northern Slavery, I briefly outlined a syllabus that would explore the spatial aspect of the town's slave trading past.It was an "off" idea and somewhat controversial, not one I thought he'd go for.However, Steve really liked it-a lot, and far more than any of the other ideas I had.He not only saw the merits of the class but didn't object to its material.And, he was extremely enthusiastic.His support was key, as was the interest of the students.Like every professor offering a special topics class, I feared that the course wouldn't make minimum enrollment.But, it filled in the first two days of registration.
Like its hometown, RWU ("R-Dubs") also does not have a diverse student population.73% of the university is white, 5% Latino, 2.5% African-American, 2.2% Asian and 1% Native American (the remaining percent is unknown).Its minority populations are below the national averages. 2Its faculty is not much better: 89% is white, 2.8% Latino, 2.5% Asian, 2.4% African-American, and .5% Native American.Given these demographics, it came as no surprise that I had only one person of color, an international student from Turkey, among my 19 students.About half were graduate students and half were undergraduate seniors.All but two were architecture majors; the remaining two were historic preservation majors.
The lack of diversity within the class was something I had anticipated in advance.About a week after pitching the course to Steve, it occurred to me that The Landscape of Northern Slavery couldn't be understood outside the context of plantation or Southern slavery.And, I could not count on university students in a northern small town to be familiar with the intricacies of plantation architecture.The course would have to take a broader approach to the idea of slavery, its architectural imprint on our landscape, and the results of that imprint today.I called Steve back and asked if we could enlarge the scope of the course to The Architecture of American Slavery.This title would offer more room to maneuver within the topic.He agreed.The course was born.

The course would have to take a broader approach to the idea of slavery, its architectural imprint on our landscape, and the results of that imprint today.
From its start, I wanted to take a long view of the subject and to define both "architecture" and "slavery" very broadly.Having begun with the idea of northern slavery, I never intended to limit the course to Southern plantations.While the lens of Southern plantations might be useful in examining the universality of slave architecture, it lacked sufficient richness to last thirteen weeks.There wasn't enough scholarship and field trips would be impossible.I feared that the course would be a monotonous death march of "if it's March 3, it must be [fill in the blank] plantation."A long view was absolutely necessary.
More importantly, the long view created the opportunity to draw connections between the past and the present.As an architectural historian, I consider the past architecture that surrounds us as a vibrant part of our lives.But, most students don't view it that way.They need to be taught to recognize the connections between past and present, as well as how contemporary architecture riffs upon (or rebels against) older buildings.If I limited the topic to plantations only, all of which were remote to our location, that's all students would see.They would never learn how these particular choices in shaping space reverberate around us today.In order to teach them this, I defined "the architecture of slavery" to include not just plantation houses and slave quarters but every space and landscape in which economic apparatus of slavery took form, including sugar houses, cotton mills, universities, missions, and public housing.
The breadth of this definition allowed me to engage with several readings I wanted to cover.A key part of slavery's architectural legacy revolves around the "40 acres and a mule" question of reparations.I wanted to talk about W the environmental component of that issue through the lens of contemporary thinkers, presently represented by Ta-Nehisi Coates and his article, "The Case for Reparations." 3 What should be done now about slavery is an important, residual question.I also wanted to engage with a project entitled Traces of the Trade: A Story from the Deep North, by Katrina Brown, a descendent of the DeWolfe family (Figure 2). 4 Her film raised significant questions about the extent to which white people today are responsible for actions taken by their ancestors; Bristol was featured prominently in it.Browne's work tackled the question of white guilt head on.I felt students should hear her thoughts on the matter.I divided the course into five relatively short units: Mission, Plantation, North, Ghetto, and Legacy.Each unit had a set of assigned readings, each ended with an essaybased quiz, and each was composed of sub-topics.The Mission unit consisted of grouped readings on the topics of "White Conquest," "Mission Architecture," and "Mission Life."For "White Conquest," we examined the history of white arrival in the (future) United States from a geographic perspective.The "Mission Architecture" readings examined the actual buildings, while the "Mission Life" readings talked about how missions operated, allowing us to better understand the lived experiences of Mission-era slaves.A key goal of this unit was to broaden the students' understanding of American slavery.This choice proved useful, as many were unaware that Native Americans had also been enslaved in the past.
