Profs and Pints Online presents: “Christmas Among the Enslaved,” a look at what accounts of the holiday on the antebellum South’s plantations get wrong and why it matters, with Robert E. May, professor emeritus of history at Purdue University and author of Yuletide in Dixie: Slavery, Christmas, and Southern Memory.

[This talk will remain available in recorded from at the link given here for tickets and access.]

Many Southern plantations elaborately deck their halls for the Christmas season and offer tours showcasing how the wealthy white families that historically owned them celebrated the holiday. Only recently have some begun acknowledging how Christmas was experienced by the enslaved Black people who provided the field and household labor that made such luxurious celebrations possible. Their neglect of that reality reflects a gap in our nation’s collective memory that historian Robert May has sought to fill.

Join Professor May online as he delivers a talk on Christmas in the antebellum South that will show plantation commemorations of the holiday factor into today’s debates about Confederate monuments, critical race theory, and how the history of American slavery is taught in the nation’s public schools.

Dr. May will explore how Christmas was a surprisingly fraught time for the enslaved and those who saw themselves as their “masters.” Refuting White southerners’ boasts that Christmas proved how humanely they cared for enslaved people, he’ll offer up research showing that slavery’s worst abuses, including whippings and the breakups of Black families, continued throughout the holiday season.

In fact, many chose Christmas as the moment to bolt for freedom. Slaveholders passed their holidays in trepidation of potential violent revolts by those held in bondage, something they would hardly have feared if they believed their own propaganda about slave contentment.

All this matters for race debates roiling the country. May will show how a post-Civil War white southern propaganda campaign romanticizing slave Christmases became essential in “Lost Cause” literature justifying the Confederacy, with misleading stereotypes of slave Christmases infiltrating our literature, news, and even theater. It is no mere coincidence that the same southern white women who played a key role in the erection of statues to Confederate leaders in the early 1900s also played a role in getting joyous slave Christmases embedded in U.S. reading material.

Unfortunately, such stereotypes are perpetuated in modern plantation Christmas “candlelight” tours and provide cover for censoring “critical” treatments of human bondage out of our textbooks. This talk by Dr. May will help correct the record as the nation prepares to enter a new year. (Ticket: $12.)

Profs & Pints Online: Christmas Among the Enslaved