Tell the Wedding Industry: There's Nothing Romantic about Slavery

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    Tell the Wedding Industry: There's Nothing Romantic about Slavery

    White bride and groom kissing on a plantation

    The wedding industry has an ugly problem.

    For years, wedding publications and websites have made millions of dollars in profit by featuring vendors who market plantations as romantic venues to host an ‘elegant’ wedding. None of this marketing acknowledges plantations for what they really are: the places where millions of Black people were once sold, whipped, raped, separated permanently from their children, and worked to death.

    It is difficult to imagine a vendor offering a physical location where human rights atrocities have taken place as an appropriate place for a party without any level of backlash. Not only are plantations physical reminders of one of the most horrific human rights abuses the world has ever seen, they are also sacred spaces where the bodies of many Black people’s ancestors are buried in unmarked graves to this day. Yet, “timeless,” “elegant,” and “picture-perfect” are just a few of the phrases that the country’s largest wedding publications use to describe the places where Black people were once tortured and stripped of their most fundamental rights.

    Enough is enough. Tell the wedding industry to stop glorifying plantations as nostalgic sites of celebration today.

    Below is the letter we will send to the country's major wedding platforms: 

    Here is the Petition:

    We’re calling on you to ensure that vendors who market plantations as wedding venues are no longer featured on your website. Plantations are physical reminders of one of the most horrific human rights abuses the world has ever seen and are the places where over 10.7 million Black people were enslaved, tortured, and murdered throughout the continent. Yet, the wedding features that remain on your site sell plantations as quaint, dreamy locations to get married.

    Marketing plantations as "classic" or "timeless" places to celebrate a big day communicates a clear message to your Black clients and readers: that their suffering is something to be celebrated, if not completely erased. Plantations are former forced labor camps that brutalized and murdered millions of Black people in this country -- they are not party spaces. That is why we are calling on you to stop promoting plantations as wedding venues in your publication today.