Because it was a seminar course, I did not lecture, but I did bring images of buildings or sites mentioned in the readings to reference during our conversations.Architectural history classes run better with images, as most architects learn more effectively through visual media.In one of those "that's a great idea" moments born slightly out of laziness, I decided to take a "running list" approach to compiling the images.For each class, I would add images from new readings to our unit PowerPoint and then flip through them, forward and backward, as they were relevant to the discussion.I had never tried this method before and found it quite useful in guiding visual learners.It also allowed us to refresh or alter our thinking on ideas discussed in previous class meetings.More importantly, seeing the sites brought a sense of realism to the issues.Over the course of the semester, we looked at many different types of images, from plantation landscapes to economic charts to African slave castles to redlining maps.Seeing the spaces where slaves were held, images of how they were restrained, and maps of how they viewed their world helped us talk about very difficult issues (Figure 3).
The Plantation unit was the largest.Its sub-topics included "Abduction," "Plantation Architecture," "Cotton," "Sugar," "Landscape," and "Escape."Looking back, this unit did the most to press the limits of our definition of the architecture of slavery.The unit began by looking at the spaces through which African slaves travelled, including slave castles, barracoons, and slave "factories," or towns established along African rivers to hold slaves for sale (Figure 4).In an effort to get a sense of the experience of moving through space as a slave, we looked at items used for confinement, such as slave yokes.We were deeply enriched by the scholarship of Louis Nelson, who is studying these ephemeral African spaces. 5e sub-topics on cotton and sugar were intended to help students understand the impact of economics on the slave landscape.These readings were augmented by images of the structures needed for cotton and sugar production, in which slaves spent a great deal of their time.We also studied how cotton was grown and picked, and how sugar was rendered from cane.Statistics and charts of slave population growth due to rises in the cotton and sugar markets revealed the influence that cash crops had on the slave experience.These sub-topics also helped us understand the plantation landscape as a totality, giving us insight into why escape was so difficult and how the experience differed for whites and blacks.Students encountered many ideas in this unit, but one of the most revelatory was that the Underground Railroad reached barely .01% of the entire slave population.One brave student ventured to describe it as "a story whites tell to make themselves feel better." 6While the Plantation unit gave us a good sense of the architecture of slavery's past, the unit on the North brought the present into focus.This unit connected us with our local landscape and its DeWolfe past.It had three sub-topics, "Colonial Northern Slavery," "Cotton Production," and "Academia and the Intelligentsia."We examined the remains of Rhode Island's plantations, which were located in the western, more rural part of the state, and considered them next to the DeWolfe family's Bristol properties.In addition to the DeWolfe warehouse, their bank, church, and many houses survive."Cotton Production" enabled us to consider the other side of the slave economy by looking at mill villages, a quintessential New England urban landscape.Through this lens, we questioned the image of a "cleanhands" North.Subsequent discussions focused on the role slavery played in constructing New England's academic institutions, specifically our local Brown University.As students grappled with the differences between Southern and Northern slavery, they wondered which might have been a harder experience.Surprisingly, their views of Southern slavery softened somewhat in consideration of the hardships Northern slaves faced.These first three units consistently produced interesting questions and observations, many with relevance to issues of today.For the Mission unit: was it possible to have "good" and/or morally justifiable slavery?Plantation unit: Blacks and whites defined landscape so differently that whites literally couldn't see spaces that blacks could.Is this why blacks and whites find it difficult to communicate today?North unit: Northern landscapes, even those of abolition, operated as auxiliary slave space.
To what extent do we read this relationship in the buildings and urban plan?By unit 4: The Ghetto, we were headed full steam towards the present.I was deliberate in choosing the term "ghetto" for this unit because I wanted to raise the ideas of separation, boundary, and power, which are key to its definition, in the context of slavery.I also wanted to consider whether the term applied to other African-American communities in the Jim Crow era and to begin the process of connecting the architecture of slavery with present-day issues that had roots in slavery, like reparations.I was hoping that students would discover slavery and ghetto to be two sides of the same coin.But, it was a lot of ground to cover.In the end, I chose four subtopics: "Migration," "Redlining," "Slum Clearance," and "Public Housing," all of which examined the ghetto in an architectural sense.A major challenge was finding a way to condense the voluminous amount of scholarship into bites useful for classroom discussions.This unit's readings, for the first time that semester, were hit or miss.Some resonated deeply.Others went by with no notice.
