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Airbnb has removed a rental listing of a “slave cabin” after backlash from the internet.
Building owners at the Belmont Plantation in Greenville, Mississippi, listed the Panther Burn Cabin, an “1830s slave cabin”, as a bed and breakfast room.
In a now-deleted listing, the home was advertised as “the last remaining antebellum mansion standing” in the area. The cabin sits next to a 9,000-square-foot mansion with nine bedrooms. The listing said the cabin was also used as a sharecropper’s cabin.
Videos of the listing went viral on social media, including a post by @lawyerwynton, criticizing Airbnb for hosting the rental as a “luxurious vacation spot”.
“How is this okay in somebody’s mind to rent this out? A place where human beings were kept as slaves,” Wynton Yates said.
@lawyerwynton #airbnb this is not ok. #history #civilrights #americanhistory
In a statement Airbnb spokesman Ben Breit said “properties that formerly housed the enslaved have no place on Airbnb. We apologize for any trauma or grief created by the presence of this listing, and others like it, and that we did not act sooner to address this issue.”
Airbnb faces backlash over “slave cabin” rental
In an additional statement to the Washington Post, the cabin’s owner, Brad Hauser, said he took ownership of the property last month and that he “strongly opposed” the previous owner advertising the cabin this way. Hauser said the cabin was actually used as the plantation doctor’s office and never housed slaves, however, the previous owner chose to advertise that it did.
In a following video, Yates posted about the Whitney Plantation, a plantation that has been turned into a museum and memorial.
@lawyerwynton Replying to @Vanessa check out the Whitney Plantation
“They talk about the plantation and the surrounding plantations from the slave’s perspective. The Whitney Plantation is not available for events or anything like that,” Yates said.
In 2019, medical students from Tulane University took a graduation photo in front of a cabin at the Whitney Plantation as their “ancestor’s wildest dreams”.
“We are our ancestors’ wildest dreams,” student Russell Ledet wrote in a tweet sharing a photograph of the moment. “In the background, an original slave quarter. In the foreground, original descendants of slaves and medical students.”
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