A case in point was an article on public housing by Joseph Heathcott entitled "'In the Nature of a Clinic': The Design of Early Public Housing in St. Louis." 7My initial instinct was that the article was a difficult read and that the other assigned reading, on slum clearance in Washington, DC, would generate more discussion.
Of course, I had deeply underestimated my students.Heathcott talks about the design of 1930s-and 1940s-era public housing in St. Louis, dissecting it in ways that allowed for comparisons between the two.His examples were still standing, so I brought pictures of them to class for discussion.We spent a lot of time looking at those images and trying to determine why they were so similar but still so different.Could you tell that one was for blacks and one for whites?In the end, we weren't so sure.
Design and construction definitely mattered.The color of the residents seemed far less important.
As in previous units, images were key to how the students understood the problems of the ghetto (Figure 5).For looking at public housing, I brought in pictures of the Dan Ryan Expressway in Chicago, whose 14 lanes of traffic separate the Robert Taylor Homes, a public housing development, from a white neighborhood.These images helped us explore the questions of boundary and spatial separation, a key theme in our previous discussions of slave space.In the case of the Dan Ryan Expressway, the boundary was inherently obvious, and utterly immovable.
In the case of redlining, however, "ghetto" boundaries were not initially visible.Redlined maps of Chicago, Boston, Baltimore, Oakland, and Providence helped the students see how Federal and economic policies could create invisible boundaries that became visible through human violence.They also made clear the government's complicity in creating a racist environment.At this moment, I suddenly felt the connection between my class and the Black Lives Matter movement crystalize in my own mind.What to do about it was far less clear.Unit 4 intersected with several students' studio work.In a stroke of luck (in my view), one group of students had been assigned a project in another class to design the Obama Presidential Library, on the south side of Chicago. 8They had visited the site and were struck by the surrounding neighborhood-one filled with public housing units.Coming at this present-day design challenge from the perspective of the legacy of American slavery gave them considerable insight into the implications of their project for the neighborhood's future.Was this going to be a good addition to the neighborhood?Or not?Had they correctly interpreted the local context?Was their design or their process of design inadvertently perpetuating a racist environment?What about their design should change?Throughout these weeks, students offered very conflicted opinions over where they now saw their studio work heading.Their voices made clear that the issues from our history class were extremely relevant today.Getting the design right was important.
By the time unit 5 arrived, not only was the impact of slavery on architectural and urban design during the twentieth century undeniable, but it was evident that I had to find a way to bring our course material together with the Black Lives Matter movement.It was not just that the BLM movement is the Civil Rights movement of our time.The movement itself had a strong architectural component, with key events happening in spaces deeply affected by long-standing architectural racism.It brought together all the issues we had discussed into a single, extremely relevant package.For example, Trayvon Martin was murdered while walking through a gated community of relatively recent date. 9Our discussions had been dancing around the idea that gated communities were the next stage in a continuum of exclusionary spaces that began with the plantation house.We needed to know whether the racist biases built into the landscapes of slavery persisted today.Was it possible, the class wondered, that the architecture of slavery still existed?Does new construction continue these earlier patterns and, if so, how?Do we live in a landscape of white domination and, if so, how did that landscape influence the course of events that lead to Martin's murder?In short, we were heading full throttle towards the key question of how the built landscape continues to reinforce racial stereotypes and injustice.
With very little regret, I ditched a tour of the DeWolfe landscape to create space in the syllabus for an assignment on the spatial aspects of the BLM movement.I was fortunate to come across a video of the "Black Lives Matter Teach-In: On Race, Architecture, and The City," held on March 9, 2015, and sponsored by Dean Jonathan Massey and his students at the California College of the Arts, which I assigned. 10Featuring a series of design projects that addressed BLM concerns, Massey's video was helpful in two key ways.First, it pointed out the homogeneity of the field of architecture, a problem often discussed in schools of architecture and well reflected in the racial make-up of my class.Second, it put the issue of BLM in a positive context by challenging architects to find solutions to social problems.Thus, it took that next step beyond identifying and acknowledging the problem to seek out remedies.The video came with a companion website, but, unfortunately, it was too late in the semester to make that an assignment. 11If I do this course again (and I hope I will), readings from the website will be prominent in the syllabus.I will also include readings on the racial politics of gated communities, which turned out to be a huge void in our understanding.
Surprisingly, we were amply prepared to discuss the BLM movement.Unwittingly, I had assigned readings that others in the BLM movement were also reading.In addition to "The Case for Reparations," we had read excerpts from Solomon Northup's 12 Years a Slave, Edward Baptist's The Half Has Never Been Told, Isabel Wilkerson's The Warmth of Other Suns, and Beryl Satter'sFamily Properties: Race, Real Estate, and the Exploitation of Black Urban America. 12ilkerson had recently spoken on campus, so I was particularly committed to including her work.We had also learned about Pruitt-Igoe's destruction and discussed Hollywood's portrayal of racial politics in Django Unchained. 13In challenging students to make connections between the course material and other aspects of their university and personal lives, I had inadvertently laid the foundation for a robust discussion of the BLM movement.
The resulting conversation was anything but "watered down."In fact, it was fully informed by our lengthy study of how the architecture of slavery had survived into the present day.We reflected on how consistently these biases appeared in the built environment.As student JG explained, "We watched the perceptions [of white and black people] change and we watched some of them stay constant, persisting into the current day and adding to the effects of slavery and race as a current issue….Often overseen as part of the big picture, landscape is both physically literal and metaphorical.What was most influential in our analysis of the white and black landscape was the idea that these landscapes were so vitally separate yet existing simultaneously together." 14As we came to understand that American slavery had created different but intertwined landscapes for blacks and whites and saw how those landscapes had developed over time, the issues of racial injustice today become crystal clear.The question was not how the BLM movement intersected with architecture but rather how architecture had played a role in bringing the movement forth.It was a class-wide "aha" moment.

Over the course of the semester, the class had encountered plenty of really hard moments, particularly where the violence of slavery became enmeshed with the spaces in which that violence occurred.
Over the course of the semester, the class had encountered plenty of really hard moments, particularly where the violence of slavery became enmeshed with the spaces in which that violence occurred.However, there were more pauses in the conversation as students came to terms with the idea that the architecture and architects they revered had an underlying line of racism at their core.As SP put it: "As designers, we rely on previous precedents to design and understand buildings . . .It has become blatantly clear that to begin designing in the future we must take our foundation of architectural knowledge and begin designing outside of these norms."The buildings that are taught to most architecture students do not represent all viewpoints, as most believe.They are not a shared heritage, but rather one of white supremacist values.For some, this moment was difficult and provoked considerable reflection.
These thoughts called for different approaches to understanding architecture of the past.Are there other ways to define architecture, we wondered, other than just as buildings?And, if so, would that help ease racial tensions?As NK explained, the BLM movement, considered in the context of American slavery, "made me realize how African Americans and other minorities suffered from architecture that was imposed upon them for most of the time . . .Even though applications such as redlining are long gone, we should still realize the existence of ongoing racism and inequality in our social lives.After such a realization, our architecture can try to solve the problem by different strategies."In short, the design process as it currently exists accommodates only white definitions of space.Blacks and other minorities not only see these spaces differently than whites, but they occupy different spaces altogether.This line of inquiry called into question not only our architectural history curriculum, but the way that the field of architecture was structured.We pondered other ways to think about and practice architecture.Then, we wondered whether architects could make a living by operating in opposition to the norm-or whether economics would ultimately rule.
My two preservationists chimed in to remind the class that what remains in the built environment is key to our understanding of its development.As AO noted: "I have begun to realize that the National Register guidelines actually actively favor privileged whites…The lack of attention to black architecture has been present since the early days of preservation-it is what allowed so-called slums to be cleared, while white neighborhoods in Savannah, Charleston, and other cities were protected as historic districts. . . .By denying African-Americans their built heritage, preservationists have denied them a sense of community-an act akin to destroying black enclaves via slum clearance or even similar to selling slave families to different owners.It has been part of the continued tradition of attempting to quell any sense of community in order to further subjugate blacks."The lesson was that if we don't preserve spaces of slavery, it becomes all too easy to whitewash its history, overlook its former presence, and perpetuate the status quo.This mode of thinking was what made George Zimmerman perceive Martin as being in a neighborhood in which he didn't belong.We felt strongly that the subsequent events of the night were deeply colored by long-held biases about space and each race's position within it.Yet, the public seemed unaware of these biases.The lack of a physical presence of African-American sites and the lack of adequate interpretation of those sites that do exist continue to foster misunderstandings about the role architecture has played in creating the current system of racial inequality.Without spaces that testify to the African-American experience historically-like sugar houses on a sugar plantation-it is nearly impossible to bring these These questions led the class to consider whether the erasure of African-American sites was actually a product of white guilt.As CC pointed out, it is hard for historic sites to present the history of slavery in general, particularly those that depend upon a positive visitor experience to generate revenue: "This class has caused me to wonder if we are preserving the right parts of plantations.Arguably, some of the most important parts are the actual dwellings of the slaves.Unfortunately, when we visit places, such as Thomas Jefferson's home, those are not a focus. 15They have not even been preserved. . . .Slavery is a dark topic that people do not want to talk about.As a result, museums are challenged with how to teach about it and still produce that positive visitor experience that they strive for."But, what about the Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC, we countered.People flock to that museum despite the challenging material it covered.Does the difference lie in the fact that that history is not our own?Do we have more trouble facing our own dark history than the dark history of others?
And, if we do, is it because of white guilt?For this question, the fact that the class was nearly entirely white proved an advantage.It was a topic that affected everyone equally in the class.And, the fact that there were no black classmates to worry about offending was helpful.It also avoided singling non-white students out as having to "represent their race."Many weeks before, I had volunteered that my ancestors had owned slaves, which helped remove any fear of discussing the roots of our shared white legacy.In fact, as the course progressed, our initial spirit of "I'm not racist" evolved into a far greater awareness of how privileged we were-and how much we had to feel guilty for.AO commented, "In the case of Pruitt-Igoe, demolition seems to be a manifestation of white guilt.If the buildings were destroyed, white people could ignore the fact that they relegated poor blacks to substandard housing.It is similar to the choice plantation owners made to demolish slave quarters.In both cases, the actions denied the black community of their history."Thus, if whites had constructed a landscape that reinforced racial stereotypes, exactly those the BLM movement was contesting, clearly the erasure of that landscape likewise served a white agenda.Despite all these questions, the course did not end on a down note.For the final quiz, I asked students to suggest alternatives and reflect on what was in their power, as future architects, to change (Figure 6).Three answers were encouraging.
Before taking the course I thought that architecture was a profession of equality, today, and throughout history.After taking the course, I now see that we, as the new generation, have a chance to possibly create an architecture and built environment that puts all races on a level ground and promotes growth to every type of person, rich or poor…One of the… most eye opening things was from the Black Lives Matter [video] when it said that only 2% of architects are black.I never knew that architecture was so predominantly "white" and I guess the way that it's taught is to blame.But with all of the cultures all over the world it is surprising to me that the majority of "star-architects" are white men.There has to be more accomplished architects other than whites with all of the unique cultures all over the world.-IWI had never considered slavery to be something that could shape the built environment so profoundly.Not only did it influence the architecture and landscape of the past, but it still continues to do so today.[Architecture]  has the ability to oppress an entire race of people-from the Slave Castles of West Africa to the urban ghettoes in Chicago.The built landscape has the power to affect people in such a dramatic way and as a designer, that was an important lesson for me to learn.-BWThis class has made me realize how huge of an impact policy can be on the success of an architectural solution.I don't believe architecture  Notes 1 http://www.city-data.com/city/Bristol-Rhode-Island.html.
2 These numbers and the following were collected from

FIGURE 2 .
FIGURE 2. TRACES OF THE TRADE: A STORY FROM THE DEEP NORTH (COURTESY OF KATRINA BROWNE)

FIGURE 6 .
FIGURE 6. RWU STUDENTS AT WORK (IMAGE: CATHERINE ZIPF) Even today, both blacks, who experience racism daily, and whites, who can't see its existence, are unaware of racial biases in our designed landscape.
library.pitt.eduNo. 106 (Fall 2016) DOI 10.5195/rt.2016.304can be the only solution to a social problem, but as an architect I can strive to best understand the limitations or opportunities that policies put forth in order to work with them or seek to change them….This class has taught me to be humble about what I build, what I destroy, and what I can learn from other people.-AF